Photograph by Blair Gable

Last month Joel Quarrington won a Juno award, in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble. A few days later Quarrington’s colleagues in Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra threw a surprise reception for him. There were speeches and cake.

Quarrington is the orchestra’s principal double bassist. Partly because his instrument is normally viewed as lumbering and ungainly, he didn’t get excited when Garden Scene, his latest album of virtuoso bass pieces with piano accompaniment, was nominated for a Juno. Violinists usually win that sort of thing. “It’s not in my nature that I would have ever gone to that event,” Quarrington said.

But then he won, and now people congratulate him everywhere he goes. The people who seem happiest are his fellow bassists. This is because Quarrington, a big 55-year-old with curly hair and a goofy grin, is considered by his peers to be among the finest bassists anywhere. And also because he is a bit of a revolutionary on the instrument.

Most bassists tune their instrument so its four open strings are separated by intervals of a fourth, from low E to A to D to G. This makes their lives hell, because every other string instrument in the orchestra tunes in fifths. The basses spend a lot of time matching what the cellos do, only an octave lower. But since the cellos tune their strings from a low C to G to D to A, the bass can’t follow the cellos down to those lowest notes. And because tuning is more art than science, the basses constantly have to make little adjustments to fit the pitch the other string instruments produce. Nobody ever thinks about this but bassists, and it’s no fun.

That low C is the big problem. European bassists add a fifth string to get down there. North American bassists typically add an extension, a few extra inches of neck that poke up from the top of the fingerboard. They flick a mechanical lever to activate the extension when they have to go down below E. It’s a pain.

One week in 1987, Quarrington needed to play some Bach, which required he move quickly in and out of the bottom register. He had no time to flick an extension on and off. He loosened his low E string until it could reach down to the C, then he tuned the other three strings in fifths to even the other notes out. He thought he’d settled a technical problem. What surprised him was how much easier it was to match the other instruments’ tuning. But the strangest thing was how much clearer and more sonorous everything that came out of his bass was. This has something to do with overtones. Quarrington has never looked back.

He is not the only bassist who plays in fifths but he may be the most prominent. His attitude is contagious. Marjolaine Fournier, who sits next to him in the NAC Orchestra, switched to fifths two years ago. The extra overtones make her instrument more resonant too. “I used to have a really good bass,” she said. “Now I have a fantastic bass.”

Callum Jennings is one of Quarrington’s bass students at McGill University. He switched to fifths over the Christmas break. Would he go back? “No way.” A bass tuned in fourths “feels like it’s broken.”

Lately Quarrington has been playing frequent guest stints in the London Symphony Orchestra. “I really wanted to see what it was like to play with a bona fide great orchestra. I went into it thinking I’d spend a week finding out, and that would be the end of it. But it was too exciting.” Now he juggles life in Ottawa with his escapes to the U.K.

In an ordinary year Quarrington would have been no likelier to try out for the LSO than to show up at the Junos. This is no ordinary year. In January his older brother, the novelist Paul Quarrington, died of lung cancer. “He and I were really close. We’d often talked about doing different projects together. Going to Ireland together, doing a fishing trip. You don’t realize how many things you put on hold. You say, ‘Well, I’ll get to that.’ ”

Paul Quarrington responded to his cancer diagnosis by speeding up instead of slowing down. “It was a good lesson,” Joel Quarrington says. “Don’t put anything on hold.” The two travelled to Nashville to record strings for an upcoming album of Paul Quarrington’s songs. They were working on the album until three days before Paul died.

Since then, Joel Quarrington says, “I’ve actually done a whole mess of things I didn’t feel like doing.” The result has been a mid-career renaissance.

Quarrington, the principal double bassist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, won in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble.

Quarrington’s CD on the Analekta label, also featuring pianist Andrew Burashko, includes pieces by Korngold, Bottesini, Gliere and others.

Born in Toronto, Quarrington began playing the double bass at age 11 and studied in Toronto, Rome, Vienna and Prague.

Other nominees in the category included violinist Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà, I Musici de Montréal and violinist James Ehnes and Ottawa harpist Caroline Léonardelli.

Léonardelli was nominated for her CD El Dorado, for the Centaur Classics label. Quarrington was also featured as a guest performer on Léonardelli’s CD.

© Copyright 2010

Joel Quarrington

Virtuoso double bassist Joel Quarrington on a moment in history that fascinates him, and what he stole from a dead teacher’s locker

Cowboy, butterfly collector, tough guy, psychic, classical double bass virtuoso.

2. If you could live inside a song for a day, which would you choose and why?

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. The guy in that song is pretty happy, plus I enjoy the authentic white scat singing.

3. What did you have on your bedroom walls when you were a kid?

Butterflies, moths and insects.

4. Which piece of music would you be happy to never play again?

That would be Ravel’s Bolero. Not that it’s such a bad piece but the bass line sucks; C-G C-G C-G C-G C-G C-G and continues like that for another 15 minutes. It’s like an incredibly slow oom-pah-pah but without the middle pah.

5. If you could be a fly on the wall at any single place and time, what would you choose and why?

It would have been remarkable to be a fly, flying alongside other Apollo 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969 as mankind landed on the moon for the first time. Perhaps it would have been especially fitting for me to be part of that historic occasion if I had been inside Buzz Aldrin’s helmet.

6. What useless skill(s) do you possess?

I can burp the alphabet in under 10 seconds.

7. If you could play a night with any single musician, living or dead, who would you choose and why, and where would you like to perform?

That would be the greatest musician of all time, J.S. Bach. I would like to be in his orchestra in Weimar for a performance of one of his cantatas.

8. What makes you squirm?

Air travel with my bass.

9. What was your most recent musical discovery?

The compositions of Rudi Stephan, whom we are playing at the Ottawa Chamberfest this week.

10. Name three habits or rituals you cannot get through the week without.

I need to practise the bass and brush my teeth every day. Also, I’m like a chocoholic, only with gin and tonics.

11. What three things could you easily do without?

Record snowfalls, the music of Manuel de Falla and lima beans.

12. Name three great driving songs.

Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run; Paul Quarrington’s I Need My Heart, as performed by Paul with the Pork Belly Futures; and She Taught Me to Yodel, as interpreted by Frank Ifield.

13. If you could have 100 pounds of anything, what would you choose and why?

I would like to have 100 pounds of sales receipts from my new upcoming solo recording, Garden Scene on the Analeckta label, due to be released this September.

14. Not counting weddings or births, what was the happiest day of your life?

One day in 1970 I was in a student orchestra at a summer music camp and we were playing the most wonderful music in Brahms’s Second Symphony. In a single instant I knew without any doubt that that was what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life.

15. If you had to pursue a career outside of music, what would you like to do?

Foam rubber sales with shrink packaging technology.

16. If you could invite any three people, living or dead, to a night of poker, who would you choose and why?

I would invite the first three generations of great double bass virtuosi; the Italians Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) and Giovanni Bottesini (1821-99), as well as the Russian, Serge Koussevitsky (1874-1951). I don’t like poker that much but I do enjoy playing bass quartets and I would like to hear what those guys really sounded like. I am pretty sure that Serge would be playing the fourth part.

17. What aspects of your profession do you like the most, and least?

A good life in music means learning and growing and evolving every day. When politics or economics get in the way of that, that’s the worst.

Also I hate wearing tails; they are very uncomfortable.

18. What is your guilty pleasure?

It’s not guilt so much as being ashamed to admit to watching all the truly dumb TV shows I watch. I’m happy The Love Boat went off the air.

19. What is the best thing you have ever bought, borrowed or stole?

Bought: my Italian bass which was made in 1630.

Borrowed: I borrowed a very rare old English bass for a year from a good friend of mine.

Stole: when my first bass teacher died we were both playing together in the Toronto Symphony. I went to his bass locker and stole the mute off his bass; not only as a momento but also that type of mute hadn’t been made for 30 years and I needed one.

20. When and how do you expect to die, and what would you like your headstone to read?

Could happen anytime and most probably by being run over by the beer truck. If I am truly proud of anything it is my children, so my headstone should say, “Father of Quillan and Caitlin.”

© Copyright 2009

Dragonetti's 3-Stringed Bass

Written by:  Matthew Hart

On a summer evening in July, I arrived for dinner at a grey house on a cliff in the Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, and there, on a stand before the windows, in silhouette against the far horizon, stood a cello.

It made a bewitching sight, its voluptuous civility poised against a squall that passed just then across the long sheet of water. More bewitching still was the saga that unfolded that night, and captivated me, devouring my summer as I pursued it.

