Cornamuse

What it means

The cornamuse is a woodwind instrument of the Renaissance with a double reed that lies hidden in a wind cap. The player blows into the cap without touching the reed with the lips; as a result it always vibrates the same way and the tone can hardly be changed in volume. The bore is cylindrical, the end of the tube closed or only partly open, from which a soft, muted, almost humming sound arises. It is built in families of different sizes, as is usual for Renaissance instruments.

Musical use

As an instrument with a wind cap, the cornamuse belongs to the same group as the crumhorn but differs from it in its straight shape and its still more restrained sound. In the music of the sixteenth century, such instruments were preferably used in a closed consort, that is, several sizes together, so that a unified, closed sound of the texture arises. Their range is narrowly limited, because wind-cap instruments cannot be overblown; the writing takes this into account. Contemporary descriptions are brief, and surviving original instruments are rare, which is why attributions and descriptions of the sound are not uniform in scholarship.

Performance practice

Watch for even, calm air pressure: because the lips do not control the reed, breath alone decides response and intonation, and even slight fluctuations are audible. Articulation therefore arises almost exclusively through the tongue and the fingers. Since the dynamics are practically fixed, you shape phrases through tempo, articulation, and changes of scoring. Wet the reed before playing and let the cap dry open afterwards. In an ensemble with other early instruments, the pitch is to be settled beforehand, since historical instruments are tuned differently.

Bear in mind that wind-cap instruments require shared breath planning in the ensemble: because individual voices cannot recede dynamically, phrase boundaries arise through common stopping. Agree breathing places and keep to them. Check the reeds regularly, since they dry less well in the cap and weaken faster. In a mixed ensemble with strings and plucked instruments, balance is easily established because the volume is fixed — here the size of the forces decides, not the manner of playing.