Musette de cour

The musette de cour or baroque musette is a musical instrument of the bagpipe family. Visually, the musette is characterised by the short, cylindrical shuttle-drone and the two chalumeaux. Both the chanters and the drones have a cylindrical bore and use a double reed, giving a quiet tone similar to the oboe. The instrument is blown by a bellows.

The qualification "de cour" does not appear in the name for the instrument in original musical scores; title-pages usually refer to it simply as a musette, allowing occasional confusion with the piccolo oboe, also known as the (oboe) musette.

First appearing in France, at the very end of the sixteenth century, the musette was refined over the next hundred years by a number of instrument-making families. The best-known contributions came from the Hotteterre family: Martin Hotteterre added a second chanter, the petit chalumeau, extending the instrument's range by six semitones. The bourdon, originally designed to accompany essentially modal music, became simpler as the chalumeaux became more complicated. The final form of the musette is fully chromatic, with a range of an octave and half starting from F above middle C; the bourdon provides drones for C, D and G.

The qualification de cour refers to the instrument's connection with the French court and aristocracy of the early seventeenth century. "Exotic" - in the sense of imported or out of place - elements were fashionable, resulting in the appearance of traditional instruments such as bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy and galoubet in compositions for professionals and amateurs alike. The musette may well have benefited from being a bellows-blown instrument, too; it was generally considered unseemly for women to play any mouth-blown instrument. Borjon de Scellery, however, does explicitly identify grimacing and pulling faces as a habit of ill-trained musette-players.

At the height of its popularity, the musette (like the hurdy-gurdy) was used not just for chamber-music but also in larger-scale compositions such as operas, where it was associated with shepherds, peasants and other pastoral elements. After the French Revolution, the musette seems to have fallen rapidly out of favour while simpler forms of bagpipe remained popular as folk-instruments. As a result, musicologists examining French baroque music at the end of the 19th century found it difficult to imagine that what they took to be the same as a simple folk bagpipe could ever have had a place in highly sophisticated music for the court.

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