A group of conical-bore double-reed aerophones of the Shawm type, unique to the Protestant region of western Switzerland, and in use between about 1750 and 1810. The group is formed of three members (see illustration): a treble, the dessus de musette, often referred to simply as ‘hautbois’; a tenor, the basse de musette (Ger. Musettenbass; the French term was coined by Gustave Chouquet in his 1884 catalogue of the Paris Conservatoire collection); and a bass, known as the basson d'amour, a term coined by the anonymous author (?F.W. Galpin) of the Catalogue of the Crosby Brown Collection, vol.i (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1904), p.148, no.883, due to the instrument's spherical brass bell, analogous to that of the oboe d'amore and other period woodwind instruments.
Documented original extant specimens include 28 tenors and 14 basses, but only five trebles, indicating that the latter were the least frequently used. The dessus and basses de musette have a wide, sharply conical bore and thin walls, usually of maple. None of the six tone holes is doubled and all are of large diameter. Both types are built in three sections and terminate in a wide flaring bell. On all three instruments the lowest hole has a brass key which bears the maker's mark, and the reed fits into a pirouette. The dessus de musette are pitched in C and are about 61 cm in length, similar to an oboe pitched in Cammerton. The basses are pitched an octave below the dessus, and have a long, coiled, brass crook equipped with a pirouette. They measure about 81 cm, with another 45 cm in the crook. Brass keys cover the first, third, fourth and sixth holes. The resulting tone is powerful, but not strident. The bassons d'amour are about 116 cm in length including the bell, are in F, and some examples have two thumb-keys in addition to the low-F key.
Although several makers are represented among the extant instruments (approximately 35 have been identified), the majority were made by a single maker with the mark ‘I.IR’. Chouquet's identification of this as J.-J. Riedlocker is now known to be false, and Staehelin has shown that this was Jean (or Jacques) Jeanneret (fl 1864–86) of La Chaux du Milieu, near Neuchâtel.
The church ensemble, which at its fullest consisted of two trebles, a tenor and a bass, was employed only in the accompaniment of psalms, primarily in the smaller parishes of German-speaking Protestant Switzerland, where wind instruments had recently been readmitted to the service (and were eventually replaced by organs). Textless part-books containing music for psalms survive in several locations, the title page of one example dated 1781, at Gurzelen, referring to the ‘Neue Hobua u[nd] Facot Music’. Often only the tenor and bass part-books are present, the lack of treble parts reflecting the proportion of surviving instruments, and indicating that the basse de musette and basson d'amour were used for instrumental support rather than playing the familiar melody lines.
A possible French origin is suggested by the similarity, primarily in the keywork, of the basse de musette to an instrument depicted in the frontispiece of Pierre Borjon de Scellery's Traité de la musette (Lyons, 1672; see Oboe, fig.3), but also found in contemporary large oboe types.
Grove5 (‘Basse de musette’; L.G. Langwill)
Waterhouse-LangwillI (‘Jeanneret’)
M. Staehelin: ‘Der sogennante Musettenbass’, Jb des Bernischen Historischen Museums in Bern, xlix–l (1969–70), 93–121
MICHAEL FINKELMAN