Contrabass Instruments Turn Heads, Help Musicians ‘Feel’ Tunes

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — What’s eight feet tall, sounds like a foghorn and is so big Roland Tso has to cart it around in two heavy metal cases? A flute. No joke.

It’s a double contrabass flute. Tso, an architect and flutist, drove the instrument, one of four in the world, from his home in California to the National Flute Association Convention in Salt Lake City last August.

It’s one of the more head-turning examples of contrabass instruments, the largest and deepest of musical instruments, favored by musicians whose ears are tuned to the lower end of the scale.

Utah college student Henry Nahelewski is a clarinetist, but he doesn’t look like one. His contrabass clarinet looks like it belongs in a Dr. Seuss book, rather than in the clarinet family.

He first saw the instrument in a music video by the jazz group Moonhooch.

“About halfway through the song, one of them pulled out a contrabass clarinet and I was just astounded,” he said. “I had no idea what instrument I was looking at. When I first got it, I wouldn’t even practice any music. I just practiced holding out those long, low notes because it was just fun to play them.”

Nahalewski said an instrument with that much plumbing does take a lot of air.

“It’s not uncommon for me to have to take my inhaler either before or after I play it,” he said.

Leon Chodos, Utah Symphony bassoonist and contrabassoonist, said the opening note of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, AKA, the theme from “2001: a Space Odyssey,” takes his breath away.

The piece begins with a very long contrabassoon pedal tone.

“I do a lot of warming up before I start playing so that my lungs can really hit their maximum lung capacity,” he said. “I use a reed that generates a good sound without using very much air. It’s kind of like, practicing for swimming underwater.”

Tso’s double contrabass flute and its cousin, the contrabass flute, were developed primarily to provide a low end to flute choirs.

“If you didn’t have bass instruments at all, there would really be something missing, the sound would completely change,” Chodos said. “It would just be like turning off the lower end of your speakers.”

It’s a sound the musicians said they can really feel.

“I can feel it in my stomach, the vibration,” said flutist and composer Jonathan Cohen.

“Sometimes when you’re reading music, the music will look like it’s vibrating, but that’s actually just the instrument shaking your eyeballs,’” Nahalewski said.

“When people hear these really low notes, it does get ‘em in a different way,” Tso said. “Bass notes just — it takes you somewhere else.”