A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TUTOR FOR THE HAUTBOY

Abstract

INSTRUCTION books for individual wind instruments, as distinct from descriptions and tablatures appearing in encyclopedic treatises on the art and science of music, are comparatively rare before the eighteenth century. If we except Borjon's ' Traite de la musette' (1672), practically the only instruments which received this attention were the recorder and flageolet. The few tutors for these instruments are all well known1, and in view of the present-day interest in recorder music, have all been worked upon. A printed tutor implies an amateur clientele; the professional musician learned his craft by a species of apprenticeship, a direct handing on of tradition by word of mouth and personal lessons from a master. Among the new wind instruments which rose to the forefront in the second half of the seventeenth century none surpassed the hautboy, or oboe, in the esteem of musicians. The popularity of the German or transverse flute notwithstanding, it was to the hautboy as often as not that serious composers turned when they required a soprano wind soloist or a strengthened ripieno line. This is not surprising, for the hautboy set a new standard of musical character in a wind instrument; it had both weight and flexibility of tone in the true soprano range, it could be freely handled in a number of related major and minor tonalities, and above all it was representative of the new subjective and individual style which was slowly permeating instrumental music. The instrument originated in France about I66o, and there are signs that it had reached England by I674.2 Thereafter it went to ground , serving a casual military and civic apprenticeship which is hard to trace until it emerged, fully fledged, in the later works of Henry Purcell. The tutor here described owes its discovery to Dr. Ernst H. Meyer, and to the fact that, in a recent book, he took the trouble to note