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 plonk, plonk, plonk, plonks?" 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.
Moreover, the instrument's various incarnations have had three, four and five strings. Los Angeles Opera principal bassist David Young explains: "Throughout the 19th century, there were many tunings and they were regional, so you play music and you try to interpolate what the composer really wanted."
An average bass stands from 6 to 6 1/2 feet tall, is 26 inches across at its widest part and is 8 inches deep. It can easily weigh 25 to 35 pounds. And because of its massiveness, people tend to think of it as "a man's instrument." Thirty years ago, Ranney remembers, a musicians' contractor explained to her why she couldn't possibly be a principal player: "Conductors want to see a strong guy back there." Says Moore: "I think the size of it gives people the mistaken impression that you have to be a brute to play it. But it's a misconception, especially these days, with the advancements of the technical abilities of players and a more thorough understanding of body usage."
Consider Lisa Gass, a rail-thin freelance bassist and member of the Pasadena Symphony who studied instrument making at the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. Gass knows the bass inside out. She worked as the bass repair person in a violin shop in Los Angeles for 13 years and in 1997 opened her own business, LA Bassworks. The second floor has one room devoted to "all the really broken ones."
"In the past," says Gass, "the sheer size of the bass dictated that students had to begin when they were older and bigger. Young children were channeled into violin because there were small instruments." However, because the Suzuki method of teaching youngsters to play musical instruments now includes the bass, "small basses are more available and desirable, even for little girls. Basses go all the way down to one-tenth size." All the same, Moore points out, "there are still more men than women in many bass sections, unlike the other strings, which are 50-50 or maybe even more than 50%. It may very well be the last bastion of male dominance in the strings in the orchestra."
