Air “I Walk Unseen” is a chamber work for bassoon and piano composed in 2021. Its subtitle comes from John Milton’s Il Penseroso, a poem of melancholy, contemplation, solitude, night, music, and inward vision.

The bassoon becomes a hidden singer: warm, solitary, flexible, and shadowed. The work draws on the instrument’s unusually human range, allowing it to move between breath, speech, song, and wandering line.

• Literary Source John Milton’s Il Penseroso.
• Commission Lola Descours.
• Forces Bassoon and piano.

The work appears on Bassoon Steppes, Lola Descours and Paloma Kouider’s Orchid Classics recording devoted to the bassoon’s lyrical, dramatic, and transcriptive possibilities. Within that context, Auerbach’s piece offers a contemporary, dreamlike original work for bassoon and piano.

Reviews have described the piece as rhapsodic and song-like, while also noting the way the bassoon moves beyond ordinary vocal imitation into trills, breath, pitch inflections, and gestures unique to the instrument.

Public links related to Air “I Walk Unseen”. The principal video is the performance by Lola Descours, the work’s commissioner and premiere bassoonist.