I would have loved to have been there–perhaps the fiddling and tooting can be viewed as the birth of American experimental music? And the Europeans thought they were something with their avant-garde business…it would still be another six years before Rite of Spring. I say John Cage stole all of his ideas about aleatoric composition from this performance!
You are so right… don’t forget that Camille Saint-Saens supposedly walked out of the premiere of “Rite of Spring” because the opening notes on the bassoon were too high.
2 thoughts on “Oh, God, the Bassoon!!”