Racketts

The racketts are very particular instruments with a short temporal development due to their limitations. They consist of a cylinder containing a tube coiled around itself several times, with holes for notes drilled into it. At the beginning of the tube, sound is produced by a double reed in contact with the player’s lips. These instruments have a low sound power and can be played in families for the repertoire of dance collections printed in the 16th and 17th centuries. In Michael Praetorius’s treatise (Syntagma Musicum II, 1619), a family of these racketts is depicted.

Racketts have an extremely low pitch due to the number of coils inside them, to the point that the bass rackett, despite being only about 35 cm long, had a range equivalent to a double bass viol. They had some success in the 17th century, where they evolved to solve some problems, but they quickly became extinct.