The cello and the island and the view belonged to Bob Williams, the descendant of a family of Toronto instrument makers who had risen to prominence at the turn of the century. They had made the cello. 

Williams bought it from a dealer, was learning to play it, and was, in what spare time he had, trying to discover the fate of a collection of instruments given by his family to the Royal Ontario Museum.  This is the story of one of those instruments, a double bass of such renown in its own enchanted world that that the mere mention of it excites a kind of longing.

Every bass is properly called a double bass, but this one has perhaps a firmer claim to that resounding name.It exerts from its entombment a powerful spell upon a small fraternity of devotees, whose hope is to restore it to the light and to the human ear. Larger than the basses of today, its cavernous voice has not enraptured concert halls for 160 years, since the divine Dragonetti last raked his bow across its pencil-thick, catgut strings.

Domenico Dragonetti was born in Venice in 1763, the son of a barber who was also an amateur musician. At an early age the boy began to play his father’s guitar and double bass, soon attracting the attention of a local impresario who put him on the stage.

He was a prodigy. At the age of 12, after only 11 lessons from the leading Venetian master of the double bass, Berini, Dragonetti was cast loose from tutelage when the maestro decided he had nothing more to teach his pupil.

The youth soared into the firmament of Venetian music. At 13 he became a principal player at the Opera Buffa; at 14, principal bassist of the Grand Opera Seria. By 23 he had joined the exalted Chapel of St. Mark, becoming its principal bassist and brushing aside, along the way, an invitation to the court of the Tsar.

Dragonetti’s fame was unmatched by bassists of the day; unusually, he gave solo concerts. His talent mesmerized his audience. The Venetian republic appointed him one of the directors of a lavish festival to mark the visit of 14 sovereigns to the island state. Once more the Tsar invited him to St. Petersburg, an invitation he again refused, although he used it to extort from the procurators of St. Mark a boost in salary to the heady sum of 50 ducats a year.

Finally, in 1794, at the age of 31, he accepted an invitation from the King’s Theatre in London. His employers in Venice granted him a year’s leave, salary to be paid throughout, and Dragonetti headed north.  Except for a single visit home he stayed in England for the rest of his life, dying there at his house in Leicester Square at the age of 83. Lionized by London concertgoers, Dragonetti spent more than 50 years at the musical summit of the capital.

He became an intimate of the Prince Consort and the friend of noblemen. He dazzled this glittering beau monde with a volcanic style of play and superlative natural gifts.

“The physical quality is his huge hand,” wrote the scholar Francesco Caffi, “endowed, first of all, with prodigious strength so that its grip on the strings of the instrument is the equivalent of the grip of a blacksmith’s vice… A hand endowed with five fingers so long, big and agile, that all five, including the bent thumb, go up and down the fingerboard each playing a note.”

This was electrifying technique at a time when most bassists played a single note with the index finger, and one more note with the other three fingers together.

His strength and stamina were legendary, and the story is told that once, while staying at a hotel, Dragonetti emerged on his balcony in the dead of night and began to play his titanic bass with customary force. In the morning, guests of the hotel were heard discussing a sudden gale that had risen in the night and moaned a while at the windows.

Dragonetti had no family, but kept a menage of life-sized mannequins, one of which he sometimes introduced as his wife. He took them with him to concerts, parading them into the theatre and awarding them prime seats. Another companion was his dog, Carlo, who slumbered beneath his master’s stool until, as it moved him, he would jump up and extemporize a solo howl.

Dragonetti’s opulent persona expressed itself in collecting too, and on his death he left art and artefacts, an archive of rare scores and a collection of fine instruments. He had some 30 violins, including a Stradivarius, a Stradivarius copy, two Amatis, and one by the great 16th-century Brescian luthier, Gasparo da Salo. He had a da Salo viola, an Amati viola, five unnamed violas, six cellos, a large cello, three guitars, two bassoons and three French horns.

But what lies at the heart of our story were Dragonetti’s basses. He had an Amati double bass and a Maggini double bass. He had a giant Gasparo da Salo – a tyrannosaurus of an instrument that hangs today in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. A second da Salo was bequeathed to the Chapel of St. Mark, where musical historians make pilgrimages just to gaze at it. And a third da Salo, or possibly a third, he left to his friend the Duke of Leinster, himself a fervent bassist.This is the instrument, once a living thing in the hands of the greatest double bassist who ever lived, that sleeps today on a Toronto shelf.

The story of how this masterpiece came to Canada is like a myth of Canada itself – the fairytale story of a young immigrant, of the business he established, his rise to wealth and station, and finally of an act of great philanthropy.

Richard Sugden Williams was born in London in 1834, the son of a confectioner. When the child was four, his parents packed up their belongings and sailed to Canada, ultimately settling in Toronto.

“The boy received a common school education,” according to a later document, “chiefly under the tuition of the late Mr. Darby, a master of the olden time, not easily forgotten by the schoolboys of that day.”

At the age of 12, young Williams stepped out of the John Street School and into an apprenticeship with William Townsend. Townsend repaired instruments and made melodeons, a type of small organ popular in the 19th century.

According to his biographer, Ladislav Cselenyi, Williams would have learned a broad range of skills, “from repairing a cracked violin, to replacing the broken hammer of a pianoforte, to restoring the watchkey screw mechanism of a 100-year-old English guitar.”

Cselenyi, an art historian, musicologist, and until his retirement, a curator at the ROM, describes a vanished world, in which the apprentice had to master many tasks, not only repairing whatever came into the shop, but also manufacturing by hand every constituent part of the instruments constructed there.

He learned to build the case and bellows. He sawed rosewood logs to make veneer. He cut out hinges from sheets of brass. He mastered tools made of ebony, four different types of plane, a watchmaker’s hammer, rack upon rack of special files. In 1853, his seven-year apprenticeship complete, Williams became a journeyman instrument-maker.

That year, to escape a shrinking market, Townsend moved his business to Hamilton. Two years later it collapsed.His 21-year-old employee, newly married, must have convinced the bankers that he knew more than how to hold a file: they asked him to run the firm. After a year of scouting Toronto, and judging that a city bursting with 40,000 people was where he ought to be, Williams rented space on Yonge Street and hung out his sign – a big, tin fiddle.

He imported, made, and repaired instruments. He was a man, Cselenyi asserts, of furious energy. His instruments won prizes at exhibitions. Six years after setting up he produced an illustrated catalogue. It did so well he decided to repeat it.

“The success attending the first Catalogue that I issued some two years ago,” he wrote, “leads to the necessity of another issue, in which I shall endeavour to show to the public of Canada, particularly those of Upper Canada, that I am now manufacturing Melodeons not only equal, but superior to any made in the United States.”

The public of Canada was apparently convinced: the Williams family went on to establish the largest instrument business in the country. They made or imported violins, cellos, banjos, mandolins, guitars and pipe organs. At its peak the company’s Oshawa factory turned out 60 pianos a week, making it the largest piano-maker in the empire. Queen Victoria ordered a pair of Williams pianos for Windsor Castle.

 By 1929 Williams instrument serial numbers had reached 67,000. Here, alas, the soaring rocket of commerce must splutter its last few feet. The company, already sold by the Williamses, did not survive the depression of the 1930s.But the Williams family left behind more than the memory of a thriving enterprise. They left a panctar, a pandora, and an English flute, some harps and harpsichords, a spinet, a theorbo, a bassoon. They left the Dragonetti double bass. For R.S. Williams, Jr., had become Canada’s foremost collector of musical instruments, all of which he gave to the ROM. The problem is to see them.

The 1971 catalogue, Musical Instruments in the Royal Ontario Museum, calls the Williams collection “one of the most generous gifts any individual has made” to the institution.

“The collection consists of almost 400 items, 166 of them instruments, about 70 music sheets and books, and about 160 letters and autographs of famous musicians and personalities of the world of music.”

When the catalogue appeared 35 years ago, the Williams collection was still one of the glories of the museum. Visitors met the first of the instruments not far past the entrance hall. 

“I remember going in there with my father,” said Bob Wiiliams. “He would point out all these amazing harpsichords, violas, violins, cellos and weird horns, like one called ‘the serpent.’ Some of them dated from the 16th century, and he’d say, ‘Your grandfather was very proud of his collection of instruments and music and documents. And he decided to give them all to the museum so that everyone can come and see them.’”

Today you will search for them in vain. In the evolving priorities of the ROM the Williams instruments have drifted off the plot.

