It's always the heavy

HEARD the one about the double bass player from the Metropolitan Opera who takes a night off to attend a performance of "Carmen"? Afterward, he rushes backstage to see his colleagues from the bass section. "You know where we have those long \o7plonk, plonk, plonk, plonks\f7?" he exclaims. "You wouldn't believe what the violins are doing!" And he starts humming the Toreador Song.

Yes, violists may be the orchestra musicians who are traditionally the butt of jokes, but Los Angeles Philharmonic principal bassist Dennis Trembly is "surprised that viola jokes didn't land on bass players." That brand of humor, he believes, originates with players of "smaller instruments with more virtuosic possibilities. You can play more notes per second on a smaller instrument. We play fewer notes, so they may feel we're not working as hard."

Trembly's fellow Philharmonic bass player David Moore observes: "The sound of one bass or even a bass section is probably the most obscure instrumental sound in the entire orchestra. There are very few instances that you can even point to in the repertoire. It's a challenge to prepare students for auditions because it's not like saying to a violinist working on the Brahms concerto, 'Pick up a dozen recordings. Go to iTunes so you can hear some examples of great solo violin playing.' "

Yet whether it's referred to as a double bass, a contrabass, a string bass, an upright bass, an acoustic bass, a bass viol, a bass fiddle or even a bass violin, this mighty stringed instrument is indispensable to a full orchestra, which typically has a minimum of eight. The way Sue Ranney, principal bassist of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, sees it, the bass is "the foundation of the orchestra. Pitch really starts from the bottom up. It's a problem when everybody just plays his or her own pitch -- you need to fall down to that bottom. We're the basis of the pitch, we're the basis of the rhythm. Bach continuo parts are the heart and soul of moving music forward. To me, Bach is what the bass is all about."

To many other people, the bass is the lowest-toned instrument in the violin family. Technically, though, it's an offspring of not only the violin but the viola da gamba, an early stringed instrument held between the knees and comparable in range to the cello. Four hundred years after being perfected, the violin retains the same shape, it still has four strings, and it's still tuned in the musical intervals known as fifths. The basses in use today, though, reflect two traditions: the flat-backed, rounded-body shape of the viola da gamba family and the curve-backed, more-pointed-corners shape of the violin. And to make matters even more confusing, basses with elements from each tradition abound.