Hello and welcome back to our final in this month’s series of Uncommon Instruments – the turn of the Cornamuse.

So far then we have had the Northumbrian pipes, the Swedish nyckelharpa and the crumhorn. The crumhorn, the small pipes and the Cornamuse are quite closely linked.

They’re all reeded and they are all part of the chanter/bellow/blown family of instruments. Some of them have bellows externally and some of them are internal bellows, or lungs.

We have Sarah Marsh here again to talk us through the Cornamuse because she is an expert in all things medieval renaissance instruments.

Cornamuse

The cornamuse is not to be confused with the cornemuse, which is French for bagpipe.

The cornamuse is one of my favourite instruments of medieval time. It’s got a much nicer sound than the crumhorn that we had last week. Hopefully you’ll agree if you watch the video. Let me know what you think.

The cornamuse is a medieval instrument. It carries on a little bit from the crumhorn, and here’s Sarah to tell you more about it.

The cornamuse is really quite a primative instrument in terms of how they look. They only have two keys as opposed to the larger number of keys on, say, a clarinet or oboe. On a clarinet or oboe you have lots of holes and a whole range of keys allowing you to cover and uncover those holes.

I don’t play the cornamuse and I’m not even going to attempt to, but you can see on the Northumbrian pipes, which is a slightly later instrument, you’ve got several more keys and each one covers and uncovers a different hole.

The development of instruments

This shows the development of instruments. So for example, in, I haven’t got this to show, but in terms of the development of the oboe, there was the shawm, which would have a very similar arrangement to the crumhorn and the cornamuse, to the baroque oboe, which has a few keys, to the modern oboe that has a lot of keys.

This development happened for two reasons – first the development of the understanding of how sound works, and secondly the technology to actually be able to put the keys in to instruments.

In the time of the Renaissance, probably a lot of instruments wouldn’t even have keys because the craftsmanship required for that would make the instrument too expensive to manufacture.

So as keys were added, range was added to these instruments and they would become more complex. But with that gain, you lose playability. And that’s why as we go sort of from the Renaissance into the Baroque, music becomes much less of a participation sport and you really see much more development of professional musicians because the instruments are getting more complex and harder to play.

So if you look at a popular Renaissance composer like Tielman Susato, a lot of people would have been able to pick up and play his music. You look at a popular early Baroque composer like Antonio Vivaldi and your average person in the street is probably not going to be able to pick up a Vivaldi concerto and play it.

Check out the video to see Sarah play a piece called Catres Brandless. We’re not quite sure what that means, but it’s another dance piece and it lends itself to the more sort of subtle tone of the cornamuse.