“Unfortunately,” wrote Brian Musselwhite, a curator at the museum, in an email, “we don’t have a staff member for the wonderful collection of musical instruments and only a few of the instruments are in the gallery. And we haven’t had a wood conservator for about five years now.

“As you may know, we are going through a large building program and all of the energies of the Museum have been geared to that. As of yet, there are no plans unfortunately for a gallery of musical instruments as the dinosaurs, textiles, and Canadiana galleries take priority.”

Among those who long to see the Dragonetti restored to the public gaze is a tall man with curly hair and a shrewd, evaluating gaze. When I met him on the second floor of his Toronto shop, on Church Street, Ric Heinl was wearing a long blue apron. Around him rose the comfortable smells of glue, wood shavings and varnish.

Four men stood at benches performing tasks in ways that have not changed for centuries. Heinl is the third-generation proprietor of one of the best-known stringed-instrument restorers in the world – Geo. Heinl & Company Ltd. His grandfather, an Austrian instrument maker, came to Toronto from Vienna in 1912, his passage paid by R.S. Williams, Jr.

When George Heinl arrived to take up his duties, he was alarmed to find the Dragonetti lying casually against a wall in Williams’s office, where a drunken caretaker had already put his foot through it once. Not long after, Williams gave the bass to the ROM. A photograph of Heinl’s shows a dark patch of wood on the side of the instrument, where someone had mended it.

“Was that your grandfather’s work?” I asked.

“No,” said Heinl, shaking his head. “If my grandfather had fixed it you wouldn’t be able to see where.”

Today, instruments from every corner of the globe come to Church Street to receive that kind of care. From a photographic archive I tugged a snapshot of a blackened instrument.

“Yes,” said Heinl, “a nice, 1813 English viola. It was in a house fire in Honolulu in 1987. As soon as the firemen let her back in, the owner grabbed it and got on a plane. She still had soot on her face when she came in the door.”

Another image showed the gleaming instrument that returned to Hawaii. Heinl’s fervent wish is to do the same for the Dragonetti. It needs it.

“When I pressed my finger on it, it gave like a sponge,” said Joel Quarrington, former principal bassist at the Toronto Symphony and now with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Quarrington has had a love affair with the Dragonetti since he saw it as a boy, and longs to play it.

“I’d like to recreate a historically accurate concert of the kind that Dragonetti used to give,” he says.

“They were crazy programs, and went on for hours.

“Dragonetti was a huge figure, and people accepted what he said as fact. In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, just before the Ode to Joy, there’s this thundering, ominous, judgemental recitativo for cello and bass, and Dragonetti told everyone that Beethoven had written it just for him. It was nonsense, but Dragonetti could get people to swallow whatever he said.” 

Did he also get people to swallow that the instrument he gave to the Duke of Leinster was a da Salo, when in fact it might have been something else?

“Italian, about 1600,” says the ROM catalogue, “attributed to Gasparo Bertolotti da Salo, and the handwritten label inside reading Gasparo da Salo in Brescia is in two lines, which is rare.”

“The only way to know for sure who made that bass is to bring it in here,” says Ric Heinl. “We’ll open it, and then we’ll know. There are things to look for, and we know what they are.”

One scholar insists that the Dragonetti bass at the ROM, no matter who made it, is one of the rarest instruments in the world.

“It’s only relatively recently that there’s been this focus on whether an old bass is a da Salo or a Maggini,” says Duane Rosengard, a bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and author of the book Cremonese Double Basses. For the last 10 years Rosengard has been working on an inventory of basses made in Brescia before 1630.

“There were many excellent instrument-makers working in Brescia at the time,” he says, “some of them just as famous as da Salo. This year I had the chance to study a very famous old bass in Frankfurt. What I found convinces me that the Toronto instrument is a very early Brescian double bass. There are not more than 10 instruments like it in the world, and many of those are in pieces.”

On a humid day in late August, Ric Heinl, Bob Williams, Joel Quarrington and I met at the staff entrance of the ROM, signed in for security passes and trooped upstairs to a fourth-floor storage vault. From floor to ceiling rose painted-metal shelves crammed with plates and chairs, a clavichord, a harpsichord, and scores of mysterious, tantalizing artefacts – the tidal wrack of a museum whose galleries can never hold all it owns.

In an aisle between the shelves lay the majestic form, positioned on its back on foam supports on a kind of gurney. A plastic sheet covered the great body. Even shrouded in polyethelene in a storeroom, the bass exuded an immense and stately gravity.

“Wow,” said Quarrington, breaking the silence. He moved to the table and gazed down at the enormous, swelling shape. “This is one of the great basses of the world,” he said, raising a corner of the polyethelene. Heinl stood at the bottom of the table, and together they lifted off the sheet.

“Well, sweetheart,” murmured Heinl when the instrument lay clearly before us. 

Catherine Wyss, a collections technician, handed out white-cotton gloves, and in a moment Quarrington and Williams were running their hands over the glowing surface. Quarrington removed some strips of acid-free tissue protecting the strings.

“Look at these,” he said, touching a gloved finger to the thick catgut. “They’re brutal. They’d tear your fingers. Some musicians needed special gloves to play on strings like that.” Suddenly he wrapped his hand around the neck, at the place where a bassist would hold it. “Ric,” he exclaimed, “just come and feel this. It’s perfect!”

For a few minutes the three clustered around the supine instrument, plainly moved by it. Quarrington plucked at a string. The ancient bass replied with a deep, resonant sound. Quarrington picked out a few notes, beaming at the rest of us. Finally Heinl unwrapped a small package of instruments and began to conduct a more clinical examination.

He poked a tiny light mounted on a probe through the f-hole – the carved opening on the top of the bass – and peered around inside. Next he inserted a round mirror on a handle – like a dentist’s mirror but bigger. He aimed a small flashlight at the glass to reveal, clearly reflected there, the short trails, like scraps of thread, left by worms that had burrowed along inside.

Inspecting the exterior, Heinl pointed to a minute lesion in the dark surface on the bottom of the bass, where a minuscule trickle of bright wood, the ancient flesh of the instrument, was leaking through the varnish. “That’s all worm too,” he said. “Worms tend to follow the glue. There’s protein in glue and they like that. They probably did that 200 years ago, or even 300. Now it’s all just falling out. It worries me.”

What is amazing is not that instruments decay, but that some of them last as long as they do.

“In stringed instruments,” wrote Susan Wilson, a former conservator at the ROM, “the wood of the body is very thin, shaped in complex curves, and put under great stress by the tension of the strings.”

Wilson performed a conservation of the Dragonetti bass 24 years ago, when, as she said in an article, it was “in a very frail state. Although the neck and head were in good condition and the belly, apart from some losses at the corners, was structurally sound, the softwood back was another matter. It was marred by 24 large splits, opening as wide as 0.35 cm. The sides of the body (ribs) also had many gaping cracks.”

Wilson placed the bass in a polyethelene humidity chamber and re-hydrated it over a number of weeks. She made thin cedar shims to match the cracks and glued them into place. Photographs show the glossy, refurbished bass that returned to the instrument gallery, a gallery that no longer exists.

Sixteen years ago the ROM decided that the Canadiana collection needed a higher profile among visitors, and the decision was made to create a larger gallery. The space they chose was that of the musical instruments gallery, which was dismantled. The Dragonetti and most of its companions moved into the vaults where they now reside.

“It’s rather sad,” said Brian Musselwhite. “When I started here 30 years ago we had the instruments near the front door. Now we have no knowledgeable staff [specializing in instruments]. An instrument that isn’t played can actually shrink. It loses something. It’s basically dead.”

But it could return to life.

“She’s the Sleeping Beauty,” says Ric Heinl of the Dragonetti, and plainly the awakening kiss could be bestowed in Heinl’s workroom. “This is where that bass should be. I imagine those shims the ROM put in have fallen out, because I didn’t see them. And anyway, conservation is not restoration. I don’t just want to make it nice to look at, I want to make it live.”

Heinl has offered to examine the bass in his shop for free, conducting an exhaustive assessment of its condition. Bob Williams hopes the museum will accept.

“We’d like to know how much it would cost to make it playable,” he says, “and ultimately to have Joel [Quarrington] play it. My grandfather gave his whole collection to the ROM, and a lot of money to help display it. It’s a shame no one can see it. Maybe if people could see and hear this magnificent instrument, they’d want to know what else is there. And there’s a lot.”

