Instruments

The ancestor of the oboe, the shawm seems to have been brought from the Middle East during the Crusades, around the thirteenth century. Adapted to European tastes and standardised around the fifteenth century, it accompanied the ceremonies and festivities of princes and cities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Royal entries, rejoicings, weddings, coronations, balls: its brilliant tone contributed as much to the solemnity of celebrations as to the energy of dance. Its double reed, made of two thin blades of cane, vibrates under the player's breath and makes a conical bore resonate, flaring out to the bell. Together with the larger shawms and early brass, it plays the highest part of the alta capella, the emblematic wind band of the period.

The name “shawm”, like the French chalemie, comes from the Latin calamus, reed. In the sixteenth century, the instrument and its family were also called haulbois in French (literally “high wood”, that is, a loud wooden instrument): it is this name, which became hautbois, that its modern descendant has kept — and from which the English word “oboe” derives.

Alto and tenor shawms (bombardes in French) are larger shawms, designed to play lower parts. Lengthening the instrument raises new difficulties: the balance between finger holes and vent holes has to be rethought, and the lowest finger hole ends up too far away to be covered directly by the finger. A metal key, worked by the little finger, is then used to close it. This mechanism is protected by a wooden barrel called a fontanelle, which gives these instruments their characteristic silhouette.

The first to appear, in the fifteenth century, was the alto shawm, which sounds a fifth below the treble shawm and plays the inner parts of the alta capella repertoire. In the sixteenth century, advances in instrument making and the humanist curiosity of craftsmen led to ever larger sizes: the shawms grew into a vast family, from the dessus (treble) down to the huge grande basse (great bass), which is more than two metres long!

The French name bombarde was probably borrowed from the vocabulary of medieval artillery: the sources suggest that it first referred to a fourteenth-century cannon, whose profile was strikingly reminiscent of the body and bell of a large shawm. Today the word also refers to a traditional instrument, the Breton bombarde. Although the acoustic principle is similar, to my knowledge there is no direct lineage between the two instruments.

The dulcian (known in England as the curtal) is a large oboe whose bore is folded back on itself. In practice, two channels are bored side by side in a single block of wood and meet at its base; the reed is mounted on a crook, a curved metal tube that brings it within reach of the player's lips. This design makes for an instrument that is both low-pitched and easy to handle: far more practical in processions than the great bass shawms, which were often taller than the musicians who played them. Its soft, warm tone earned it its name.

Appearing in the first third of the sixteenth century, the dulcian also quickly developed into a consort, that is, a complete family, from treble to bass. Only the bass survived beyond the seventeenth century: it is the ancestor of the modern bassoon. In Spain and its American possessions, where it is called bajón, it accompanied cathedral music until the eighteenth century and sometimes beyond.

At the end of the sixteenth century, new instruments appeared in response to changes in musical language. No longer quite shawms, but not yet baroque oboes, they are the “missing link” of a family in full transformation. The Renaissance shawms did not disappear for all that: in France, they remained in use at least until the coronation of Louis XIV!

With no surviving examples, it is difficult to trace the evolution of these transitional instruments. Seventeenth-century paintings, engravings and sculptures bear witness to major changes in their construction (the appearance of keys, new proportions…), probably linked to the makers' attempts to make the oboe more flexible and its tone softer. In The Musicians' Brawl, painted around 1630, Georges de La Tour depicts an instrument whose silhouette recalls a small shawm, and which may well correspond to one of these intermediate models.

Found in Europe since the Middle Ages, the recorder is called flûte à bec (“beaked flute”) in French, after its beak-shaped mouthpiece, which directs the player's breath towards a sharp edge: there is no reed here; the sound is produced by the air meeting the edge of the wood. It was also called flûte douce (“sweet flute”); its English name is said to come from the verb “to record”, in its old sense of “to hum”. A bas instrument, that is, a soft one, it lends itself to the refined music of palaces rather than to the open air.

The Renaissance recorder, often made from a single piece of wood, has a wide bore that gives it a round, full sound, especially in the low register. Like the shawms, it comes in a family of several sizes, played together in consort. Its success was considerable: at his death, King Henry VIII of England owned seventy-six of them! In 1535, the Venetian Sylvestro Ganassi devoted the Fontegara to it, the first recorder treatise, in which he urges the player to imitate the human voice and offers ornamentation patterns of rare rhythmic complexity.