From Renaissance to Baroque

Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century

Jonathan Wainwright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351566254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Historians of instruments and instrumental music have long recognised that there was a period of profound change in the seventeenth century, when the consorts or families of instruments developed during the Renaissance were replaced by the new models of the Baroque period. Yet the process is still poorly understood, in part because each instrument has traditionally been considered in isolation, and changes in design have rarely been related to changes in the way instruments were used, or what they played. The essays in this book are by distinguished international authors that include specialists in particular instruments together with those interested in such topics as the early history of the orchestra, iconography, pitch and continuo practice. The book will appeal to instrument makers and academics who have an interest in achieving a better understanding of the process of change in the seventeenth century, but the book also raises questions that any historically aware performer ought to be asking about the performance of Baroque music. What sorts of instruments should be used? At what pitch? In which temperament? In what numbers and/or combinations? For this reason, the book will be invaluable to performers, academics, instrument makers and anyone interested in the fascinating period of change from the 'Renaissance' to the 'Baroque'.

Chapter One

Baptiste’s Hautbois: The Metamorphosis from Shawm to Hautboy in France, 1620–1670

Bruce Haynes¹

Introduction

In 1620, Michael Praetorius was still illustrating a traditional Discant Schalmeye, or treble shawm, of the type that had been perfected and maintained without basic change all over Europe for centuries (Illustration 1.1; for Illustrations see pp. 39-46).² But a half-century later, an instrument had materialized that showed, apparently for the first time, the physical attributes we now associate with the hautboy.³ It appeared in an engraving by Blanchet that served as the frontispiece to Pierre Borjon de Scellery’s book on the musette (1672) (Illustration 1.2).⁴ With these dates as reference points, we can presume that the new hautboy came into existence some time between the appearance of Praetorius’s and Borjon’s books, in the period between 1620 and 1670. This essay will attempt to outline that development.

Experiments with the Pirouette and Reed

Just 15 years after the appearance of Praetorius’s book, evidence of a slow evolution towards the hautboy began appearing. Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonicorum instrumentorum of 1635, shows a picture of a treble shawm whose reed is without the usual pirouette (Illustration 1.3).⁵ The significance of this is that it implies a change in the contact between the player and the reed. The pirouette was a piece of turned wood that projected beyond the end of the shawm and surrounded the lower part of the reed. Its upper surface was used to support the lips.⁶ If a player used a pirouette, he was not obliged to control the reed completely with his teeth and lips; without it, the embouchure took full responsibility.⁷ An instrument that used an independent embouchure could play higher and offer more control of dynamic and tonal nuance.

At about the time Mersenne’s book appeared, Pierre Trichet mentioned that the hautbois de Poitou was sometimes played ‘en mettant l’anche dans la bouche’ (by putting the reed in the mouth, presumably without the pirouette).⁸ Also, where Praetorius gave his shawm a range of only an octave and a sixth, Mersenne’s and Trichet’s shawms of the 1630s or 40s went up two octaves, like the first hautboys; this extension upward implied a certain degree of embouchure control, with or without pirouette.

The Protomorphic Hautboy

Early German and English sources tell us that the hautboy originated in France. This is indicated also by the instrument’s name in all European languages; it seems to have been taken over directly or transliterated from the French hautbois (pronounced obwe). But finding a date for the appearance of the definitive hautboy is complicated by the fact that in France shawms and hautboys had the same name. Unlike in other countries, the hautboy developed step by step in France and was not suddenly introduced as a foreign import. A new name was not therefore necessary and both shawms and hautboys were called hautbois.

Clues to dating the hautboy’s development can be found in the works of Jean-Baptiste Lully who became Surintendant de la musique in France in 1661. Michel de La Barre suggested that Lully (nicknamed ‘Baptiste’) was the godfather of the new hautboy:

... his promotion meant the downfall of all the old instruments [the musette, the hautbois, the bagpipe, the cornett, the cromóme, and the sackbut] except the hautbois, thanks to the Philidors and Hotteterres, who spoiled so much wood and played so much music that they finally succeeded in rendering it usable in ensembles. From that time on, musettes were left to shepherds, and violins, recorders, theorbos, and viols took their place, for the transverse flute did not arrive until later.⁹

We can situate this date more precisely by using further information that La Barre supplied on the traverso:

Philbert was the first to play it in France, and almost immediately afterwards, Descoteaux. The instrument was a great success with the King, and indeed everyone at court, and His Majesty caused two new positions to be created in the [ensemble called] Musettes de Poitou and conferred them on Philbert and Descoteaux...