Joel Quarrington

A hallway chat about bass tunings has led to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra landing the world premiere for a rare composition for double bass, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN

 

Double bassists are the grunts of the orchestra, who support everything and seldom get to shine on their own. There are about 200 concertos for double bass sitting in the world’s music libraries, but even most bass players can name only a handful, and not one is by a major composer.

So when Joel Quarrington , principal bassist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, heard that American composer John Harbison was writing a concerto for solo bass, he hurried off to a concert at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (where he has also played principal bass with the NAC Orchestra) of chamber music by Harbison, who is best known for his opera The Great Gatsby.

The composer was in the hall, so Quarrington, who is a much better player than diplomat, confronted him in a hallway afterwards and began to air his views about the pros and cons of various systems of bass tuning. It’s a subject so near to his heart that he forgot to introduce himself.

“In retrospect, that was probably a mistake,” Quarrington said. “He looked at me like I was insane.” Undeterred, Quarrington then told the composer that the title of his work-in-progress (Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra) was all wrong, because, he said, the modern bass is not a viol but a member of the violin family.

“By that time, he was backing away from me,” Quarrington remembered. But the encounter had a happy ending: Harbison wrote his concerto, kept his title and is travelling to Toronto to hear Quarrington play the world premiere tonight.

“World premiere” is sometimes a euphemism for first and last performance, but in this case there’s no doubt that the piece will be heard again. Fourteen other North American orchestras — including those in Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle — signed on to perform and help pay for Harbison’s 25-minute concerto, in a consortium deal arranged by the International Society of Bassists (ISB).

Consortium commissions are nothing new, but this one may be the most heavily subscribed ever and is probably the first to start with a contribution from employees at Wal-Mart, an organization better known for bass-fishing lures than for its support of the arts. A group of staffers, mourning the sudden death of their music-loving colleague David Capoccioni, collected $10,000 and gave it to his widow at the company’s annual convention. Capoccioni’s son Hunter, a bass student at Rice University in Houston, thought that a concerto might be a fitting way to memorialize his father, so the family approached the ISB, which sent a letter to all the professional orchestras in North America asking if they’d be willing to make a small investment in a starring role for their principal bassists.

“It was mostly to make it affordable,” said ISB general manager Madeleine Crouch, referring to her pitch letter. But the prospect of multiple performances by the principal bassists of several orchestras was a strong secondary motive, especially given how rare it is to hear orchestral music featuring solo bass.

The TSO is playing it first because it scheduled its performance earlier than anyone else. That was harder done than said, since Harbison’s deadline for composition was the end of December, and orchestral parts weren’t due to be delivered till the beginning of March. That left only a few weeks for the parts to be prepared with string bowings (a standard, time-consuming chore for every orchestral piece) and learned by the players.

Quarrington had to work initially from a hand-written part he received around Christmas. Loie Fallis, the TSO’s director of artistic administration, had long since smoothed over relations between him and Harbison, who even asked Quarrington for technical advice (though his main informant was Boston Symphony Orchestra bassist Edwin Barker).

“Loie was all over this thing,” Quarrington said. “She was so aggressive [in her scheduling] that we got the world premiere.”

Quarrington is certain that Harbison spent a fair amount of time thinking about how he in particular would play the piece, and not just because he gets to do it first. Most bassists tune their instruments in fourths, like bass guitarists. Those who play solo often tune a whole tone higher, using a special set of strings. Quarrington is one of the few bassists (jazz player Red Mitchell was another) who tunes his instrument in fifths, the way a cello is tuned. It means that he had to learn a whole new fingering system, and that he has to do more shifting on the fingerboard. But he can also reach a low C without resorting to any of the contraptions that bassists sometimes use, and can claim to be following the system used when most of the standard orchestral repertoire was written.

For Harbison, knowing that at least one player would approach his concerto from a whole different place on the fingerboard had an effect on how he would deal with open strings and harmonics, and on what kinds of sonorities he could expect at any given point. He has said that he wrote the piece with all three tunings in mind, but Quarrington is sure that his comes out on top.

“He wrote it ideally for me,” he said. “It’s just perfect for fifth tuning — how it lies, how things ring.”

Harbison came to the task with a greater feeling for the sound and fragility of bass-string sounds than most composers, because he has played jazz piano in small groups and has a lot of experience conducting the cantatas of J. S. Bach. The tone and weight of the bass line, especially in the exposed recitatives, is of crucial importance in performing those baroque works.

It’s probably fitting that Quarrington first heard Harbison’s music in chamber-music form. The orchestra for his concerto is large and colourful, but it’s used sparingly, so as not to make the solo bass seem like a small voice fighting the crowd. However you tune them, the lower stringed instruments don’t project nearly as well as a violin.

“I’ve never been particularly happy with the viola concertos for giant orchestras,” Harbison said in an interview with Jeremy Kurtz, one of the 13 other bassists preparing to play the concerto, “because the orchestra stops playing, and the viola comes in and sounds wimpy. . . . I wanted the scale of the orchestra to be something that would make the re-entry of the bass sound appropriate.”

The piece opens, Quarrington said, with just three basses playing together, in an overt allusion to the viol consorts of the 13th century. Other sections have implications of Bach, and walking bass lines familiar from jazz. Quarrington has figured out a special orchestral seating plan for the unamplified piece, though final word on that will come from music director Peter Oundjian and conductor Hugh Wolff.

One review, of sorts, is already in, from Houston Symphony Orchestra music director Hans Graf, who grumbled good-naturedly during a recent visit to the TSO podium that the orchestra’s nimble scheduling had beat him to the punch by a month. As they say in baseball, score won for the home team.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra performs John Harbison’s Concerto for Bass Viol tonight at 8 p.m., as part of its New Creations Festival. CBC Radio is recording the concert, which also includes music by John Weinzweig, Chen Yi and Paul Hindemith.

Red Mitchell

Written by:  Gene Lees

The great jazz musician Red Mitchell was the first bassist in more modern times to use fifth tuning. Unfortunately I never met him before his death in 1992, but he was working fairly often in Toronto with another jazz great, Don Thompson. Don must have told Red about me, because Red phoned me whenever he passed by this way and he would regale me with stories of his incredible life and his experiences with fifths tuning.

I am very pleased that the famous jazz writer Gene Lees has allowed me to reprint some of his interview with the real fifths legend and pioneer Red Mitchell. This excerpt is from Mr. Lees outstanding book “Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White” from Da Capo press 2001.

All the interviews in the book originally appeared in Mr. Lees “Jazzletter” which is easily subscribed to;

Jazzletter PO Box 240, Ojai CA 93024-0240 (12 issues a year, 70$ a year)

Or e-mail; genelees@sbcglobal.net This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

“When I came home from the army in 1947, and told my parents I was going to be a jazz musician,  that was something different. I was not going to go back to Comell, which I could have done free, between the scholar­ship and the GI Bill. My family and everybody I knew were telling me, If you’re going to be a musician, at least go to Juilliard and get a degree, and then if you don’t make it you’ll have the degree to fall back on and you can teach.

“I went to Juilliard for three months in 1947. l took two courses, music appreciation and bass. Phil Woods came slightly after me. l got A in music appreciation and C in bass. I studied bass for three months with the man. If you were going to study bass in New York, who did you go to? Frederick Zimmerman. He was the assistant principal of the New York Philharmonic -which he was very bitter about, having started off as principal, having been Herman Rheinshagen’s star pupil. Herman was really the boss in New York, one of the major players in the New York Philharmonic, he had all the good students, all the good jobs. When he retired, he gave it all to Frederick Zimmerman, and they demoted Frederick Zimmerman after a short time because he was not leading the section. He was a pretty good bass player. I heard him play in his apartment. I’d have given him about a C, which is I guess what he gave me.

“You have to understand, I had been trying to play the bass for only three months before that. Having tried all the other instruments and failed, and finding myself more suited to the bass, having a one-track mind, and want­ing always to get to the bottom of things. That may sound corny, but it has a lot to do with it. After three months with Frederick Zimmerman, he said,

‘Forget it, kid. There’s a lot of bass players out there. lt’s a rough world. What was that other thing you were going to do?’

“I said, ‘Inventor.’

“He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, be an inventor, you’ll make a lot more money.’

