Renaissance

˝They trumpeted, blew, whistled and sang so that you could hardly hear yourself speak˝. (˝es trumett, bließ, pfiff und sang, das einer sein aigen wort nit höret”) – these words give the impression of a wind- and vocal ensemble of very dubious quality. Who would guess that this referred to Emperor Charles V’s court musicians, who had been brought in from Burgundy and who constituted the leading professional ensemble in the Western world?
(Sabine Zak, „Musik aus Ehr und Zier”, Neuss 1979, pp.19f.)

 In the 14th and 15th centuries a distinction was made between ˝la haute et basse musique”: the loud and soft music. Instruments such as the recorder, lute. fidel and harp belonged to the second category, while the trombone, bagpipe, pommer and shawm were seen as ˝loud instruments”. These must have played an important part in the court ensemble of Charles V. ˝Loud” in this context denotes not just volume of sound but rather something impressive and spectacular. Here we are dealing with ˝prestigious noise”, which proclaimed and celebrated the power, fame and splendour of the Court. Mention is first made of the ˝Alta Capella” or ˝Bläser-Alta” at the court of Burgundy in aroud 1430, where Johannes Tinctoris explicitly praises their beautiful sound (˝melodissime clangunt”.) This was a dance troupe with accompanying shawms, pommers and trombones. Shawms and pommers, the forerunners of the oboe family, were known as ˝hautbois”, not, as is sometimes said, the ˝high woods” but the ˝loud”, ˝ceremonial” woodwinds. We hear of a bass ˝hautbois” (˝basse de hautbois”) in the 16th century; how could one reconcile this with the translation ˝high woods.

These musicians did not play from printed music; the normal practice was to improvise over a well known dance melody played in the tenor voice.One of the very few notated examples of this kind of improvisation is in the ˝Danza Alta” of  Francisco de la Torre, a singer at the court of Fernando and Isabella of Spain, which is found in the Cancionero de Palacio. In this piece,  the famous ˝basse danse” ˝La Spagna” appears in the tenor and cantus firmus, while the soprano part is given a virtuoso descant. This kind of virtuoso playing must have been common all over Europe, something akin to the improvisations of jazz clarinettists in our own day. It was sometimes even seen as rather disreputable. In his ˝Yconomia” (Paris, C15th) Konrad von Megenberg wrote, ˝Nowadays the loud shawms and trumpets have completely driven out the respectable fidels >from celebrations and feasts, and young girls vie with each other in dancing to the din they make, waving their backsides in a tasteless, strumpet-like fashion, like young hinds.” However, the ˝haute musique” also had an important part to play in ceremonial occasions of the town, the Church and the Court. Goethe describes one of the last appearances of such an ensemble in his autobiography, ˝Dichtung und Wahrheit”: ˝All at once a wondrous music announced as it were the advent of earlier centuries. There were three pipers, of whom one played an old shawm, another a bass, and the third a pommer or hautboy.”
In the 16th century, printed dance music, mostly with four or more voices, became more widespread, and this meant that the improvisatory skills of the ˝Bläser-Alta” were lost.  This was when the so-called ˝ministriles”, ˝piffari” or ˝Stadtpfeifer” came into their own. These were groups of professional musicians working at courts, in cathedrals or in towns. Their duties were various: court and town musicians performed on ceremonial occasions and were also deputed to play from the tops of towers, while in the church the ministriles doubled or even replaced vocal parts in choral music. They were an integral part of church music, especially in Southern Europe, and groups of shawms, pommers, cornetti, trombones and dulcians continued to play an important role in church life well into the 19th century.