The bassoon is a member of the double reed group of woodwinds, which also includes bagpipes, baritone oboe, English horn in F, heckelphone, oboe and oboe d’amore. The bassoon comes in two forms: bassoon and contrabassoon or double bassoon. Contra usually indicates an instrument an octave lower than the instrument it is named after, and this is the case here. Both the bassoon and the contrabassoon are non-transposing instruments. The player is called a bassoonist.

A bassoon has five parts:

• a crook or bocal, the curved metal tube that connects the body of the bassoon to the double reed
• the wing joint or tenor joint, where the crook connects and which runs parallel to the long joint
• the double joint or butt joint, also called the boot, a u-shaped tube attached to the wing and long joints which contains the hand rest for the right hand
• the long joint, the longest piece of tubing, parallel to the wing joint
• the bell, which ends the instrument; a longer bell can increase the instrument’s range downwards by a minor second

The bassoon developed from the baroque bassoon, which had a similar shape, but fewer keys, and was most used in the eighteenth century. Two models found today are the German Heckel bassoon and the French Buffet bassoon.

Bassoon and contrabassoon are both used in orchestral as well as band ensembles. Perhaps the most famous use of the bassoon in an orchestral work is either the bassoon part at the beginning of Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), Part I, “L’Adoration de la terre” (Adoration of the Earth), or as the grandfather in Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. There are also memorable passages in French composer Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen during the Entr’acte before Act II and in the very first bars of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s overture to his opera Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).