A Singing Bass:

New Life in the Lily Pond

In musical prestige as well as pitch, it is hard to get any lower on the scale than the double bass. Rumbling and ungainly, it is the bullfrog of the orchestral lily pond--laughed at by laymen, slighted by composers, and even cursed by its own players, who call it a "monster" or a "baroque doghouse." Once, after Conductor Serge Koussevitzky gave his Boston Symphony players a dazzling demonstration of bass playing, one of them said he was so good that "he sounded like a lousy cellist." At the time, Koussevitzky was one of three men in the 250-year history of the instrument who had mustered enough talent, courage and sense of humor to qualify as a virtuoso bass soloist.*

Now there is a fourth. In the hands of Los Angeles-born Gary Karr, 26, the bass sings instead of croaks, and it sings with all the richness of the cello, the warmth of the viola and the agility of the violin. Yet Karr is not content simply to be the master of a narrow field. He wants to broaden the field-by revamping the technique of bass playing and bringing the instrument into its own as a solo voice. "My intention is to start revolutions," he says. "Most bass music doesn't demand very much, and most bass players don't want to work very hard; they're satisfied to be ensemble players. They've done too little to improve the status of their own instrument."

Slow Bow. Karr is building a movement. Next year he will be teaching at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, Boston's New England Conservatory and the University of Wisconsin. He publishes a magazine (The Bass Sound Post) and organizes annual conferences for the 1,000-member International Institute for the String Bass, which he founded and heads. He champions improvements in bass design: his own custom-made instrument has, among other features, a special thick-bellied shape for resonance and carrying power and an unusually close spacing between the strings and fingerboard for easier fingering. He has his own method of drawing the bow more slowly across the strings to achieve a "rich, passionate" tone. He also argues that classical bassists could learn much from the free wheeling devices of jazz and rock, both of which he plays with enthusiasm.

Many of Karr's techniques are self-taught. Raised in a musical family in which the father, grandfather, two uncles and three cousins all played the bass, he took up the instrument at nine "without even knowing there were other instruments." He made such rapid progress that he soon ranged beyond the conventional approach to the bass. He studied with a cellist, a pianist and even with Singer Jennie Tourel ("the greatest influence on my phrasing and musical ideas"). After a 1962 appearance in one of Leonard Bernstein's televised Young People's Concerts, he started on a career of recitals and solo stints with major orchestras. This required him to pad out the skimpy repertory for bass by transcribing the music of other instruments, from the archaic viola da gamba to the flute. More recently, composers such as Alec Wilder and Hans Werner Henze have begun to recognize his uniqueness by writing new pieces for him.

Bee in a Bottle. The latest of these new works is Gunther Schuller's wispy, astringent Concerto for Double Bass and Chamber Orchestra, which the New York Philharmonic premiered under Schuller's baton last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall. While the 20-minute work scarcely explored the lyrical side of the bass, it did give Karr plenty of opportunity to display an awesome technique. Bowing and plucking in quick succession, deftly grabbing knotty clusters of double-stops, he skittered from basso groans up to ghostly coloratura harmonics, shading effortlessly from the sound of a human voice to that of a bee buzzing in a bottle.

After his final pizzicato plink, he walked over to shake hands with the bassists in the orchestra. But Karr the revolutionary was hardly making peace with the old guard. "In ten years, orchestral bassists will really hate me," he says cheerfully, "and I hope they will. It's the only way they'll change."

*The others: Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) and Giovanni Bottesini (1821-89).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.