“This was 1947. Five years later, in 1952, in Los Angeles, I’m playing

with Red Norvo and Tal Farlow, and here comes in this elderly couple, both with white hair, sitting down and listening. Somebody introduced me to them after the first set. It was Herman Rheinshagen and his wife, Muriel. They came to hear me. His wife, who was very nice, said confidentially in my car, ‘You know, Herman is retired now, he’s not taking any more stu­dents. But I think if you asked him, he’d take you on.’ And I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I did, and he did, and I studied with Zimmerman’s teacher for six months. He was inspiring.

“Diane said that she recently had come across Red’s baby book, in which his father had written about how musical Red was at the age of two.” I do remember I’d go to the piano,” Red said. “I’d make fun of my father’s music when l could just barely reach the keyboard. He was into classical music so deep, l used to imitate it. Especially the pompous endings. Tah-dah! He built his own pipe organ. He started out with a reed organ and then a pipe organ in the house, with a low C. l was hearing that from the time l was a kid. I kind of got it by osmosis.

“When l was a very young kid my father turned on the radio one day to turn me onto Jascha Heifetz. My father had hi-fi  long before it was called that. This was in the early ’30s. It was mono, but it was very good sound. He said, ‘This is the man; he’s the master.’ l said, ‘I can hear that he’s great, Pop, but l hate to tell you, he’s a little out of tune on some notes.’ My father said, ‘What?’ l said, ‘That one. That one there.’ And he said, ‘I’m glad you heard that. You were brought up with the tempered scale and he’s using the natural scale.’ And l said, ‘What’s the natural scale?’

“There again l was extremely lucky. My father was actually able to explain to me what the difference was. Heifetz’s thirds sounded a little raunchy to me. Later on my father wrote a paper for the American Acoustical Society, which was also presented to the American Guild of Organists, on tuning pipe organs. As far as l know, it’s still the definitive paper on the subject. He used his engineering knowledge. He carried it out to four or five decimal places, a degree of accuracy that no one had ever reached before. He ex­plained what was wrong and what was right with previous papers on that subject.

“He was able to explain to me that Mother Nature never promised us a rose garden, that the scale, as we call it, is a matter of wishful hearing. It doesn’t exist anywhere except within the human race. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in nature. It’s an acceptance of a series of compromises be­tween the scale you would get if you tuned an instrument in fourths and the scale you would get if you tuned it in fifths. If you tune an instrument in fourths, you get a scale that is shorter physically. The top notes are lower, the bottom notes are higher in pitch. If you tune an instrument in fifths, you get a bigger scale. The top notes are higher, the low notes are lower.

“One day I’m going to write a book about this. One chapter will explain why some bass players and some cellists get along like some cats and some dogs. They could all get along just fine, except they tune their instruments differently. AlI the other stringed instruments are tuned in fifths. As a matter of fact, that’s the tuning the bass started with.

“The ‘normal’ tuning today, which is causing this war between the bass players and all the other string players in the symphony orchestras-every symphony orchestra-is this difference in tuning. The ‘normal’ tuning of bass is fourths. It was a catastrophic mistake. I believe it started gradually around the 1700s. The bass originally had only three strings, tuned exactly as I have them tuned, from the top clown, A D G.

“They couldn’t make a C string in those days without its being as thick as your thumb, because they used only gut. They didn’t have wrapped strings. So the low note was G, a seventh above the lowest note on the piano, which is an A. It’s that G. Then a fifth up to D,and then a fifth up to A. That’s the way the bass started. Then some smart-asses-I think Bottesini was one of them-found that if they lowered the top string a whole tone, from A to G, they could do finger tricks across the strings and play faster, because speed was a problem on an instrument that big. For a long time the bass was tuned G D G. It was a fifth on the bottom and fourth on top.

“As a matter of fact, there are still different ways of tuning the bass, and the symphony players haven’t straightened it out yet. Three times now the Royal Philharmonic in London has been in New York when I was working at Bradley’s, and six of the eight bass players have come down to hear me. PartIy because they’re jazz fans, but partly because they’re interested in the fifth tuning. And the last time, they invited me to a concert of theirs at Lincoln Center. It was a very good concert, a very good orchestra.

“They had eight basses tuned four different ways. The principal and assistant principal used what most jazz players use, E A D G from the bottom up. The next two bass players had five-string basses, with B, not C, on the bottom. I remember because they played Brahms’ First Symphony,and he wrote a low B. Only two of the bass players had it, but it sounded great anyway. From the bottom, BEA D G. And the back row, the first two had extensions-that piece of ebony that goes up beyond the fingerboard. They have to cut the scroll to put it on. The low string goes on up over a pulley and down to the tuning peg. There are two kinds of extensions. Two of the guys had the one, and the other two had the other.

“The one extension is without metal fingers. There’s a clamp that goes over where the low E normally is. If you want to use that, you have to open that first, and you get a loud Clack! And then you have to finger the whole scroll. Bass players with large hands can in fact play certain limited passages on that-Ron Carter, for example, and Rufus Reid. But it’s not really practical. You can’t just play a walking bass line down there and back up. You can’t use it in a solo as Zoot Sims used to use his low register. You remem­ber Zoot going down to his low register, and right back up as though it wasn’t low? Zoot could do that, and Zoot has always been one of my idols.

“The other two guys had the metal fingers on ‘em. That’s even worse. With the metal fingers, which clamp down on the strings and are connected through telescoping tubes to four metal knobs that stick over the top of the neck, you can at least attempt to play classical music on the bass. There’s no way you can play jazz on it, but you can at least try to play classical music that is written down there-but with a lot of problems.

“During my years as the first bass player at MGM, it wasn’t because I was the best of the bass players around-it was about flexibility. I could play rock-and-roll-I played the electric bass for ten years-and I had studied enough to play the classical music that we got to play.

“But when we would turn the page and see a cue like that, depending on how many bass players we had, I would hear ‘Sh-sh-sh-shit’ right down the line. Those guys learned to hate those low notes, because they were a big problem when you had those extensions.

“There are a lot of other ways to tune the bass. Glen Moore, the Oregon bass player with the group Oregon, has several tunings. His main is high C, which Chubby Jackson and Eddie Safranski used to have on their five-string basses, down a seventh to D, down a fourth to A, and down a sixth to C. The two C’s on the outside are two octaves apart, and he calls them his melody strings, and the D and A in the middle he calls his harmony strings. And he has a lot of music he can play on that bass that nobody else can play.

“There’s a particular phenomenon on a stringed instrument when you get a perfect fifth, and that is that you get a crescendo when you let it ring, instead of a diminuendo-you play two strings, in my case, the top A string and the D, and it’ll get gradually louder over a period of about ten seconds.

“I was extremely lucky when I was a kid. My father was one of the few people in the world who could have explained it to a kid. If you started with the low A on the piano and then measured the frequency of it, it would be 27.5 cycles. If you double that, it’s 55, and you get a natural octave, and if you double that it’s 110, another natural octave, and if you double that 220, and if you double that 440-that’s where A is supposed to be, most of the time- 880, and on up. And you get a certain number at the top. If you start with the low A and take three halves of that, that’s the ratio that a fifth is. Think of the open G string, whatever that frequency is, you’ve got a D harmonic, which is a matter of dividing the string in thirds. The D harmon­ic is an octave and a fifth above the open G. If you divide that in half, you’ll have a fifth. So that’s three halves, that’s where the interval comes from. My father was able to explain to me that if you started with the low A, 27.5, and took three halves of that and three halves of that and so on up until you get to the next A, you’d have a completely different number-higher than if you went up by octaves. Audibly higher. You’d hear it in a second. Anybody except somebody who’s tone deaf.

“When I started playing bass, I asked several people how do you tune this thing? They said, ‘ln fourths, E from the bottom.’ That makes it quite different from cello, which is in fifths. All of the nineteen years I played that way, I had a lot of problems, most of which disappeared when I changed the tuning. It’s exactly like the cello, C G D A, but an octave lower. The bottom string is a major third lower than the normal E.”

“Did you have trouble getting strings?’” 1 asked.

      “I experimented from ‘66 to ‘71 with all the strings in the world that I could get hold of. Hampton Hawes was particularly tolerant in that period. It was when I was with him, at Mitchell’s and Donte’s, that I made the change. I had piles of strings on the piano. I would change every set. After five years, I had gone through all the strings in the world, and it was close but no cigar. So in 1971, I called the Thomastik company, which makes the best bass strings, and that’s when I got this young Renaissance man who was head of the company. He was twenty-nine, was a jazz fan, and knew who I was. He said, ‘Of course we’ll make strings for the fifth tuning. It’s a great idea.’ And they did.

