The Sackbut, Its Evolution and History

Extract

That the Sackbut was the predecessor and counterpart of the Slide Trombone of the present day is a matter of common knowledge, but, when we come to unravel the origin of the name, we are landed at once into the region of wild conjecture. Some writers have wisely passed the subject over in silence; others have propounded solutions more plausible than probable. Nares, for instance, in his Glossary (1822), writes: —“The modern Sackbut is a complicated instrument with sliding tubes answering the purpose of stops. Sackbut is corrupted from Sambuca, used in Latin for the same instrument (see ‘Coles’ Dictionary ‘).” Of this mistaken identification we shall speak presently. Kastner suggests a French etymology for the word, viz. : “saccades bouter,” to give little jerks, alluding to the movement of the slide. One of our latest dictionaries has again returned to a French derivation, giving the O.F. “saquier,” to pull, and “boter,” to push, as the source of “Saqueboute,” the French form of the word. But those writers seem to be nearer the truth who look for its origin in Spain, where the name, under the form Sacabuche, first appears. The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1848) so traces it, but gives a ludicrous, yet very generally accepted, explanation of its meaning. Sackbut is from “Sacar del buche,” “because they who use this instrument draw up their breath with great force, and blow with all their might.” Skeat (Etymological Dictionary, 1890) adopts the same derivation, explaining it literally as “that which exhausts the chest.” We pass by the suggested derivations from the Latin “Sacca-buccis” (chubby-cheeked), or that sac is “a bag” and bouche is “the mouth,” as due to the contortions of inexperienced players; but the following may perhaps recommend itself as a legitimate interpretation of the word. As several recent writers have reminded us, the word Sacabuche is also the name of a form of pump, the first half of the word being evidently derived from Sacar, “to draw out “; but while others have derived the rest of the word either from “buche,” the chest or maw, or from Boccine, a corrupted form of the Latin Buccina (neither of which meanings are applicable to the pump, which is apparently the older appellation), I would suggest that “buche” is identical with “bucha,” the Spanish form of the Latin “buxus,” used in the sense of a tube or pipe originally of boxwood, but even in classical days employed without reference to its material. This view is confirmed by the fact that in Portuguese the word is “Sacabuxa,” and the English equivalent would be “draw-tube” or “draw-pipe,” a meaning which also will apply to a pump, the body of which was often made of boxwood. The application of the word to the musical instrument first appears in Spain in the fourteenth century possibly as a nickname. At the end of that century we find it in France, but under the form “Saquebute,” a change due either to linguistic action or by confusion with a very similar word—“Saqueboute”—already in use as the name of “a lance armed with an iron crook, and employed for pulling a knight off his horse in an encounter.”∗ The word appears in England towards the end of the fifteenth century,” when it is written” Shakbusshe,” more in accordance with the Spanish pronunciation, therefore, than the French; early in the following century it takes the form Saykebud, Sacbut, or Sagbut.’ In Belgium the French form is used; in Germany and Italy the word is unknown.