Before leaving the double reed wind instruments, a few words should be said of a family of instruments in the sixteenth century as important as the schalmeys, pommers, and bombards, but long since extinct.  This was the cromorne, a wooden instrument with cylindrical column of air; the name is considered to remain in the cremona stop of the organ.  The lower end is turned up like a shepherd’s crook reversed, from whence the French name “tournebout.”  Cromorne is the German “krummhorn;” there is no English equivalent known.

The tone, as in all the reed instruments of the period, was strong and often bleating.  The double reed was inclosed in a pirouette, or cup, and the keys of the tenor or bass, just the same as with similar flutes and bombards, were hidden by a barrel-shaped cover, pierced with small openings, apparently intended to modify the too searching tone as well as to protect the touch pieces which moved the keys.  The compass was limited to fundamental notes, and from the cylindrical tube and reed was an octave lower in pitch than the length would show.  In all these instruments provision was made in the holes and keys for transposition of the hands according to the player’s habit of placing the right or left hand above the other.  The unused hole was stopped with wax.  There is a fine and complete set of four cromornes in the museum of the Conservatoire at Brussels.

We must also place among double-reed instruments the various bagpipes, cornemuses, and musettes, which are shawm or oboe instruments with reservoirs of air, and furnished with drones inclosing single reeds.  I shall have more to say about the drone in the third lecture.  In restricting our attention to the Highland bagpipe, with which we are more or less familiar, it is surprising to find the peculiar scale of the chaunter, or finger pipe, in an old Arabic scale, still prevailing in Syria and Egypt.  Dr. A.J.  Ellis’ lecture on “The Musical Scales of Various Nations,” read before the Society of Arts, and printed in the Journal of the Society, March 27, 1885, No. 1688, vol. xxxiii., and in an appendix, October 30, 1885, in the same volume, should be consulted by any one who wishes to know more about this curious similarity.

We have now arrived at the clarinet.  Although embodying a very ancient principle—­the “squeaker” reed which our little children still make, and continued in the Egyptian arghool—­the clarinet is the most recent member of the wood wind band.  The reed initiating the tone by the player’s breath is a broad, single, striking or beating reed, so called because the vibrating tongue touches the edges of the body of the cutting or framing.  A cylindrical pipe, as that of the clarinet, drops, approximately, an octave in pitch when the column of air it contains is set up in vibration by such a reed, because the reed virtually closes the pipe at the end where it is inserted, and like a stopped organ pipe sets up a node of maximum condensation or rarefaction at that end.  This peculiarity interferes with the resonance of the even-numbered partials of the harmonic scale, and permits only the odd-numbered partials, 1, 3, 5, and so on, to sound.  The first harmonic, as we find in the clarinet, is therefore the third partial, or twelfth of the fundamental note, and not the octave, as in the oboe and flute.