“Now they make four types of fifth-tuned strings, three-quarters bass, four-quarters, normal and soft, more gut-like. It took them a year and a half to get the first batch right. They made three batches. The third batch was okay, and they’ve gone from there.

“When I made the change in ‘66, I took my second wife and her son down to the beach near San Diego and practiced for nine days around the clock over the sound of the surf. There’s a motel that goes right out over the surf.”

(Red’s brother has an interesting comment on this transition in Red’s life and work. “By begging, lying, and cajoling,” Gordon said, “Red created a ten-day gap in his schedule, went to that motel, restrung his bass, unlearned the old system, invented a new one, learned it, and went right back into the studios ten days later as if nothing had happened. Astonishing! It’s like learning oboe over the weekend.”)

    “Legend always had it,” I told Red, “that you changed the tuning and played a gig two days later.”

“That’s a little exaggerated,” Red said. “It was nine days. I came back to Los Angeles, and the first job I worked with the bass now tuned in fifths was with André Previn. I was playing first bass with sixty-five men at the Sam Goldwyn studio. I figured: Okay, André Previn with a big orchestra. If I can fool André, with his elephant cars, I can fool anybody. I didn’t tell André I was doing anything different. About twenty minutes into the ses­sion, I made a gross mistake. I pushed my finger down on the first string, and it would have been right if I’d had a G string. But it was a whole tone high. André stopped the orchestra. He didn’t usually do that. This time he looked over at me and said, ‘Red, really. If it weren’t you, I’d say that note was out of tune.’

    “I said, ‘Thank you, André, it was a whole tone out of tune. It will happen again, and I’ll explain to you on the break.’

    “I explained to him what I had done.

    “He said, ‘You mean, I can think of the bass the same as I think of cello? It looks the same on paper, but it sounds an octave lower?’

‘Yes.’

“He said, ‘The same string crossings?’

“I said, ‘Yes.’

“‘The same flageolets?’” (Flageolets are thc harmonics of stringed instru­ments. )

“‘Yes.”

‘Same bowings?’

“‘Yes.’

“And he slapped his forehead and he was the first of a long line of

composers who said, ‘Damn! Why doesn’t everybody do that?’

“I asked, ‘Well? Why don’t they?’

“Dizzy Gillespie said the same thing. Dizzy understood it immediately.  I didn’t find out until fifteen years later that it started with that tuning. Gary Karr in New York has a bass built in 1611 by Amati. He started playing seriously when he was eleven. When he made his debut in New York at, I think it was Town Hall, he got a phone call the next day from a woman who said she was Serge Koussevitzky’s wife, and she loved his playing and was going to give him Serge Koussevitzky’s Amati. He laughed and said, ‘Who is this?’ It was her, and she gave it to him. He paid $10,000 for his bow, but he got his Amati free.”

“Is there such a thing as a $10,000 bow?” I asked naïvely.

     “Oh boy!” Red said, raising his eyes. “I’ll give you the same answer I gave my son when he asked, ‘What is it with women?’ I said, ‘You must keep it in mind that all women have one thing in common, and that is that each one is unique.’ And it is exactly the same thing with bows. Two bows made by the same maker-forget it, they’re going to be different. I finally found the bow of my life in 1972. It was a French-style bow made by a German maker, Pfretschner, and I was playing all my solos with the bow, and finally getting the bow to sound like I always thought it could-like Gene Ammons a couple of octaves down. I was not out after that classical sound at all. l was after Gene Ammons sound specifically.

“It started to sound that way. And then a customer came into a little jazz club in Stockholm, a young guy who was totally drunk. This guy took the bow and started conducting us with it. I took it away from him. It happened three times. l said, ‘Look, l’m not angry at you at all. But if you do that one more time, l’m going to kill you! You got it?’ He laughed, ha ha ha, and sat down. l thought l had cooled him out. We took a break. We came back, and he was gone, and the bow was gone and l haven’t played with the bow since. That was the bow of my life. That was twenty years ago. It may sound a little childish.

“After two or three years, I realized that not having that resin on the strings allowed them to sing much longer. And I could get all the colors out of the strings that I couldn’t get when that resin was stuck on ‘em.”

“Can you get a sound without resin on a very good bow?” I asked. “The best players use the least possible amount of resin,” Red said. “Gary Karr, after a concert, wipes the resin off the bow. The less resin you use, the better it sounds, right down to zero. I had always preferred my pizzicato sound to my arco sound. That’s not about anybody else, that’s just about me.”

“John Heard,” I interjected, “says that there are all sorts of techniques of bass playing, including harmonics, that have not been fully explored by jazz players.”

“He’s right,” Red said. “And there are all sorts of tricks and techniques used by cellists. When I made the switch to fifths, I got together with Fred Seykora, who is now working with Roger Kellaway’s new cello group. He was the second cellist at MGM, and one of my best friends. Fred and I got together every day for a week at my house. He wanted to learn how to improvise. l had been teaching that. l wanted to learn how a cellist thinks with this fifth tuning. I think we helped each other. I think he’s the only cellist in Los Angeles now who can improvise, unless Fred Katz is still around. He blew my mind with his explanation of the tricks and physical things cellists have to go through that bass players never even think of.

“To get from one note to another note on the same string, let’s say from F to B-flat on the D string. You have four fingers up there to start with, not counting your thumb, and your nose, and your elbow, and anything else you might be able to get up there. You should be able to go from any of the four fingers on the one to any one of the four fingers on the other note. That means you’ve got sixteen ways to get from one note to the other, and you’ve gotta know all sixteen ways. It’s gotta be in your muscle memory, you can’t be thinking about it. And they all sound different, and each one has a different function. Especially as a jazz player, you need to know those alternatives, because you don’t know where you’re going from the second note.

“One of my favorite tricks-I got it from Charlie Christian-is like false fingering on saxophone, to go back and forth to the same note on different strings. You get a bloop-blop bloop-blop effect.

“My idols are not all bass players. Zoot Sims was one of them, and Sarah Vaughan for her intonation, among her countless other qualities. She could land on a note perfectly and then it would get better. How in hell did she do that? She’d land right in the center of the bull’s-eye and then go deeper into the middle of the center of the middle of the bull’s eye. That alone could give me goose bumps and make me cry.”

“Sahib Shihab said you could listen to her just for her use of vibrato,” I told Red.

“That too. l usually advise my students to emulate horn players, not bass players, and I recommend most heartily Miles Davis from the ’50s and ’60s. First of all, because he was not a natural trumpet player, he had to fight for everything he got out of the trumpet. So he thought and thought. He both fought and thought. And what he came out with was so simple and so deep that any bass player could play it. So if you’re going to emulate a horn player, emulate Miles Davis. A couple of octaves down it sounds even deeper.

“I think Miles used his problem as an instrumentalist to the nth degree. He thought hard and fought hard behind every note he played. He never ever played thoughtlessly:”

Written by Stewart Hoffman in Performance Magazine (Winter 2005)

It’s a brilliant afternoon, and at Parry Sound’s Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts, bassist Joel Quarrington is performing a Dvorak quintet as if his life depended on it.  Which is nothing unusual for Quarrington.  That’s just the way he plays – absolutely focused, breathing along with each phrase as he digs his bow deep down into the thick strings of his instrument.  The rich sound Quarrington produces provides a musical foundation that’s as solid as the hall’s exposed stone and timber.

The Dvorak is being performed with the New Zealand String Quartet, a collaboration forged by Festival Of The Sound director James Campbell.  The quartet’s cellist, Rolf Gjelsten, recalls that when Campbell first called him in Wellington, he asked: “How would you like to play with the best bass player in the world?”  There’s no indication that Gjelsten feels he was misled.

“His sound is like velvet,” says the cellist.  “He has fantastic articulation.  And his playing has so much rhythmic impetus.  It feels like he is running the show.  At the same time, you feel you can be as flexible as possible.  We played Dvorak with another bass player who was fine.  This is a different league.”

It’s a league, in this country at least, that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s principal bassist occupies on his own.  Ask Quarrington’s longtime friend Chas Elliott, another TSO bassist, what Quarrington was like as a student, and he readily admits “he was leaps and bounds ahead of all of us.  He had a level of virtuosity beyond where any of us were.  Tom (Monohan, the TSO’s former principal bass and Quarrington’s teacher) recognized it early on.  Joel was working on things I’ve never worked on.”

At 50 years old, Quarrington’s still working on things – apparently all the time.  Walking along the Parry Sound Harbour to grab a quick lunch before his afternoon rehearsal, he’s on his cell phone, still talking bass, excited about a recent discovery.

