April 3rd 2009
Acoustic guitars are quiet instruments, and their accompaniments need to be subtle rather than assertive. Rodrigo uses an orchestra of a couple of dozen players, who rarely all play at once. The guitar is like the leader in chamber music, and the music is more agreement than confrontation. Continue Reading »
April 3rd 2009
Even experts need to practise, and Ravel spent years promising himself the luxury of trying some experiments in orchestration as soon as he had time. His chance came when the dancer Ida Rubinstein asked him to orchestrate some piano music by the Spanish composer Albéniz. Ravel couldn’t get the rights, and offered instead to write Rubinstein an original piece in Spanish style. Continue Reading »
November 1st 2008
Take a close look at the instrument in the picture above. It is called a mouth organ, or harmonica. This kind of instrument was invented in Europe about 150 years ago. Can you think how the mouth organ makes a musical sound? Each tiny hole has two metal reeds next to it, one short and one longer. When you blow into the holes, the reeds vibrate. Short reeds make high notes, longer ones make lower notes. These are called ‘free reeds‘ because they are free to vibrate up and down. Continue Reading »
October 10th 2008
A similar, but more complicated instrument is the zither. This is a folk instrument from northern Europe that has thirty to forty strings stretched across a flat, hollow sound box. The four top strings are used for playing the melody, while the rest of the strings are plucked and strummed to provide the accompaniment. The right hand plucks and strums, and the left hand stops the melody strings against the frets of a guitarlike fingerboard.
When Johann Strauss composed his famous waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods, he included a charming solo for the zither in the orchestral score. Continue Reading »
October 10th 2008
Folk music is music of the common people. Created by someone who has a story to tell rather than composed by a trained musician, it is simple and easy to understand. Folk songs have easy, singable melodies, use simple harmonies, and (unless the song tells a sad story) have rhythms that are fun for dancing. The instruments of folk music are the instruments people happened to have around at the time. Sometimes inventive people built their own instruments if no others were available. Continue Reading »
October 7th 2008
In addition to the notes of the four “open” strings, the players make many other notes by stopping the string with the fingers of their left hands. When a string is pressed against the fingerboard, its length is shortened, and a higher sound is produced. The closer to the sound box the finger is pressed, the higher the note. There is nothing on the fingerboard to tell a player exactly where to place his fingers (that is, unlike a guitar, a violin has no frets); he must listen very carefully and practise hard to learn where the right spots are for each note. Continue Reading »
October 3rd 2008
Thousands of years ago man discovered that by boring a hole in the side of an animal horn and forcing air through the opening, he could produce sounds that were useful in sending messages short distances. The sound was generated by the player’s either buzzing his lips into the small opening or by blowing across the opening as you would blow across the top of a Coke bottle. The horn then amplified the sound and made it loud enough to be heard some distance away. Continue Reading »
August 31st 2008
The timbre of the oboe can be identified more easily and quickly than that of any other instrument of the orchestra because during tuning up it can be heard sounding long, steady As to which the whole orchestra, in what seems like a total chaos of sound, tune their strings, pipes and percussion.
Made of grenadilla, rose or’ cocus wood, the oboe has a narrow conical bore terminating in a slight flare or bell. It is held vertically and the double reed, which is mounted in the top, is held in the ‘player’s mouth,. When blown the lips of the double reed start beating; this drives beaten air into the pipe which then becomes alive with sound. The quality of sound or timbre depends to a major degree on the dimensions of the reed, the grain and its density. Continue Reading »
August 14th 2008
The bass drum stands vertically, the rim of the shallow wooden shell facing the audience. This was originally known as the Turkish drum. Sometimes it has two heads, sometimes only one, the former model producing somewhat greater clarity. It is beaten with upward — or downward — glancing blows with a soft stick, and sometimes brushed simultaneously on the other side with a switch of sorts. Continue Reading »
August 14th 2008
The staves for the percussion instruments are massed in the middle of the score. Who plays what depends on manpower, availability and ability.
The glockenspiel and celesta are both metallophones, the first having a resemblance to a small xylophone and the second to a small piano.
`Glockenspiel‘ means ‘bell-play’ in German. The glockenspiel used in marching bands is a set of steel bars set in a lyre-shaped frame. Mozart specified an instrumento d’ acciaio (steel instrument) for the part of Papageno’s magic bells in Die Zauberflote; this may have been a set of small tuned bells played from a keyboard like a modern celesta. These bells were also used by carillon players for practice. Continue Reading »
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