Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #9 "Swarm"

Tom Bachtell's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Swarm"

Nick Paumgarten has written dozens of “Talk of the Town” stories, several of them masterpieces of the genre, including “Little Helper” (“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day”); “Request Line” (“Still, voices rose from the audience, barking requests, and the shushing kicked up, like a sudden breeze”); “Up and Away” (“It was a gorgeous, seemingly low-particle evening. You could clearly see both Manhattan and Philadelphia, and miles of farmland, forest, and sprawl”); and “Bong Show” (One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”). 

My favorite is “Swarm” (January 24, 2011), a visit with the Dewan brothers in New Rochelle, inventors of an electronic synthesizer called the Swarmatron. Paumgarten writes, “The Swarmatron, in the center of the room, had a pitch ribbon and a swarm ribbon, and an array of unlabelled knobs and switches, which Brian began manipulating in a way that produced something that your own first cousin once removed might recognize as music.” 

But the part I love about “Swarm” isn’t about the Swarmatron; it’s about the bassoon. Paumgarten begins his piece with a consideration of how the bassoon got its name:

It is hard to think of a musical instrument that doesn’t have a great name. Tuba, oboe, clarinet. The word “bassoon” comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy who was stationed aboard a paddle frigate off the German colony of Kamerun. Basseau ordered his crew to hollow out the ship’s bowsprit and take turns playing Schubert lieder on it in a flowery Francophonic style that he hoped would annoy the German spies hidden in nearby shrimp boats. The Germans called this sound schwachsinnige Musik, but the vice-admiral’s name for it—“bassoon”—was the one that stuck.

All very interesting. But then, in the next paragraph, Paumgarten pulls a surprise:

Actually, no. “Bassoon” is merely “basso” (Italian for “bass”) with an augmentative suffix. The names of most instruments arise out of the sounds they produce or the feature that produces those sounds. So what about the Swarmatron? 

“Swarm” ’s transition (with reverse pivot) from bassoon to Swarmatron is one of Paumgarten’s coolest moves. The whole piece is cool – one of Paumgarten’s best.