Songsheet - July Week 3

Hello! This week we have the lovely Sarah Marsh with us who will be discussing the Crumhorn. She’ll also be playing it - better she does it than me, for all our sakes! Over to you Sarah… Hello! I’m Sarah and I play the bassoon and all members of the recorders and other early music instruments. I’m here to talk about the Crumhorn today - basically it looks like an umbrella handle - but it’s not good to shelter from the rain! It was a popular instrument during the Renaissance so it would have been played in Tudor times, around the times of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I - around the 16th-17th centuries. Perhaps you would have seen it in the orchestra pit during Shakespeare plays - it was a very common instrument back then and Henry VIII composed for it as he was quite a musician himself. The Crumhorn would be found in the woodwind section. It’s actually a ‘windcap’ instrument (you don’t see them anymore) and has a double reed within the cap. It’s very similar to the reed you’d get on a bassoon and while you could play it direct off the reed, it’s not easy! So the cap over the reed means you don’t have to have a specialised embouchure that you would need to play other double reed instruments. Within the orchestra, the Crumhorn was an ensemble instrument. During the renaissance, music was much more participatory than it is now. Nowadays we listen to music but back then everyone joined in. The Crumhorn is quite simple to play so you didn’t necessarily require specialised musicians to play it - they’d have been busy playing the lute and other stringed instruments that required more skill. The more specialised woodwind instruments would have been the serpent, the rackett or the rauschpfeife. During the renaissance you wouldn’t have an orchestra in the same sense we know now. There would be groups of anything from three to eight or ten musicians playing dance music or songs. The crumhorn is one of the most simple instruments to play and it doesn’t have a great range - just an octave at a bit. The hardest thing about it is getting used to the tone it makes. It’s tricky not to laugh when you hear it! The Crumhorn has identical fingering to the equivalent recorder - the one in the video has the same fingering as the treble recorder. Crumhorns can be mixed with recorders to bring emphasis to a piece of music - listen to the piece played on the Crumhorn and the treble recorder to hear how different they sound. We hope you agree that the Crumhorn is a fantastic instrument - if you have any comments or questions about it, please leave them below! #SinginHinn #MusicThatSizzles #Crumhorn #UncommonInstruments