Court documents record that Philippe Rebillé dit Philbert and René Pignon dit Descoteaux were both part of the Hautbois et musettes de Poitou by 1667.¹⁰ If La Barre’s information is accurate, the traverso would have appeared in the mid-1660s.¹¹ And since La Barre put the traverso’s arrival later than that of the hautboy, some kind of usable hautboy must have predated the mid-1660s. It has long been thought that such an instrument was first heard in Lully’s ballet L ‘Amour malade of 1657.¹²

La Barre wrote that the Philidors and Hotteterres eventually succeeded in rendering the hautbois ‘propre pour les Concerts’, suitable for ensembles. What kind of ensembles would he have meant? Shawms had traditionally been consort instruments, played as an independent family. Strings, like the Grande bande at the French court, also played as a closed consort. But it can be argued that the birth of the ‘orchestra’ was the moment when the two families, the shawms and the strings, began to be played in combination instead of in discrete groups.¹³

Terminology may be relevant to this question. The French word concert as used by La Barre might be analogous to the English ‘consort’ of the early seventeenth century, which meant specifically mixed ensembles.¹⁴ The Italian word concerto might also have had this meaning at the time. In that case, a piece in the Philidor Collection written for a grand bal entitled ‘Concert à Louis XIII par les 24 Violions et les 12 Grand hautbois... 1627’¹⁵ might also signify that the two groups played together. However, there are indications that, in these dances, the violins and shawms played in alternation rather than together: the clef usage associated with the two groups is consistently different, and the writing for strings is noticeably denser and more complex.¹⁶ Further research on the way these words were used in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century might yield interesting results. A certain amount of mixing and matching may have occurred among the Douze grand hautbois by the sixteenth century, as the ensemble’s official title was Douze joueurs de violon, hautbois, saqueboutes et cornets. Benoit suggests that it was once divided into two groups of six players each, playing exclusively winds or strings. The strings would have disappeared by 1560.¹⁷ This theory may be influenced by a twentieth-century assumption of instrument specialization, and it is quite possible that in the seventeenth century some or all of the members of the Douze grand hautbois played both shawms and violins. There is considerable documentation of players switching between wind and string instruments until well into the eighteenth century. Many German courts maintained bands of doublers of this kind.¹⁸

Lully began using a new form of hautbois in his ensemble, the Petite bande, in about 1657, but the instruments did not yet have the outward appearance of the hautboy in Blanchet’s engraving of 1672 (Illustration 1.2). These new hautbois were transitional, and we know of them through the depictions made by Charles Le Brun, painter to the king and director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Le Brun included them in the designs of two tapestries for the royal Gobelin workshops in 1664, ‘L’air’ from the series Les Elémens and ‘Le Printemps ou Versailles’ from the series Les Saisons. The king may have seen these designs, as they were executed during the time he was regularly visiting Le Brun’s studio.

Le Brun used the same border for both the tapestries, and they consist of ‘trophies’ of many kinds of contemporary wind instruments, including nine hautbois of two different types. The clearest surviving version is the tapestry known as ‘L’air’ or the ‘Arazzo Gobelin’; it is the first of several duplicates (tentures) based on the same model (Illustrations 1.4 and 1.5).’¹⁹ Some of the instruments are familiar, like the trumpets, drums, musettes, and recorders. The depictions are detailed and, to judge from the instruments already known, reasonably accurate.²⁰

There are two distinct forms of hautbois in the border. One model is black, with a relatively long bell; the other is of a light-coloured wood -probably box - with a short bell. They correspond to the two types of hautbois that were in standard use in France by at least the 1630s,²¹ as described by Mersenne in his chapter on the grands hautbois (shawms):

Il faut remarquer qu’il y a deux sortes de Haut-b...