The Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble - II

Further south, at the Catholic courts of Munich, Innsbruck, and Vienna, cornetts and sackbuts were cultivated at a level rivaling Venice. Indeed, there was a constant exchange of musicians across the Alps, often involving cornett and trombone players (e.g., cornettist Girolamo Dalla Casa and his trombone-playing brothers, who were employed for a time at the Bavarian court). Music for the Imperial Court at Vienna, in particular, often included brilliantly virtuosic parts for these instruments.

Moreover, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of sacred works in manuscript of composers such as Johann Joseph Fux, Heinrich Biber, Giovanni Francesco Anerio, Giovanni Felice Sances, and Antonio Bertali call for cornetts and sackbuts colla parte or in modestly obbligato roles. Characteristically, these pieces call for an ensemble of one cornett, two trombones, and a curtal (fagotto) instead of a cornett and three trombones.


We are much less well informed about the use of cornett and sackbut ensembles in England, France, and Spain, partly because the lack of a flourishing musicpublishing industry in the seventeenth century in these countries means that there is much less surviving music. What is certain is that these instruments were used frequently both in the church (and in processions connected to liturgical functions) and in secular settings, including such things as accompanying the nobility outside the palace and signaling the hours from a balcony or tower. In the church their function was most often to double the voices of the choir, though the situation in Spain seems to have been rather more complex. Recent research, which has begun to shed light on the mysteries of instrumental use in Spanish churches, has demonstrated that the use of instruments in the church, particularly loud winds (cornetts, shawms, trombones, and curtals), increased throughout the sixteenth century.

Church bands in the sixteenth century tended to consist of from four to six players of shawms and trombones, with the players doubling to an increasing extent on cornetts and curtals (dulcians) as the century wore on. The surprising and, it seems, uniquely Spanish aspect of their performances was the fact that they rarely doubled the singers in the colla parte manner we would expect in Italian or German sacred contexts, but rather played either entirely by themselves or in alternatim (in alternation) with the singers.

In England the use of these instruments at the court, in the Chapel Royal, and in provincial and collegiate churches was widespread at least to the time of the Commonwealth. Although a definitive history of the royal wind music remains to be written, a look at the incomplete archival records reveals that in the first three decades of the seventeenth century a wind ensemble of three cornetts and three sackbuts came increasingly to dominate over the more varied groups of recorders, flutes, and shawms more prevalent in the previous century. In the Chapel Royal as well as in the cathedrals at such places as Canterbury, York, and Durham, the cornetts and sackbuts were principally used to double the voices of the choir. Roger North describes
the practice at Durham:

They have the ordinary wind instruments in the Quires, as the cornet, sackbut, double curtaile and others, which supply the want of voices, very notorious there; and nothing can so well reconcile the upper parts in a Quire, since wee can have none but boys and those none of the best, as the cornet (being well sounded) doth; one might mistake it for a choice eunuch . . .

As widespread and popular as this practice may have been, it was ultimately new tastes imported from the French court that spelled disaster for players of these instruments. John Evelyn’s diary contains the following entry for December 21, 1662:

One of his Majesty’s chaplains preached, after which instead of the ancient, grave and solemn wind music accompanying the organ, there was introduced a consort of twenty-four violins, after the fantastical light way of the French—better suiting a tavern or playhouse than a church. This was the first time of the change, and now we heard no more the cornett, which gave life to the organ, for that instrument, in which the English were so skillful, was quite left off.

Eventually even the town “waits,” civic instrumental ensembles similar to the German Stadtpfeifer, succumbed to French fashion. The Edinburgh Town Council Register of 1696 reports that the cornetts there were to be replaced by the “French hautboye and double curtal,” instruments considered to be far more proper than the
instruments they then had to play on.