His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts are a group of virtuoso wind players who specialise in playing Renaissance and Baroque music in historically appropriate styles on original instruments.

The noble sounds of cornetts and sackbuts were among the most versatile instrumental colours available to composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, heard in many musical contexts: in consort or in alternation with voices in the extravagant liturgy of the great Italian and Spanish churches - above all the Basilica of St Mark's in Venice; in aristocratic entertainments such as the intermedii of northern Italy or the masques of Jacobean England; and in the ceremonial and devotional music for the courts and free cities of Lutheran Germany.

In its heyday the cornett was one of the most favoured of wind instruments being employed by composers in courts and churches. Blown like a trumpet but fingered like a recorder, it is capable of both astonishing virtuosity and heart-rending vocal expression. In 1636 one writer compared its sound in a church to 'a ray of sunshine piercing the shadows'.

The sackbut is the direct forerunner of the modern trombone - indeed the Italians already called it trombone, or 'large trumpet' - but perfectly matches the vocal timbre of the cornett, thanks to its relatively narrow bore and shallow mouthpiece. Despite its slide mechanism, early composers often wrote for it in an amazingly florid manner and of course because of its slide mechanism, the sackbut was able to play more harmonically evolved music and was used by chamber music and church music composers across Europe until the middle of the 18th century.