Do You Have a Sagbut?

It's that time of year again - time to start thinking about Early Music Camp! I have gone every year for the last five years, and this year they are offering all sorts of wonderful classes. Monteverdi! Landini! Period tuning methods and modal singing! As our banjo player said, it hardly matters if you get into your first, second, or third choice class because they all sound so fantastic! A number of people in my folk band are Early Music Camp addicts, including the banjo player, the flute player, and one of the fiddlers... and me, of course. So I asked Hardingfele if she would like to go to Early Music Camp, and she said there was only one class that interested her: sackbut techniques.

If you know anything about early music - and who doesn't, right? - then you know that the sackbut (or its even more entertaining alternate spelling, "sagbut") is just an old-fashioned trombone. If you read this blog regularly, then you know that Hardingfele plays the fiddle and the hardanger fiddle. And if you know anything about playing musical instruments, then you know that playing string instruments is totally different than playing brass instruments. It's like languages: if you know one in a family (say, Romance) then you can more quickly learn another one, so Spanish helps with Italian and violin helps with mandolin. Going from the violin to the sackbut is like learning Spanish and then Turkish; you might have a slight advantage in having learned a foreign language, but none of the vocabulary or syntax will be the same.

When I asked Hardingfele why she wanted to make such a dramatic switch in instrumentation, she admitted that she had just been enamored of the way the word sounds. It is, I will grant you, a very funny word. Supposedly it comes from the Old French for push-pull, so it could have been called a pushme-pullyou. Then again, the creature from the Dr. Doolittle books which looks like a llama with a head on each end might equally be called a sackbut!

The Alternate Sackbut (or Sagbut)

(photo credit: Palm Tree Fan

terrible photo editing credit: Famous Hat)

Famous Hat