“I’ve been doing something new when playing with a large piano,” he announces enthusiastically into the phone, “leaving the lid open, but turning the piano around.”  Balancing the deep, resonant tones of the bass with those of a grand piano has always been a problem, one traditionally solved by adjusting the height of the piano lid.  But Quarrington has never blindly followed tradition.  “It has to do with the sound reflecting off the piano lid,” he explains, then asks, utterly baffled: “Why has no one ever done this?”

Why, indeed.  It’s this constant questioning that has led Quarrington along musical paths never taken before – though you can be forgiven if at first you don’t recognize the seriousness with which he takes his art.  There’s the look of an overgrown boy about Quarrington, something in his eyes that suggest he’s planning some sort of mischief.  And his sense of humour can be totally off the wall.

He plays the erhu, the traditional Chinese two-stringed instrument, but admits his playing is “truly terrible” – which hasn’t dissuaded him from producing seven CDs with titles such as Everybody Digs the Erhu, Erhu From Beyond The Galaxy and Country Erhu ’98.

He has a reputation as a prankster, though that might be a holdover from his youth.  Once, for example, during a session with the National Youth Orchestra, Quarrington hid under his dormitory bed, determined to scare the living daylights out of his roommate.  When his victim returned to the room and shuffled over to within striking distance, Quarrington’s hand darted out from under the bed and latched onto an ankle.  His colleague instinctively executed a leap worthy of an Olympic gold medal.  It’s unclear just how long Quarrington had lain in wait under the bed, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20 – though Quarrington pegs it at 45.  What it comes down to is that Quarrington is serious and single-minded about everything, even about being funny.

So it may not come as too much of a surprise that Quarrington, with his questioning mind, singularity of purpose and virtuoso technique, is considered an innovator on his instrument.  Indeed, Britain’s Double Bassist magazine says he “expanded the boundaries of bass playing.”  That was back in 1998.  In 2005, his stated goal is nothing short of “revolutionizing” the art of bass playing.

The household in which Quarrington grew up seems to have been a breeding ground for nonconformists, original thinkers – and funny people.  He has two brothers.  Paul is a novelist and humourist, author of Whale Music, Galveston and King Leary, for which he won the Stephen Leacock Humour Award.  Tony is a prominent jazz guitarist and songwriter.  Sister Christine is a research manager at the University Health Network.

They were the children of psychologists, who, Quarrington concedes, were a little offbeat.  “They weren’t into housecleaning, for instance.  They were into free thought, ridiculing religion, stuff like that.”  And they encouraged individualism.  “The encouraged us to be suspicious of anything that was popular.”  Creativity was encouraged, and there was always music in their north Toronto home.  The brothers played together in bands.  Joel experimented with guitar, drums and piano.  Tony played a mean banjo, as well as bass guitar – until Joel picked up the instrument when he was about 10.

He discovered the double bass in Grade 7 at Don Mills Collegiate.  Only four-and-a-half feet tall, he was dwarfed by the instrument.  Nevertheless, when the teacher demonstrated it, “it made the skylight rattle.”  That, along with the fact that it was “the least geeky of all the string instruments,” hooked him.

He studied in Toronto with Tom Monohan and Peter Madgett, who was and remains a member of the TSO’s bass section.  But curiosity led him to Europe to study with foremost bassists there, Ludwig Streicher in Vienna and Franco Petracchi in Rome.  “Joel has always been innovative,” says Chas Elliott.  “He was the first student from here to study with Streicher and Petracchi, and he came back with new ideas.  He was always the one to push the envelope.  People don’t like that if they’re comfortable and set in their ways.  But to move forward you have to change.”

In 1976, Quarrington won first prize in the CBC Talent Festival and took the top medal in the Geneva International Bass Competition two years later.  In 1979 he became principal bassist of the Hamilton Philharmonic, and assumed that position with the TSO in 1991.

He is the most in-demand bassist in the country, performing as soloist with orchestras and working with the finest chamber ensembles on the continent.  A faculty member of the Royal Conservatory of Music, he has also conducted master classes at such renowned institutions as Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and London’s Royal Academy of Music.  His second disc of the music of 19^th-century bass virtuoso/composer Giovanni Bottesini was recorded in August for the NAXOS label.  Next April, Quarrington and the TSO premiere a bass concerto by the distinguished American composer John Harbison at the New Creations Festival in Toronto.

Still, as remarkable as his career as a performing artiest is, the question remains: Where is the revolution?

The answer lies in the fact that Quarrington, the day after receiving tenure with the TSO, changed the tuning of his open bass strings from the way practically everyone tunes a bass, E-A-D-G to C-G-D-A – from intervals of fourths to intervals of fifths .  This is where the revolution comes in.

The bass itself, as well as bass-playing techniques, have been standardized for only a short time, Quarrington explains.  The problem, in a nutshell, was developing an instrument that could best reach the low notes composers wanted to hear – generally speaking, cello notes sounded an octave lower.  Early technologies couldn’t produce bass strings – longer and thicker than those of any other instrument – that sounded good.  Made of thick gut, they were so difficult to play that bassists wore gloves to avoid burn.

Performers experimented with different tuning systems, while instruments makers came up with instruments with three, four, five and even six strings.  Finally, the four-stringed instrument we see today, tuned in fourths, became the standard.  The problem is, cellos are tuned in fifths.  And without getting into a dissertation on musical acoustics, that disparity throws things out of whack.

Of course, remind Quarrington that he spoke of “revolutionizing bass playing” and his response is one of mock astonishment.  “I did?” he shoots back.  “Was I drinking?”  But he immediately settles into an impassioned defence of his cause, and you realize he’s dead serious.

Type the phrase “double bass tuning fifths ” into your computer’s search engine and you’ll find Quarrington’s name peppered throughout the first few pages.  He’s writing a three-part method book, a “massive tome” detailing technical concepts fully integrated with his tuning system.  “What it’s all about,” he says, “is clearer sound, and perfect intonation with the cellos.  An instrument tuned in fifths is more alive.”

But the movement is still in its infancy.  And understandably so.  After all, it takes months, or longer, for a seasoned musician to make the switch.  “After years of playing notes here, here and here,” says Chas Elliott, “suddenly they’re not there anymore,”  Think touch-typing with the keyboard all jumbled up.

Not that Quarrington expects everyone to re-learn how to play bass. “But,” he insists, “there’s no reason young players can’t learn this.  I’m not going to win this battle in my lifetime, but it has to start somewhere.”

It all comes back to lessons learned long ago, about questioning the status quo, and having the strength of your convictions.  Most of what people believe to be true, Quarrington points out, usually isn’t.  “There’s some inaccuracy somewhere.  So it makes sense to make up your own mind about things, doesn’t it?”

And with Quarrington’s mind made up, you know he’ll never give up the battle, no matter how long it takes.

Written by Barb McDougall in Double Bassist Magazine

Joel Quarrington has expanded the boundaries of bass playing as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral principal. Barb McDougall went to Toronto to find out more.Preceded by generations of musical ancestors, Joel Quarrington had learned to play several instruments by the age of 12 and his small size didn’t prevent him – with the help of a step ladder – from deciding to learn the double bass. According to his older brother, novelist and screen playwright Paul, Joel chose the bass because he reasoned “the double bass is big and anyone who plays it must be big and therefore if I were to play the double bass I must myself be big”.

Quarrington claims he was rather unambitious as a youngster. But watching his teacher Tom Monohan playing first chair in the Toronto Symphony bass section every Sunday afternoon gave him what he felt was a reasonable goal: to one day play in the section. He achieved that and more, becoming the Symphony’s principal bassist in 1991. En route, he has carved out a solo and chamber music career and rolled forward the very frontiers of bass playing. But it was a rude musical shock as a teenager that led Quarrington to strive so hard.

“When I was 15 I auditioned for Canada’s National Youth Orchestra,” he explains, “and I didn’t get in. It was devastating to me and I knew that in order to get in the next year I would have to leap-frog above the people that were already there. For eight weeks that summer they were going to be playing eight hours a day so I knew that I had to do more than that to get ahead. I’ve always loved practicing, I just became very compulsive about it. So I began practicing eight hours a day, and if I missed a day I would try to make up for it by doing 16 the next.”

