On the Crumhorn

The crumhorn is a musical instrument which to some degree recalls Antiquity but which is not so much in the fashion in France as in Germany and England, where it is made and employed more widely. It is somewhat similar to the crosier carried by our prelates. That is why the Latin name lituus is most appropriate, and the French name [tournebout] even more so. For it may be said with propriety that it is called tournebout because its end [bout] is turned [tourné] or hooked, not because the end must be turned to bring it to the mouth in order to play it; those who do so find it so sweet and pleasant that they turn it frequently.

We find that the ancient Romans had two kinds of lituus, the augural and the military. But we may now make three kinds by adding the crumhorn, which is very similar to them in shape as it is hooked and serves to express various sounds, like the military lituus but in a quite different way…

We may note this difference: the crumhorn has several holes and is not made of brass like the lituus…

Who has ever seen one of our trompettes bâtardes or one of our military bugles resembling a crosier, or hooked, however slightly? It is quite true that they are sometimes coiled, yet one cannot apply to them the Latin epithet aduncus or incurvus [“curved”], as one can to the lituus… I was quite amazed by the great size of that mentioned by Gesner (in descrip. mont., p. 52), which he calls lituus alpinus and which he says was almost eleven feet long and composed of two pieces of hollow wood, slightly curved, bound and fitted very closely together with willow wands from one end to the other. In Loches, in Touraine, there is an apothecary named Voisin who, curiously enough, has preserved an almost similar instrument, as I have been informed, the mouthpiece of which, together with the bell, somewhat resembles the trumpet. Indeed, among the oddities in my study I have a little wooden alpine trumpet which is covered with several layers of bark which envelope it but it is not two feet long.