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The Gemshorn: a Reconstruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1972

Horace Fitzpatrick
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Extract

The Gemshorn can be defined as a folk recorder, made from an animal horn, which enjoyed some currency from the latter part of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth. It belongs to that definitively European class of instruments, the end-blown fipple pipes; but it is unique amongst them in having a bore which is a stopped inverted cone. Apart from endearing itself to organists for some four and a half centuries as a useful flute-stop in which its name survives, the Gemshorn made few appearances, whether folk or formal, after its final decline round about 1550.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 99 , 1972 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 The Royal MusicaXDl Association and the Authors

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Footnotes

The lecture was illustrated by the author on instruments of his own construction.

References

1 No. 3436 in the Musical Instrument Museum of the Staatliches Institut fur Musikforschung in Berlin. Another, formerly in the Bach-Haus at Eisenach, has disappeared since Curt Sachs examined it there in 1913.Google Scholar

2 ‘Das Gemshorn’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, i (1918–19), 153–6.Google Scholar

3 The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. Murray, J. A. H., London, 1872, p. 65.Google Scholar

4 Musical Instruments: a Comprehensive Dictionary, New York, 1964, p. 203.Google Scholar

5 The Old French guiate or gaite are cognates of the English word ‘wait’, meaning a town musician, usually a wind player.Google Scholar

6 Histoire générale de la musique, Paris, 1869, p. 26.Google Scholar

7 Enqueteur de musique de la vie Wallone, iv (Liège, 1945), 188.Google Scholar

8 ‘Typen europäischer Kernspaltfloten’, Studia instrumentarum musical popularis, ed. Stockman, E., i (Stockholm, 1969), 43, 57.Google Scholar

9 I am greatly indebted to Dr. J. F. Haltenorth of the Zoological Institute at the University of Munich for his invaluable help on the zoological aspects of this study.Google Scholar

10 Conrad Gesner, Historiae animalium, Zurich, 1533, i. 331–4.Google Scholar

11 Vienna, Staatsarchiv, Oberstjagermeisteramt, Landtafel, Catastrum xlii, 28 October 1628.Google Scholar

12 This set of woodcuts, dating from 1429, saw several publications, with or without accompanying moral texts, during the course of the fifteenth century.Google Scholar

13 British Museum, 1895–9–15–806. Jan Lauts, Carpaccio, London, 1962, No. 144, p. 272.Google Scholar

14 Carpaccio's later drawing of a huntsman with an oliphant (Lauts, op. cit., No. 212) shows clearly the well-defined mouthpiece. Then again the five or more notes of which on Virdung's evidence the Gemshorn was capable would be more appropriate than the oliphant's single note to the music-room setting of the earlier sketch.Google Scholar

15 P. Molmenti and G. Ludwig, The Life and Works of Vittore Carpaccio, London, 1907, No. 230, p. 216.Google Scholar

16 My thanks are due to Mr. J. F. Hills of the Natural History Musuem, and to Dr. Hans Kruuk of the Department of Zoology at Oxford University for their help in this identification, also to Herr Rainer Weber for putting me on the track of this picture.Google Scholar

17 Ottmarus Luscinius, Musurgia, sive praxis musicae, Strasbourg, 1536.Google Scholar

18 I am once again indebted to Dr. Haltenorth for his confirmation on this point.Google Scholar

19 Reproduced in Congrés préhistorique de France, xii (1936), 770–81, Pl. II.Google Scholar

20 Friesland tot de elfde Eeuw, s'Gravenhage, 1951, Pll. XXX/16–17 and XXXI/2–5. I am indebted to Dr. J. V. S. Mcgaw of the Department of Archaeology at Leicester University for this and many other archeological references.Google Scholar

21 See footnote 8.Google Scholar

22 Syntagma musicum, Wolfenbüttel, 1619, ii. 134.Google Scholar

23 Published in Estampies et emus royales, ed. Aubry, Pierre, Paris, 1907.Google Scholar