It enjoyed particular fame at the turn of the 17th century. At that time, cornettists were so sought after that even Claudio Monteverdi, the famous composer at San Marco in Venice, was complaining that some of them earned more money than he did!
The cornett—cornetto in Italian, cornet in French, zink in German—is a woodwind instrument. It can be built using various types of wood—some cornetts used to be made of ivory.
Many are covered with a sheet of parchment paper or leather. Cornetts often have a slightly curved shape, probably for symbolic reasons as well as for sound direction. With seven holes, the cornett looks somewhat like a flute, but it is part of the brass section because, like all the instruments in that family, it has a mouthpiece in which the player vibrates their lips. The mouthpiece is called bouquin in French, from the Italian bocca, meaning “mouth” (bouche in modern French).
It is a chromatic instrument, which means it can play all the notes used in Western music. The most common cornett is the one matching the range of the human soprano voice, but there also are piccolo cornetts (called cornettino), as well as, alto, tenor and bass ones.
Most organs have a cornett stop, whose sharp and sweet sound tries to emulate its namesake’s. In the beginning of the 17th century, the organ of Notre Dame in Paris even had a clavier de boucquin (bouquin keyboard), in reference to the cornett’s mouthpiece.
