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Instrumental odyssey
For Arlen Fast, changing the contrabassoon meant going where no one had for more than a century
by Melanie Zuercher
Like many a teenager fresh off the farm in the early 1970s – or even today – Arlen Fast ’76 didn’t have much idea when he went to college what he wanted to do with his life. However, for him, at least, there was always the music.
When he was in fifth grade – at Liberty Grade School, a three-room school near the farm south of Moundridge where Fast grew up – Fast’s mother, Maxine (Ruth) Fast ’50 took her son to a regional high school music festival. The idea was for him “to look around, to listen to all the instruments and decide what I wanted to play.”
He chose the bassoon. However, he had to wait until he went to Moundridge High School before he got to play one, a plastic student model belonging to the school that came with a plastic reed and a fingering chart. He only got a wooden bassoon in his senior year after another student graduated.
When Fast started Bethel in 1972, he “had a vague notion of going into architecture, but I never followed through with the coursework. I think I was afraid of math. I took what I wanted to take, to explore the things I was interested in.” He attended Bethel for four semesters. In the final one, he took only a philosophy course with Marion Deckert ’56 and recorder lessons from a Tabor College music professor while working full-time at Hesston Corporation. The next year, he went off to the University of Kansas thinking he would major in philosophy but, “for fun,” enrolled in some music classes as well.
“Those were classes for music majors, and they tried to discourage me from taking them,” he remembers. “I took recorder lessons from the flute instructor. Then someone found out I had played bassoon in high school and suggested I could probably get a full scholarship.” His parents, Orlando and Maxine, found him a used student bassoon and he went to the bassoon professor at KU.
“He listened to me and said, ‘I can’t help you – you don’t play well enough.’ I went away and practiced, then went to him again. Once more, he sent me away. I went the third time and he agreed to teach me. However, after I had two lessons with him, he disappeared. I found out he had stomach cancer, and he had died!”
Fast then took bassoon lessons from Rodney Boyd, the bassoon professor at Washburn University in Topeka. “Mr. Boyd was the first teacher who helped me begin building my technique in a systematic way,” Fast says. Meanwhile, KU was without a bassoon instructor. Fast decided to transfer to Wichita State University, where there was an active bassoon program. He knew WSU’s bassoon instructor, Michael Dicker, and was attracted to the performance program WSU offered.
Even though scholarship money at WSU was uncertain, Fast says, “The choice of a teacher who I thought could really help me was most important.” Then he also learned there was likely to be an opening for the second bassoon position in the Wichita Symphony Orchestra the following year. So the summer before his senior year in college, he painted houses during the day and “practiced bassoon all evening, every evening.”
When the opening came up in the Wichita Symphony, he tried out and won the position. “Within nine months of getting my first bassoon,” he says, “I was playing professionally.”
Thus began the way of life that would take Fast through the next number of years:
“Each week, I would say to myself, ‘What do I have to do to survive?’” As a WSU student, he was catching up with other music majors, all the while learning the bassoon and playing in a professional orchestra. He earned a B.A. in music performance at WSU.
After college, he got a job with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra (SDSO) playing second bassoon. He spent 17 seasons there. “While it was an excellent orchestra with a wonderful woodwind section, the symphony was plagued at times with money problems,” Fast says. In San Diego, Fast first took up the contrabassoon – “An instrument that is two times as long as the bassoon with twice the problems” – but only played it, at most, for several productions a year with the San Diego Opera.
Yet it was the contrabassoon that would change Fast’s life.
In 1986-87, Fast went through a painful 14-month lockout at the SDSO, the result of a labor dispute. “The picture I had in my head of how the music world worked was exploded,” he remembers. “We were really not so far from the medieval ages when musicians played at the pleasure of the king. Our board of directors decreed that we would either work under their rules and their pay, or not at all. The lockout was a very difficult time.
“After we went back to work, my attitude had taken a beating. Playing in the orchestra became a job, not something I loved to do. To change that, I decided I would look for a position in a bigger orchestra that paid more so that the time I invested in my playing would be better compensated. I also decided to try to win a position in a bigger orchestra on the contrabassoon.
“I had to start from scratch to learn to play the contrabassoon,” he continues, “but that learning process brought me back into the joy of playing music.”
In 1988, Fast began taking auditions for contrabassoon positions but chose the locations carefully because his wife, Anne Ediger ’75, had a significant career of her own in applied linguistics. “When Anne and I got married,” he says, “we sat down and identified a select number of cities around the world where we both felt we could have really good careers. Those were the cities where I took contrabassoon auditions.”
In 1995, the contrabassoonist at the New York Philharmonic retired. Fast auditioned for the position and won the job of his dreams. But his odyssey with the contrabassoon was just beginning.
“Within the first few months of my new job, I started to become dissatisfied with my instrument,” he says. “I had trouble making my instrument produce what I heard in my head as the voice I needed to have in the New York Philharmonic. I quickly learned that all contrabassoons had severe limitations and that all players struggled with the same problems I encountered.”
Through a long process, Fast learned that many of the problems he had with the contrabassoon lay with the register key system of the instrument, which had been essentially unchanged for more than 100 years. The design of the system produced a problematic upper register.
Fast began a series of experiments – first to understand how these register key systems worked and then to redesign the contra system to make the instrument respond better and have a more even scale. He began working with Fox Products Corporation, a maker of double-reed instruments in South Whitley, Ind., to create a prototype contrabassoon using the “Fast Register System.”
“I played the prototype contrabassoon in the orchestra for two months in the spring of 2001,” Fast says, “and it changed my life.”
After making some minor adjustments to the system, Fox built a finished version of the “Fast system contrabassoon” and in early September 2001, Fast played it in its world debut in a series of concerts in Braunschweig, Germany, on tour with the New York Philharmonic.
The orchestra was set to travel home Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, they didn’t make it that day.
As a result of those events, Fast’s new contrabassoon made its American debut playing Brahms’ German Requiem in memory of those who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the four commercial jet airliners on Sept. 11.
Today, there are Fox-made Fast system contrabassoons in the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and the Iceland Symphony, with one being readied to send to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra later this spring.
Fast recently returned from a six-month sabbatical, where the young man once “afraid of math” did a physics research project on the contrabassoon with one of the world’s leading acousticians at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
The most recent journey for Fast and the contrabassoon was to Asia, where the New York Philharmonic gave a historic performance broadcast worldwide from Pyongyang, North Korea.
He seems to have come a long way from the farm in Moundridge and a small college campus in the Midwest. “Growing up on the farm, my view of the world was not very big,” he says. “Bethel began to open that world up.”