Instrument Zoo: Cornetto

One of my favorite instruments in the world is the cornetto. The duck-billed platypus of the early music world, the cornetto is half woodwind, half brass. Fingerings of a woodwind with the mouthpiece like a brass instrument. Click here to check out the wiki page. The cornetto player can create the most hauntingly beautiful sounds imaginable. However, the path to this beauty is a steep one, up a mountain and through the woods without a trail kind of steep. The sounds I created during my brief stint with the cornetto resembled more a beginning trumpet player, on a bad day.

When I first heard the sounds of a cornetto, I was immediately intrigued. What kind of instrument sounds like buttery brass? At that point in my early music career, I had only played bass double reeds, and I was just venturing out into the world of higher double reeds, recorders, bagpipes, etc. I was totally game to try everything, I was hooked, trying to find my next early music fix. However, the cornetto with the embouchure of a brass instrument, made me nervous. However, the beauty of the sound still beckoned to me. So several years later, I was a little more comfortable with sounding like crap on any given instrument, and I was able to borrow a cornetto. So I made the leap.

Well, this time, it looked like I bit off more than I can chew. I started out on a few minutes a day, buzzing the mouthpiece, trying to figure out for the first time in my life what a brass embouchure was exactly. The mouthpiece of the cornetto is particularly tiny, making the sound production even more tenuous than a modern brass instrument. I started to slowly figure out how to make a proper sound, but it was slow going. Two steps forward, one step back. I started to realize how much practice it was going to take to make even a decent sound. I already double on many different instruments, and adding yet another embouchure to practice I realized was more than what I could do. Sadly, I admitted defeat.

So, now I leave the cornetto playing to the pros, and try to be happy with just be an appreciator of the cornetto. Recently I had the pleasure of playing in a gig where the cornetto players, three of them, were standing right behind me in our performance. What an amazing sound, and I was able to enjoy bathing in their buttery sound. Here in Europe, cornetto is also a certain kind of ice cream cone, and one of the players had managed to find a tiny cornetto ice cream cone pin, and had attached it to the lapel of his suit. Perfect. I will leave you now with one of my favorite pieces of all time, which of course features the dulcet tones of a great cornetto player.

It's all about the Bass

A single musical voice, the most simple of concepts. A single voice can carry the weight of the world, lull a child to sleep, pierce the soul. There is something about one musical voice that draws us inward, transports us to a different place, a different era, a different level of existence. Composers who choose to write for one voice have their work cut out for them. In my lifetime I have heard the most subliminal and the most banal sounds from this genre.

I was talking to a friend recently and we discussed Bach’s solo violin music. I realized that it had been a long time since I had heard any of the 6 solo sonatas and partitas. This was an error that I quickly remedied, finding an excellent and complete recording by the baroque violinist John Holloway. Deciding on a single recording of the violin sonatas and partitas can be a daunting task, as there is a wealth of treasures within the Bach recording scene. I prefer Bach on baroque strings and baroque mentality, so that cuts through the clatter a little bit and makes the choice slightly less daunting. I am happy with my choice, it is an interesting, introspective recording. Do not listen to this recording if you prefer the overdoness and excessive vibrato that some modern players prescribe to when playing Bach, you will not find this style here. 

In writing for solo violin, Bach likely drew inspiration from several composers. Westhof, Biber, and later Vilsmar and Pisendel all wrote significant pieces of work for solo violin around the time Bach was composing his music. Recently I rediscovered Biber’s (the original Biber, not the current pop star) solo passacaglia ca. 1676, definitely worth several listens. Solo music was not regulated to violin alone, many other baroque composers wrote solo music for other instruments, including Telemann.

When I was a freshman at Indiana University, one of the first things my teacher and I worked on were the Telemann fantasies for solo flute. This work was on modern bassoon, but that did not stop my amazing teacher, Kim Walker, from giving me what I consider my first baroque lessons. Part of my work was to separate the bass line from the solo line. This work was not only interesting musically, but also intellectually. This work also laid a wonderful foundation for my later work in baroque music.

If one wants to study a piece of baroque music, whether you have an old or new instrument in hand, one must always begin with the base line. Whether it is a solo piece, or there is accompaniment, the bass is always the place to begin, even when the bass line is not a bass line. The play between solo and bass is where the magic happens. Composers during this era spent countless hours working out exercises between these two voices, the best composers displaying the greatest ability to think creatively between these two pillars, and usually the most work. The next time a piece of music by one of the great Dead White European Males (of the powered wig variety) shows up on your music stand, make sure you have all the parts in front of you, start taking note, and then you can begin to truly appreciate the masters.