Alta cappella

An alta cappella or alta musica (Italian), alta musique (French) or just alta was a kind of town wind band found throughout continental Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, which typically consisted of shawms and slide trumpets or sackbuts. Waits were the British equivalent. These were not found anywhere outside of Europe.

History

Alta musique in general refers to the "loud music" of instruments like shawms, sackbuts, trumpets, and drums, in contrast to basse musique, the "soft music" of recorders, viols, fiddles, harps, psalteries, and the like. These ensembles first appeared in Europe in the thirteenth century, taken from the ceremonial loud bands of the Arab World, consisting of small shawms, nakers, and other percussion, together with pairs of straight trumpets functioning as something of a cross between drone and percussion. In Europe, these instruments were sometimes augmented by bagpipes and pipe and tabor. By the fifteenth century, these bands had come mainly to consist of three musicians, two playing shawms and the other a slide trumpet or (later) sackbut, but in the sixteenth century the size gradually increased and the instrumentation became more varied. After about 1500 in Germany, the alta developed into the kind of band that came to be known as Stadtpfeifer (town pipers). Present-day descendants of this tradition are the Catalan cobla bands who play dances called sardanas. The cobla features a modern version of the shawm with the main melody played by the tenor member of the family.