Musical Performance

Jazz is a mixture of many different kinds of music. Although jazz is now played nearly all over the world, its true ‘home’ is the United States of America. This is where jazz began almost 100 years ago. Early jazz was created by black-American people, the descendants of slaves who were brought from Africa. Their jazz was a combination of a kind of sad folk music called blues, mixed with melodies and rhythms from African music, church music, brass band music and from popular dances. Continue Reading »

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All the instruments of the flute family are very similar. Their sound is produced by a vibrating air column, they are all fingered the same way, and they are made from metal. Although it is a small family and the instruments can’t play very loudly, the flute family has an important place in both our musical heritage and the music of today.

Instruments of the clarinet family are perhaps the most versatile and useful of the woodwinds. Descendants of a family of seventeenth-century instruments called shawms, shalmeys, or chalumeaux, their sounds are produced by blowing air across a single reed. Continue Reading »

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Although the key mechanism on modern woodwind instruments looks very complicated to a beginner, all the keys, rings, rods, and springs actually make the fingering much easier; ten fingers can now do the work of twenty. If a student practises hard, he will soon be playing much faster than even a professional could play 250 years ago.

Since the time of the pipes of Pan in ancient Greece, hundreds of woodwind instruments have come and gone. Continue Reading »

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The saxophone has to be treated as a family of seven instruments of different sizes, each one covering 4 octaves and all seven a compass of 51 octaves. Saxophones look like outsize metal tobacco pipes supported by neck slings, apart from the sopranos which are shorter, parabolic cones. All have a single reed, clarinet-type mouthpiece. Classed as woodwinds, though made of brass, their part is written in a treble clef on a stave beneath the clarinets. Continue Reading »

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