Enter your email address and click subscribe to receive new articles in your email inbox:

Cornetto Master to Perform with Cincinnati's Catacoustic Consort

Mary Ellyn Hutton
Posted: Dec 18, 2009 - 8:02:37 PM in news_2009

BruceDickey2_1.jpg
What sounds like a  trumpet, "very delicately played," a boy soprano and "a little bit of woodwind, maybe flute?"
   It looks like a piece of bent wood (which it is), has finger holes and is very difficult to play.
   There was nothing like it after the turn of the 19th-century except in the occasional town or military band.  
   If you're stumped, the answer is the cornetto (or cornett), and you can find it in paintings played by various beings, winged and otherwise.
   Cincinnati's award-winning early music group Catacoustic Consort will play host to the world's most eminent cornettist, Bruce Dickey, at 7:30 p.m. December 19 at North Presbyterian Church, 4222 Hamilton Ave. in Northside.
cornetto_with_cherub.jpg
cherub playing cornetto
Dickey (author of the above description of the cornetto) joins cornettist Kiri Tollaksen of Ann Arbor, Catacoustic Consort artistic director Analissa Pappano on bass viol and Daniel Swenberg of Highland Park, New Jersey on theorbo (lute) for "A Christmas Fanfare," an evening of Christmas music from 17th-century Italy.
  There will be canzonas, sonatas and motets by the likes of Giuseppe Scarani, Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, Lodovico da Viadana, Niccolo Corradini (not to be confused with the Italian cross country skiing champion), Giovanni Martino Cesare, Girolamo Frescobaldi and a pair of cloistered nuns, Sulpitia Cesis and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.
     The cornetto was king from about 1500-1650, largely because of its resemblance to the human voice (like a high castrato).  Supposedly, sculptor/goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini played the cornetto.
   It was displaced by the violin -- some of the music on Saturday's program was written for both instruments -- and from the end of the 18th-century it was consigned to the dustbin of history until the mid-20th century with the emergence of the early music movement.
320px-Three_cornetts.jpg
cornettos
Much of that interest came from trumpet players, a seeming oddity, since the cornetto is not made of brass, nor does it bear any resemblance to the instruments of the brass family.  Nevertheless, trumpeters are best equipped to play the cornetto because it uses a mouthpiece similar to a trumpet's.  (Still, because the mouthpiece is smaller and made of animal horn, it is by no means easy for a trumpeter, who must produce the sound in a different way on an oddly shaped instrument.)
   How Dickey, a native of South Bend, Indiana, came to play the cornetto is a singular story:
   "I did my trumpet degree at Indiana University and studied musicology there.  I went off to Basel, Switzerland to study recorder with a cornetto in my back pack because I had fooled around with it a little bit at Indiana.  I had no intention of becoming a cornetto player.  Not that anyone in those days did.  In the first semester, I fell in a house where I was living.  It was a stupid thing, playing touch football in the hallway."
   Stuck with a broken wrist, Dickey had his right arm in a cast for two months.  "One day I was just looking at the cornetto hanging on the wall and I thought, hmm, with that curve and the fact that there's no seventh finger hole on the front, maybe I could just manage to play it  Those two months I didn't do anything but fool around with the cornetto propped up on my knee and the cast on a table.  When they took the cast off, suddenly the instrument just felt right in my hand.  It was suddenly easy to hold, which is one of the most difficult things in the first stages of playing the cornetto.  It always feels like it's going to fall on the floor.  It just felt right.  I changed my major to cornetto and things went on from there."
   With his experience playing both trumpet and recorder, Dickey was particularly well endowed to play the cornetto.  "I had the embouchure skills of a trumpeter and the finger and sound skills of the recorder and they came together."
   In 1976 he began teaching cornetto and 17th-century performance practice at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, and in1987 he founded the early music ensemble, Concerto Palatino.  The group, named for an actual cornetto ensemble that performed in Bologna, Italy for 200 years, comprises two cornettists and three sackbuts (baroque trombone).  Dickey has made many recordings with Concerto Palatino and other groups.  His 1991 CD "Quel lascivissimo cornetto" ("That lascivious cornetto," quote attributed to Cellini's father) was the first to feature the cornetto on an entire recording and was awarded France's Diapason d'or. 
   For more on Concerto Palatino and Dickey, visit www.concertopalatino.com.
   Dickey has performed with leading artists of the authentic performance practice movement -- more properly."historically informed" performance practice, since true authenticity is impossible to demonstrate -- including Jordi Savall, Nicolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, Monica Huggett, Gustav Leonhardt and Philippe Herreweghe.    
   In 2000 the Historic Brass Society awarded him the Christopher Monk Award for "his monumental work in cornetto performance, historical performance practice and  musicological scholarship."  In 2007 he was one of 14 musicians to receive a "Taverner Award" from British conductor and musicologist Andrew Parrott for their "significant contributions to musical understanding motivated by neither commerce nor ego."
   Dickey moved to Bologna in 1981 with his wife Candace Smith, a singer who has championed the work of nuns who were composers, to be close to the origins of his adopted instrument and to facilitate continuing research.
   Tickets to the concert are $20, $7 for students, at the door or call (513) 772-3242.  Children 12 and under are free.  For further information, visit www.catacoustic.com