When Bass Became Giant
Rea,
Today you have your strings concert and I’m looking forward to attending. It’s been interesting lugging your double bass back and forth to school. It’s without a doubt the largest instrument in your concert today! But did you know there is a bass even larger?
In 1850, a French instrument maker named Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume was fascinated by a question: how low could a string instrument possibly go? While most instrument makers were trying to create more beautiful sounds, Vuillaume wanted to create something that would push the very limits of what was possible.
His answer was the octobass – a string instrument so enormous that it stands nearly 12 feet tall, about twice the height of your double bass. It’s so tall that musicians need a stepladder just to reach the top! Imagine trying to bring that to school on the bus.
The strings on an octobass are so thick and long that human fingers aren’t strong enough to press them down. So Vuillaume created an ingenious system of levers and pedals that the player operates with their hands and feet. It’s like playing a musical instrument and operating a machine at the same time.
The sound of the octobass is extraordinary. It can produce notes so low that some are actually below the range of human hearing – below 20 Hz. While we can’t hear these ultra-low notes, we can feel them as vibrations moving through our bodies. The lowest note on a regular double bass is about 41 Hz, but the octobass can go down to 16 Hz. That’s so low it can make the floorboards of a concert hall vibrate!
Vuillaume only built three octobasses, and only a few exist in the world today. You can find them in museums like the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix and the Musée de la Musique in Paris. In 2016, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra acquired an octobass and became one of the only orchestras in the world to have one.
When composers write music that includes the octobass, they’re looking for that special rumble that no other instrument can create. It’s like adding an earthquake to the orchestra!
While your double bass serves as the foundation of the orchestra – the heartbeat that everyone builds upon – the octobass reminds us that sometimes pushing boundaries leads to extraordinary creations, even if they’re too impractical for everyday use. Your double bass strikes the perfect balance: large enough to create those deep, rich tones that form the foundation of the music, but still (somewhat) portable enough to take to school.
Love, Abba
P.S. Next time you feel your double bass is too cumbersome to carry, just imagine trying to bring an octobass!
