the.com/sackbut
the medieval trombone with a name like a Renaissance insult and a Saturday-morning-cartoon sound
means A Renaissance-era brass instrument, an early form of the trombone, played with a telescoping slide to change pitch.
from From the French 'saqueboute,' likely combining 'saquer' (to pull) and 'bouter' (to push or thrust) — a tidy description of the slide's tug-and-shove. The English ear mangled it into 'sackbut,' which sounds far ruder than the gentle pull-push it actually names. The instrument was a fixture of courtly and church music from the 15th century onward, and the word even turns up in the King James Bible (in Daniel), where it's a translation of an Aramaic instrument name — meaning the biblical 'sackbut' is almost certainly a mistranslation, since the original was probably a stringed instrument entirely.
- name origin
- From French meaning push-pull, not anything ruder
- trombone ancestor
- Direct precursor to the modern trombone
- sliding mechanism
- First brass with a true telescoping slide
- sacred duty
- Played in churches and royal courts for centuries
- bible cameo
- Mistranslated into the King James Old Testament
henry viii's sackbut — surviving instrument at the royal college of music, london, from 16th century england
basel sackbut collection — museum of ancient glass holds multiple renaissance sackbuts from swiss collections