Quarrington’s determination paid dividends during his studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and at the city’s eponymous University with Monohan and Peter Madgett. In 1976, he was awarded first place in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Talent Festival Competition. Foreign studies followed in the summer of 1975 with Franco Petracchi in Italy and with Ludwig Streicher in Vienna, Austria, in 1977 and 1978. Lessons with such esteemed teachers were oriented much more towards solo work and focused on an extremely advanced left-hand technique. 1978 proved a watershed in Quarrington’s playing career, when he entered the Geneva International Competition and won the silver medal – the top prize awarded that year. He also received an award at the First Isle of Man Double Bass Workshop and Competition for the most convincing performance of the commissioned test piece – an unaccompanied sonata by David Ellis.

“I’d had some great teachers but I really consider myself self-taught,” Quarrington says. “I wasn’t a very good player back then but now I had time to really start to figure out how to play. The whole concept of tuning in fifths just made so much sense to me. Of course, when I auditioned for the Toronto Symphony position I didn’t use fifths tuning – I waited until the day after I had tenure!”

Only a handful of bassists today tune in fifths, tuning in fourths remaining the unquestioned choice for the vast majority of players. Quarrington, though, offers a convincing argument for his practice – intonation: “The physics are different when you tune in fifths because you are in the same groove as the rest of the string section. The bass in fourths is impossible to tune – if you make the fourths perfect, your low strings will be too flat and of course will not relate to the open strings of the other instruments, just because it’s turned upside down. I think a lot of bass players would admit they don’t understand the level of sharpness that the other strings seem to be operating on – it just seems like an irritating thing that they do. However when you tune the bass C-G-D-A-, all of a sudden you understand. Also rhythmically it makes a difference. I really feel that it’s a faster speaking instrument when it’s tuned in fifths.”

Music scholars have catalogued several attempts by numerous players to introduce tuning in fifths as far back as the 18th century. The idea was repeatedly abandoned, perhaps due mostly to fingering problems. Jazz bassists have an advantage in adopting the system because printed music is rarely and issue for them. Indeed, the US jazz bassist Red Mitchell was an enthusiastic supporter of the tuning. He felt it was the most natural solution to achieving the low C and enjoyed the resultant fingering opportunities. “Mitchell used to call me whenever he was passing through Toronto,” recalls Quarrington. “He was the president of the Fifths Club!”

Whether tuning in fifths will catch on is another question. Quarrington himself admits to a certain unwillingness to teach the tuning: “I am reluctant to teach it – most of my students come to me too advanced to start over again. I don’t want to send someone out in the world and have them be a freak right away! On the other hand, why should we judge if a system is only good if it is taught and accepted by students? What about the people who are actually doing the playing?”

It is difficult to imagine the system becoming widely used, though, simply because professional bassists cannot afford the time it takes (anywhere from six months to a year or more) to learn a new fingering system. Quarrington, however, remembers an exception: “A few years ago, Max Kasper (principal bassist of Symphony Nova Scotia) stopped by my house to play for me because he was entering a competition. I happened to have a second bass in the room that I had tuned in fifths – at the time he listened to my explanation but didn’t give any indication that he was particularly interested. At a later date, I learned that he had gone home and retuned his bass in fifths and never looked back. He’s a much bigger dreamer about it than I am and he has now been playing with this tuning for six years. In a small orchestra like that (there are only one or two basses) his colleagues are mush more aware of his contribution and they are convinced!”

Kasper is indeed a confirmed “fifths-o-phile”. One of his students, who was not particularly advanced, wanted to try the new tuning Kasper noted that the pupil’s shifting abilities actually improved exponentially when he tried the new system. Although fifths tuning obviously increases the frequency of shifting, Kasper says that he feels a closer link between positions that he had not felt with the instrument tuned in fourths. Kasper is full of admiration and praise for his mentor: “Joel is the only bass player I have ever heard who has absolutely conquered the physical requirements of playing the bass. Most players simply take what their teachers give them and pass it on to their students in turn. Joel is of that rare breed who has actually found a better way of doing things – he is truly a monster player.”

Despite his reluctance to teach established players the fifths tuning system, training young bass players from the start to play in fifths tuning makes a great deal of sense to Quarrington. “I don’t wish to offend teachers of young children who start their students out on very small basses,” he says, “but I think it’s a real waste of time. The way to make super bass players would be to train them on the cello – they would be playing better repertoire, and they would have a much better developed musical personality through having all these great pieces to relate to. That’s simply not the case with bass repertoire.”

Quarrington feels there is plenty of room for development in the evolution of bass playing. He regards extensions to reach the low C as “terrible things” while “five-string basses are very difficult to play and the top strings are never bright enough”. And he is saddened to observe that the virtuosity of the instrument is being measured by one’s facility in the high range: “It is the low range which is the essence of the instrument – it makes more sense to me to take care of that low range”.

Such convictions were rewarded last year by the Toronto Symphony which commissioned a new concerto written specially for Quarrington (and his fifths tuning) from the Toronto composer Raymond Luedeke. The new bass concerto was extremely well received at its premiere in September 1997 and Quarrington has been asked to perform it at the International Society of Bassists (ISB) convention in Iowa in 1999. Luedeke has also made available edited versions of the solo part in E-A-D-G and F#-B-E-A – orchestral and solo tunings respectively.

Luedeke explains that the piece is shaped around the idea that “the double bass is the perfect prototype of the male psyche”. The three movements embody four archetypes suggested by Carl Jung: the King, the Lover, the Trickster and the Warrior. “The first movement,” says Luedeke, “evokes the archetype of the King – the leader who is strong and helpful to his people; the evil side of the King is the tyrant. I wanted to create this feeling of striding over the earth, of a huge space that encompasses everything. The Lover/Trickster movement begins in a warm and intimate manner and in the second section I used short fast notes, almost like laughing but a little dark. Joel is playing a million notes there – you can’t believe a bass can do it!” An incredible cadenza incorporates all the Warrior movement – very fast-paced music with constant irregular metre changes, often in 11/8 time. Throughout the concerto, the composer makes frequent use of solo woodwinds, violin and viola. In combination with Quarrington’s bass wizardry, the result is extremely colourful and exotic.

It’s all helped by Quarrington’s marvelous bass, an instrument made in 1630 by Giovanni Paolo Maggini and which formerly belonged to Chicago Symphony bassist Warren Benfield. While still searching for the perfect strings, Quarrington is at present using various Thomastik Dominant strings across the instrument: the A-string from the solo set; the D-string from the orchestra set; the G-string from the solo set (actually a F#); and C from the orchestra set. He had been in touch with Thomastik and was expecting a real G string and a thinner C to be manufactured. Unfortunately, this project seems have been postponed. He encourages any classical bassists interested in fifths tuning to write urging the manufacture of the new strings.

As a devotee of the German bow, Quarrington says he can play closer to the bridge and move the bow more slowly: “You’re playing more into the resistance of the strings down there and it makes a clearer, more focused sound. I can play as loud and as long as I want and I never tire – I’m like that pink rabbit in the battery commercial!” For the bow itself, Quarrington turned to Canadian maker Reid Hudson. I’ve had about a dozen of Reid’s bows,” he elaborates, “but this one is fantastic – it’s made of snakewood. I never want to use pernambuco again. Snakewood really suits the German bow and this bass.”

He uses the bow – and plays his Maggini bass – on his debut solo recording, a CD released on the Naxos label in January 1998 entitled “Bottesini: Music for Double Bass and Piano – Volume 1 [8.554002]“. Quarrington is joined by the gifted young Canadian pianist Andrew Burashko. A second CD project called “Joel Quarrington and Friends [MVCD-1108]” is scheduled for imminent release and features a much broader spectrum of music. It will include Luigi Borghi’s Sonata in D for bass and viola, Quarrington’s own transcription of Saraste’s “Zigeunerweisen”, Henry Eccles’ Sonata in A minor for bass, strings and harpsichord and Canadian composer Milton Barnes’ “Papageno Variations” for bass and strings. The ensemble is drawn from members of the Toronto Symphony, led by Quarrington’s longtime close friend the conductor Timothy Vernon.

It’s all a far cry from the major musical disappointment of his teenage years. And just to illustrate the point, Quarrington traveled to Kingston, Ontario, earlier this year for an intensive month-long session of the Canadian National Youth Orchestra – almost 30 years after his failed attempt to join the ensemble!

This article is © Double Bassist magazine 1998. All rights reserved. For subscriptions details contact: Paul Jackson at Orpheus Publications, E-mail: subs@orphpl.com This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it , tel/fax: (+44) 181-863-2020/2444. Cover shot and photo credit is due to Barb McDougall.