Reeds (part II)

Acoustically related to the shawm is the curtal (pronounced “curt’l”), in which a conical bore like that of the shawm is doubled back on itself to produce a long sounding length in a short—in effect, “curt”—package. (It is still often called the “dulcian”—one of its German names—because the first suppliers of copies in this century were Germans, who called it that on their price lists. But “curtal” is its traditional English name.) Praetorius illustrates a whole family of them, in sizes corresponding to those of the shawms. However, he says that the doppel Fagott (the curtal corresponding to the grossbass Pommer) is available in two different pitches, one a fourth and one a fifth below the bass curtal or chorist Fagott; these are known as the quart Fagott and quint Fagott, respectively. (However, no representatives of the quint Fagott appear to survive.) In addition, curtals were made in two styles, offen (open) and gedackt (covered); in the latter the bell opening is provided with a sieve-like cover, somewhat damping the sound. Praetorius says that the Fagotten are softer and sweeter in sound than the Pommern (hence the alternative name Dolzianen) due to the folded bore  and — when present — the bell cover. (On the other hand, as we have seen, an offen chorist Fagott could substitute for a bass Pommer in a shawm band, so the difference was not necessarily extreme.)


As in the case of the shawms, not all sizes of curtal were in common use throughout Europe. The bass (bottom note C) had by far the greatest currency in all countries. In England it was known as the “double curtal” (since pitches in the octave below G or gamma ut were called “double notes”); the next size smaller — the “single curtal,” with G as its bottom note — was also known there. (The terms “bass curtal” and “tenor curtal” for these are modernisms, again based on a partial adoption of German terminology.) The use of other sizes seems to have been confined to Germany and Spain, although it has been suggested (based on Mersenne) that the quart Fagott was known in France. In Spain, families of curtals (called bajones) were used in church to accompany the choirs; this practice continued well into the nineteenth century. The Spanish penchant for shawms in church is well documented, and it is often assumed that they doubled or substituted for choral voices. However, it is quite possible that the shawm band’s participation was mostly (or even exclusively) in alternatim with the choir and that the only reed instrument actually mixing with voices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the bajón.

Other conically bored reed instruments in use at the outset of the seventeenth century were bassanelli (a family of soft-toned, low-pitched “oboes”) and—at the other end of the tonal spectrum—windcap shawms. The latter were known in modern times as Rauschpfeiffen, until Barra Boydell connected the name Schreierpfeiffen (lit., screaming pipes) with extant examples; Praetorius must be somehow in error regarding the instruments he illustrates under that name. The rest of the reeds of the era—crumhorns and their derivatives—were cylindrically bored. Praetorius mentions Cornamusen (like crumhorns but straight, with sieve-like opening to damp the sound), Sordunen (with doubled-back-bore and mouth-held reed, like curtals), one size of Kortholt (like Sordunen, but with a windcap), and Racketten (the extensio ad absurdum of the doubled-backbore principle). Few of these, conical or cylindrical, were known outside Germany and northern Italy, and even there they were rapidly falling into disuse. (Even the crumhorn—certainly the instrument among them with the widest distribution—hardly survived Praetorius himself; after his death it is cited in inventories more often than performances.) The simple reason, once again, seems to be the violin, whose domination of instrumental music was more complete in Italy and Germany than yet in France. Crumhorns and their ilk are in their element playing Renaissance-style vocal polyphony; few instruments are as good at making clear the inner parts of close-voiced counterpoint. In Italy especially, however, the new emphasis in both vocal and instrumental writing was in expression of emotion, not counterpoint for its own sake, and Germany was very much under Italy’s musical influence throughout the century. The instruments of choice were clearly the violin family and those winds with similar capabilities: cornetts, sackbuts, and curtals. The rest of the winds were found deficient in either range or expressive power (or, in the case of the shawm, civility) and became literally “voices from the past.”

In France, however—far from Italian influence—several of the Renaissance reeds lived on. Besides the crumhorn (which he calls tornebout), Mersenne describes the courtaut (similar to the Sordun), the cervelat (Rackett), and the hautbois de Poi[c]tou (historically a detached bagpipe chanter fitted with a windcap, but similar in principle to the Schreierpfeiff). We would hardly be considering this last an art instrument at all, of course, but for the royal favor it enjoyed as part of the Hautbois et musettes de Poitou of the Grande Écurie. (Just to what extent, or how long, the names of such official court ensembles reflected reality is somewhat uncertain—for instance, the fifres of the Joueurs de fifres et tambours were, by the end of the seventeenth century, an oboe bandl — but we can be sure the titles at least started out having some element of truth to them.) On the other hand, Mersenne’s inclusion of the tornebout and cervelat may be more a result of his own fascination with their mechanical and acoustical properties than a reflection of actual use in this period. In any case, his tornebout—the traditional Renaissance crumhorn—is not to be identified with the French cromorne of the second half of the century; the latter has been shown to have more similarity to the bassoon.


Mersenne says that the courtaut can serve as a bass to musettes; whether by musette he means here the complete bagpipe with its bag and drones (the musette de cour or “court musette”) or merely a detached chanter fitted with a windcap—the form he prefers—is unclear. But it is clear from his description of the musette that it was not quite yet the fully developed and standardized instrument of the treatises of Pierre Borjon de Scellery (1672) and Hotteterre le Romain (1738). Though the main physical characteristics of the musette—bellows, cylindrically bored chanter, and so-called shuttle drone — were already in place (and had been before 1596), there is no mention by Mersenne of the peculiar technique described by Borjon and Hotteterre, whereby a semblance of articulation is achieved on an instrument actually incapable of stopping between notes. This technique is referred to as “covered playing” (or “closed playing”) by Borjon; it depends on leaving most of the fingers on their respective holes and raising them only one at a time for the notes of a melody — not the normal woodwind practice, to be sure! The six-finger note on the chanter is treated as the “default” position; it tends to sound, however briefly, between the other notes. But, since it has the same pitch (g') as the top note of the complex drone, it seems to disappear; it is perceived as a space—and thus an articulation. However, with this “covered” approach to fingering, cross-fingering becomes unavailable as a method of producing chromatic alterations; for this reason multiple closed-standing side keys were adopted on the musette long before they were even considered for other woodwinds.