The word “bassoon” is listed as just being a large bass, the same way that “balloon” is a large ball. There are indeed such things as a “tenoroon” and a “contrabassoon,” suggesting that wherever the word comes from, it does get analyzed that way, and indeed most dictionaries including the online OED list it as deriving from French “basson”, which does indeed mean “bassoon”, and which the French TLFi dictionary dates to the 17th century and says derives from Italian “bassone”, the augmentative form of “basso” listed as 17th century by the Italian Tommaseo-Bellini dictionary.
But the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal has the more-or-less identically pronounced “basoen” as an alternate spelling for “bazuin”, which is, in fact, a buisine, i.e. a medieval signal trumpet based originally on an Arab design but named after the buccin, an earlier military Roman signal horn called “buccina” in Latin or “βυκάνη” in Greek. The Grimm brothers, meanwhile, give the same origin for the German word “Posaune”, which today means “trombone” but is also used to translate “σάλπιγξ” (yet another kind of military trumpet) in German New Testament translations, as indeed is “bazuin” in Dutch.
Quite venerable, all in all. But how does it compare to the “big bass” theory? Well… I tried to track down this Italian “bassone”, and quite to my surprise, found basically nothing. There’s a village by that name near Verona, but most Italian dictionaries don’t list the word at all. Tommasseo-Bellini does have a cursory one-line reference to it as being, indeed, the augmentative form of “basso”, but defines it only as referring to a singer with an exceptionally deep voice. The Italian word for an actual bassoon, meanwhile, is “fagotto”, so called because early ones were constructed of multiple pieces of wood held together like a bundle of sticks.
So where did this French “basson” come from? Well, TLFi has a reference to Nostradamus that I simply cannot trace down, but the French Wikipedia sends me to the Encyclopédie. The original 1750s one by Diderot, which indeed has an entry for “basson de hautbois”, or “basson” for short. And then I get stuck in the variety of double reed instruments with confusingly similar names that are subtly different in English and French. The “hautbois baryton”, while literally “baritone oboe”, seems to be a late 19th century innovation called the bass oboe in English, while a “basse de hautbois” appears to be a contrabass oboe, and indeed extant in Diderot’s days (per English Wikipedia, citing a book I don’t have).
In the end, it seems plausible that the bassoon is, indeed, some kind of bass rather than some kind of buccina, but the word probably crossed the Alps quite separately from the instrument. French doesn’t have augmentatives, but Italian does, so it could cheaply supply a word for “voice below bass” that French musicians, who saw a lot of Italian jargon anyway, could probably make sense of pretty much immediately. At the same time, “basoen” is too close of a match for “bassoon” not to at least mention in an etymological dictionary, in my opinion.
References, sadly without links because the forum won’t let me post more than two:
- TLFi “basson”
- TLFi “buisine”
- English Wikipedia “buisine”
- English Wikipedia “buccina”
- WNT “bazuin”
- Grimm & Grimm “Posaune”
- Grande Dizionario “bassone”
- Tommaseo-Bellini “bassone”
- Encyclopédie de Diderot “basson de hautbois”
- Wikipedia “bass oboe”
Links are at https://pastebin.com/UWyhy71i
(The main reasons are that it cannot leak air anywhere other than where it’s designed to do so, and that the hollowed-out parts of the wood must be of highly accurate, precise, and stable dimensions or it will play out of tune.) It could probably be done somehow, but it would be very difficult to get it right, and the maker would be muttering “There has to be a better way…”.