Plate XXXIX. — Dolciano. Oboe. Bassoon. — Oboe da Caccia. Basset Horn
The shawm of the English Bible is the schalmey, the treble instrument of the old Pommer or Bombardo family and the origin of the modern oboe. The oboe da caccia, derived from the alto pommer or Bombardo piccolo of the sixteenth century, has gone out of use, the Italian corno inglese (French cor anglais) having taken its place. There being some confusion about the description by different writers of the oboe da caccia and oboe d’amore, I fall back upon Dr. W.H. Stone’s authoritative definition that the oboe da caccia is a bassoon raised a fourth in pitch, while the oboe d’amore is an oboe lowered a fifth. The bassoon, the centre figure in the Plate, has been regarded as a development of the bass pommer or Bombardone, and the transformation has been generally attributed to a canon of Ferrara named Afranio, a native of Pavia. This question has now been definitively settled by Count L.F. Valdrighi, the librarian of the Biblioteca Estense at Modena. He has proved (Musurgiana, No. 5, “Il Phagotus d’Afranio”), that Afranio’s invention, ante 1539, was of the nature of a corna musa (cornemuse or bagpipe), the bag being most likely combined with soft bass melody pipes, called from their quality of tone “Dolcisuoni,” whence the dolcino bass of church organs. This invention was improved by Giambattista Ravilio, also of Ferrara, and thirty years later was perfected by Sigismund Scheltzer of Nuremberg, who, rejecting the cornemuse bag, united the two tubes into the “fagotto,” so named from the fascine of beech (fagus), or fagots. The fagotto is the same as our bassoon. This clearing up of a disputed invention has been discovered in a very unlikely place—in an Introduction to the Chaldee language, published in 1539, written by the nephew of Afranio, Teseo-Ambrogio Albonesio, Professor of Chaldee and Syriac at the University of Bologna.
The dolciano, to the extreme left of the Plate, will be thus seen to owe the suggestion of its name to the original bassoon. But this instrument has a clarinet or beating reed, not the double reed of the oboe and bassoon. I state this fact upon the high authority of Mr. Henry Lazarus, the clarinet-player, who names it “tenoroon,” but Dr. Stone has accepted this name as a synonym of the oboe da caccia, and calls this instrument with a clarinet reed, “dolciano.” Mr. Lazarus, when in the Band of the Royal Military Asylum, played upon such an instrument, as he informs me, made by Garrett of Westminster, at a date that must have preceded Sax’s invention, which combined the conical tube and clarinet reed in the Saxophone. The basset horn, or corno di bassetto, to the extreme right of the Plate, is the alto clarinet, a fifth lower in pitch than the clarinet in C. It is said to have been invented at Passau in Bavaria in 1770, but the name of the inventor is not recorded. It was improved by Lotz of Presburg in 1782, and again by Iwan Müller in 1812. Mozart wrote two parts for basset horns in his famous Requiem. The relative positions in the Plate of the Oboe and Oboe da Caccia are indicated above.