The Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble - I

The cornett is a lip-vibrated, wooden, fingerhole horn, usually curved and of octagonal cross section, which went out of use in the early nineteenth century. The sackbut is the ancestor of the modern trombone, made of thinner brass and with a narrower bore and bell than its descendant. The histories of these two instruments, differing so greatly in physical characteristics, nevertheless became inextricably intertwined in the course of the sixteenth century, remained so throughout the seventeenth, and gradually diverged in the eighteenth as the cornett fell into obsolescence. The story of this “marriage” is unique in the history of musical instruments and largely determined the destinies of both instruments for two hundred years.

The cornett, developed through the addition of fingerholes to the animal horns widely used for signaling in the Middle Ages, evolved around the turn of the sixteenth century into the most important soprano voice of the Renaissance instrumentarium. The sackbut, derived from the medieval natural trumpet through the application, in the late fifteenth century, of a U-slide mechanism, developed quickly into the most important tenor and bass wind instrument of the sixteenth century. Each of these instruments needed the other to provide the homogeneous consort typical of Renaissance tastes; each complemented the other perfectly. The sackbut generally lacked the agility necessary for intricate ornamentation required of soprano lines; the cornett family lacked middle and low voices. (Tenor and bass cornetts were eventually developed but were never as popular as sackbuts on lower parts.)

It was first and foremost in Italy where ensembles of cornetts and sackbuts took hold, eventually replacing the late-medieval mixed wind band of shawms and slide trumpet. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the cornett reigned as the virtuoso solo instrument par excellence, and the concerto di cornetti e tromboni, usually known as the piffari, was an essential feature of the musical landscape of virtually every city of any importance in Italy. Outside Venice, the center of cornett and sackbut playing, extensive  documentation exists for such groups in cities including Bologna, Genoa, Brescia, Udine, Florence, Rome, and Naples. Virtuosos of the cornett were extravagantly praised by local chroniclers (and often correspondingly remunerated by their patrons). Their numbers included highly trained composers (Giovanni Bassano in Venice, Ascanio Trombetti “detto del Cornetto” in Bologna, “Il Cavaliere” Nicolò Rubini del Cornetto in Modena), at least one famous artist (Benvenuto Cellini), as well as several cloistered nuns (most notably at the convent of San Vito in Ferrara).

The duties of the piffari centered on ceremonial civic functions: daily “performances” in the public square, accompanying the entrances and exits of prominent officials as well as providing entertainment for their meals, playing for processions and at public celebrations, and so forth. In addition, these groups often provided music for Mass or for other church functions, either as an official unit or, more often, as a pool of players to be called upon when needed to augment the salaried musicians of the cappella. Not all theorists agreed (nor did the church, at least officially, since the Council of Trent) that these instruments were appropriate in the church. In disparaging their use in sacred or refined circumstances, though, Vincenzo Galilei clearly expresses a personal bias:

[Cornetts and trombones] are often heard in masquerades, on stage, on the balconies of public squares for the satisfaction of the citizens and common people, and, contrary to all that is proper, in the choirs and with the organs of sacred temples on solemn feast days; . . . these instruments are never heard in the private chambers of judicious gentlemen, lords and princes, where only those [musicians] take part whose judgement, taste and hearing are unsullied; for from such rooms [these instruments] are totally prohibited.

Ensembles of cornetts and sackbuts were heard in Italy right through the seventeenth century, and in some cases through the eighteenth century as well. The Concerto Palatino della Signoria di Bologna, one of the most renowned of these ensembles, existed for more than 250 years, usually in a formation of four cornetts and four trombones, and was not disbanded until 1779. By this time, standards on the cornett had sunk so low that the city fathers voted to silence the Concerto Palatino, stating that

either the great difficulty of adapting the said cornetts, very imperfect in their structure, to the harmonious expression of that kind of music which corresponds to the genius of the present time, or the scarceness of subjects in possession of the natural disposition necessary to take on and cultivate the sound of this instrument, actually out of use, has made manifestly clear the absolute necessity of substituting the cornetts with some other instrument more grateful to the ear and which might remove the unpleasantness which results from hearing, in the public functions and, above all, in the churches, a very disagreeable dissonance, from which derives a manifest scandal.

The Concerto Capitolino in Rome, with six cornetts and six sackbuts, was not disbanded until 1798, when, upon the arrival of Napoleon, it was replaced with a military band.

North of the Alps, most German civic authorities maintained a wind band by the fifteenth century. Its principal instruments were (by the sixteenth century) the cornett and the sackbut, but the players each mastered many instruments. This instrumental versatility appears to represent one of the principal differences between the German Stadtpfeifer and the Italian piffari. To be sure, many Italian cornettists and trombonists played other instruments as well, but the practice seems to have been neither as widespread nor as officially sanctioned as in Germany, where wind players often began their careers among the string players (Kunstgeiger) and only later were promoted to the more prestigious wind instruments. A particularly good example of this instrumental flexibility is shown in the seventeenth-century Ratsmusik of Hamburg. Though much under the sway of English consort music, the Hamburg musicians retained a far more varied instrumental usage than their English stringplaying contemporaries. One document indicates that the cornett players were also required to play violins and recorders and the trombonists either viola and recorder, or string bass and curtal, to use “pro variatione.”

As in Italy, the duties of the Stadtpfeifer included functions both civic (including the famous “tower music”) and sacred. A truly enormous quantity of German sacred music from the seventeenth century includes parts for cornetts and sackbuts, sometimes in obbligato roles, but more often doubling voices in the ripieno choir. This practice was virtually universal in the performance of music in the stile antico, the classical sixteenth-century polyphonic style still much used in German Lutheran churches as late as the eighteenth century. A manuscript in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek which preserves, partly in the hand of J. S. Bach, a group of instrumental and vocal parts to Palestrina’s Missa sine nomine à 6 bears witness to the prevalence and persistence of this practice in Leipzig. Bach’s instrumentation of this Mass includes two cornetts and four trombones, as well as a continuo group of organ, harpsichord, and violone.

Bach’s famous complaint in 1730 that the Leipzig Stadtpfeifer were “partly retired, and partly not at all in such practice as they should be” undoubtedly reflects a decline in this famous group which took place after 1720. Nevertheless, the Stadtpfeifer continued to play cornetts and sackbuts into the nineteenth century in some places. The French composer and musicologist Jean Georges Kastner heard them in Stuttgart in 1840, though he was little impressed with their skill.