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. (More…)
dodo
10 Oct, 2008
Oct
10
Starting with a design that is nearly four hundred years old, the violin maker selects just the right pieces of wood from his storeroom. Each part of the instrument will be made from a special kind of wood, and he chooses pieces of spruce, maple, pine, ebony, or Pernambuco wood with which to work.
For the next three or four months the instrument maker will carve, shape, and fit these pieces of wood together like a puzzle. As he finishes each of the nearly seventy different parts, it will be fitted in the proper place. Some parts will be glued, others will be held in the proper position by being fitted just right, (More…)
Oct
7
In the score the music for the trombone is written in a bass or tenor clef on the stave over and sometimes beneath that of the timpani. The compass is two octaves and a sixth. The sound, produced by means of a shallow cupped mouthpiece which is lip vibrated, is powerful and rich in harmonics. (More…)
Aug
11
Today violinists in the orchestra all play the type of instrument evolved during the 18th century, with a Tourte design bow. The more fortunate among them possess original but modified violins of the Cremonese school. These fetch very high prices in the auction rooms today. In the last century £200 to £5oo (then about $800 to $2000) was considered to be an excessive price for a Guarnerius or an Amati for, it was pointed out, the principal violin makers of the late 19th century, Thibouville-Lamy, with extensive premises in London and Paris, manufactured and sold violins for four shillings and sixpence (then about one dollar) and made a profit of 15%. (More…)
Jul
20
The part for the first violins, the first and the most important of the bowed string instruments, is written in the score in the treble clef on a stave above the second violins. The strings of the violin are tuned to G D A E and have a compass of 32 octaves. Until fairly recently some orchestras preferred to have their violins strung exclusively with gut, but the thin top string has a tendency to break easily, so it has been replaced by wire, tuned by a small sensitive screw on the tail piece. Today a violin might be strung entirely with metal, each string having a tail piece screw, or some strings may be gut wound with aluminium, silver or copper.
The variety of sounds and effects that can be produced from the violin exceeds that of any other single instrument of the orchestra, but owing to what is called a formant it is always possible to identify the violin as being the source. (More…)
Jul
20
The part for the double bass is written on the bottom stave of the score. The notes sound an octave lower than written. Unlike any other member of the violin family the strings are tuned in fourths — GDAE; this is because with strings of such length and thickness the intervals between the stopped notes are very wide and if they were tuned to the usual fifths there would be insuperable physical difficulties in fingering. The greater length of thicker string gives a smaller, not wider, compass on account of the notes being so widely spaced. The compass is about two and a quarter octaves. (More…)
Jul
15
