On the Sackbut or Harmonic Trumpet

The publisher Minkoff in Geneva has produced a very large number of reprints of historical works of great value, access to which had previously been available only to scholars familiar with archive and library searches.

Apart from the better known musical works on brass instruments, Minkoff republished in 1978 the “Traité des Instruments de Musique” (“Treatise on musical instruments”) written around 1640 by Pierre Trichet which had been published in 1957 with an introduction and notes by François Lesure (212 pages, in French).

This treatise, as Mr. Lesure explains superbly in his introduction, has been in the library at the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève since 1753. [...] It has remained hitherto little used by musicologists and almost ignored by organologists. The manuscript, running to 151 folios, is autographed.

The work, contemporary with and complementary to that of Mersenne¹, supplies much new information on the brass and related instruments of the time and on the use which was made of them then.

Lesure says: Reading his “Treatise”, we have a picture of Trichet as the opposite of the pedantic humanist. He has no illusions about “the extent of his ability” (the preface) or the “capacity” of his mind (a letter to Mersenne). Between Mersenne and Trichet is the gulf which separates the great encyclopaedist in cahoots with the whole world of learning from the honest provincial scholar to whom many discoveries remain unknown. Sometimes, however, his basic good sense makes his evidence more useful to the historian than that of Mersenne.

For brass and the related instruments we would like to point out chapters 12 (“On the cornett and serpent”), 13 (“On hunting horns and other similar instruments”), 16 (“On the lituus” [which Trichet calls in French tornebout]), 17 (“On trumpets”) and 18 (“On the sackbut or harmonic trumpet”). We thought it would be interesting to reproduce these various chapters in forthcoming issues of BRASS BULLETIN, starting here with the sackbut. jpm