Nobody much plays the schreierpfeife anymore. Or the crumhorn or the racket. These and other Renaissance and Baroque musical instruments long ago fell out of favor, replaced by more complicated, sophisticated instru ments that did not have nicknames like "sausage bassoon."
But Lauren Pelon loves the ancient horns and reeds and lutes and lyres. She loves the hurdy-gurdy and the pennywhistle and the cornamuse. The old instruments are "the living roots of music," she says.Pelon will be in southern and central Utah next week to perform and lecture on a tour sponsored by the Utah Humanities Council.
Her Living Roots of Music program will be at Tuacahn in St. George on Monday, July 15, (7:30 p.m.); in Fillmore, at Millard High School, on Wednesday, July 17 (7:30 p.m.); in Torrey at the Daughter of the Utah Pioneers museum on Saturday, July 20, (7 p.m.); and at the Randall L. Jones Theatre in Cedar City on Sunday, July 21, (7 p.m.).
All performances are free.
Pelon started her instrument collection innocently enough with a recorder. She liked baroque music even as a teenager, then progressed to Renaissance music after moving to San Francisco. Over the years she began adding more unusual instruments as she performed with groups such as Banish Misfortune.
Except for a 145-year-old concertina, all of her old instruments are reproductions. That's all that exists now of some of the instruments, such as the schreierpfeife, a wind-cap clarinet-looking thing.
A few instruments can be found in museums. That, for example, is where you would find the racket, a double-reed instrument popular during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Pelon describes it as short and squatty, with a pitch that is extremely low but not quite as annoying as the name implies.
Pelon prefers the gemshorn, a medieval duct flute originally made from the horn of the chamois and later the ox. The gemshorn makes a sweet, mellow sound, Pelon reports. Its downfall, however, was that it could only make nine sounds, none of them sharps and flats.
There are no known authentic specimens in existence, but Pelon does own a reproduction. She also owns a reproduction of a crum-horn, another double reed instrument that was popular in the 16th and early 17th centuries. In a phone interview earlier this week from her home in Red Wing, Minn., Pelon tooted on the thing and produced a sound not unlike the kazoo.
Some people might say that musical instruments have evolved and improved over the centuries. Pelon prefers to think they just changed. She likes the old ones and she also likes the new ones. Her Utah concerts will include songs on the Yamaha EW20 windcontroller.
The concert features a first-century Greek song, a 19th-century ballad, a 12th-century troubadour song, Renaissance dance songs, and some contemporary pieces.