[Trombone-l] so-called Sackbuts Was: Contra question

[Ray Horton]

Actually, the Finke bass and alto we had played pretty decently. One of 
the tenors was fair, also.   It was possible to get a fairly 
characteristic sound on them - moreso soft than loud, but most of what 
we did was with singers, so that was OK with them.  The tenor with the F 
attachment was bad, and taking the valve off helped it only marginally. 


We did the two Schütz: Symphoniae Sacrae ("Fili Mi, Absalom" and 
"Attendite ...") on a graduate recital I did.  We spent quite a bit of 
time on the instruments, and rendered a performance that was quite lovely.


I guess we had never had the luxury of playing on good instruments, so 
we didn't know these weren't supposed to sound that good, or something 
like that. 


Raymond Horton

//

 thetubameister at roadrunner.com wrote:
> All of which would explain why the Finke and Alexander "sackbutts" I've played from that erra were... well... garbage.
>
> J.c.
>
> ---- Howard Weiner <h.weiner at online.de> wrote: 
>   
>> At 11:21 22.05.2009 -0400, Ray Horton wrote:
>>     
>>> The Eb/D sackbut I played in college I mentioned earlier was made by
>>> Finke in the early 60s, I believe.  The quartet of sackbuts that U. of
>>> Louisville bought was early in the historical instruments movement and
>>> not as historically correct as some later instruments would be.  (One of
>>> the tenors had an F-attachment!
>>>       
>> Initially, the Finke "sackbuts" had nothing to do with the historical 
>> instrument movement. They were actually made for the German 
>> Posaunenchor movement. After WWII a fellow by the name of Wilhelm 
>> Ehmann ( a name surely familiar to a number of you) became one of the 
>> leading figures in the Posaunenchor movement, and his shtick was the 
>> use of narrow-bore trombones and trumpets. At his proding, several 
>> German instrument makers started producing such instruments, the 
>> trombones supposedly modeled after historical originals (one of which 
>> was an alto trombone bell section with a tenor trombone slide -- but 
>> that's another story). The Finke, Monke, or whatever trombones were 
>> hardly accurate replicas of the originals and lousy instruments in 
>> all respects; and the (valve) trumpets were apparently even worse. 
>> Ehmann's small-bore idea was eventually abandoned by the trombone 
>> choirs because it just didn't make it. However, when the early music 
>> movement started getting to the repertoire calling for trombones, 
>> these were the only instruments on market that came close to filling 
>> the bill. So in the makers' catalogues these instruments suddenly 
>> appeared and have remained as "sackbuts."
>>
>> Howard
>>
>>
>> --
>> Howard Weiner
>> h.weiner at online.de
>> http://howard-weiner.de/
>>
>> Tosca jumped to a conclusion.  
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-l at samford.edu
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>>     
>
>
>