In use from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, the shawm was a wooden instrument, often made out of boxwood, with a conical bore opening out from top to bottom. At the top, a cut and scraped reed was fitted over a small brass tube called a ‘staple’. The hollow reed was housed in a ...
cylinder. Italy has even more, among them the gran zampogna, one of the world’s largest, the widespread zampogna di Scapoli which is often played together with the shawm piffero, and in Calabria about five forms of ciaramedda. For Western European pipes the double-bladed reed is the norm, in a chanter with usually a single, often ...
As ensemble music became more popular during the sixteenth century there was increased demand for wind instruments that could elegantly negotiate the lower ranges. Large versions of wind instruments intended for the higher registers lacked volume and agility and were often difficult to play. Various elements of existing instruments – the bass recorder’s crook and the shawm’s double reed, for ...
disappeared from professional music. At the same time, new wind instruments were being developed, often by rethinking the design of older ones. The oboe was basically a redesigned shawm and its greater expressiveness, better tone and tuning led to it replacing the older instrument in the second half of the seventeenth century in military bands and church ensembles. ...
Not to be confused with the modern valved brass-band cornet, which is a kind of small trumpet, the cornett (with that extra final ‘t’) was made of two carved, lightly curved pieces of European hardwood (such as pear) bound together and wrapped in leather. The instrument is further unusual in that it has an octagonal finish. To the ...
Instantly recognizable, the crumhorn (also known as the krummhorn or cromorne) was made out of wood – usually boxwood – that had been bent rather than carved. The bell turned dramatically upwards like a hook, and the narrow cylindrical body flared only slightly, making the instrument lower in pitch than one with a conical bore of the same ...
reed, cane or similar material to a small metal tube (known in English as the staple), which is then inserted into the top of the playing tube. The Global Shawm Members of the shawm family are by far the most numerous and widely played of the double-reed instruments across the globe. Details vary worldwide, but the prime features of ...
group (usually harpsichord plus a bass instrument such as a bass viol or baroque cello) accompanies two melodic instruments such as Baroque violins or flutes. Instruments as diverse as the shawm, tabor, fiddle, cittern, crumhorn, serpent and hurdy-gurdy have been very successfully resurrected. Current performing ensembles include the Baroque brass group, His Majestys Sagbuts and ...
The oboe was developed in the mid-seventeenth century and the credit is usually given to Jean Hotteterre (c. 1605–90/2), a shawm player at the court of Louis XIV. Its immediate predecessor was the shawm and the oboe took over the French name for smaller shawms, hautbois or ‘loud woodwind instrument’. The distribution of the finger holes and the bore was ...
development. There is no single, revolutionary moment at which the oboe became a modern instrument, and it retains strong links with the past both in sound and design. Shawm The modern oboe is a direct descendant of the shawm and the hautboy. The shawm was a conically bored, straight wooden instrument with a flared bell, popular throughout ...
The racket was a short double-reed instrument that looked like a kaleidoscope. It had nine parallel bores, all connected at alternate ends to form a continuous tube, with eight of them arranged around a central ninth. In this last a reed was inserted on a staple, much as in a shawm. The fingerholes were at the front and ...
of the recorder as the most widely used chromatic teaching instrument and as a tool in the hands of avant-garde composers. Styles & Forms | Renaissance | Classical Instruments | Shawm | Renaissance | Classical ...
saw the development of the consort principle, in which instruments of the same design but different sizes were combined to create a homogeneous ensemble. Initially this was applied to shawm, flutes and recorders, but the first decade of the sixteenth century saw the first fiddle ensembles develop: the violin family was born. Violin versus Viol To begin with ...
– as the ‘clown’, for its comic effects, or the ‘gentleman’, for its eloquent, lyrical capacities. Its early development is thought to have followed the reconstruction of the shawm, a strident-sounding instrument often played in outdoor ceremonies during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Similarities in design and use also suggest the curtal or dulcian was the true ...
Most instrumental music of the Renaissance was written for small ensembles. At the time, the major distinction was between the consort and the broken consort. The former consisted of a set of instruments from the same family. The fact that recorders, shawms, viols, violins and many others existed not as single instruments but as a whole range ...
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