Many flutes are held sideways across the player’s mouth. They are called side- blown or transverse flutes. The player blows across the top of a blow hole to play the instrument. Flutes are an ancient kind of instrument which became popular in European concert music about 200 years ago. Early fluteshad open holes along the pipe. You closed these with your fingers to change the pitch, just like a whistle. But early flutes were not easy to play because the fingering was complicated. (More…)
dodo
13 Nov, 2008
Nov
13
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. (More…)
Nov
1
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…)
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
The double-reed family of woodwinds consists of the oboe, English horn, bassoon, and contrabassoon. Each has a double reed made of cane that the player holds between his lips and blows air through, just as you did earlier with the paper drinking straw.
There have been many types of double-reed instruments throughout history. Imported to Europe from the Orient, they have rather strange names such as bombarde, pommer, schryari, krummhorn, and rackett. It was during the seventeenth century that these instruments began taking on the appearance and sound of our modern instruments. (More…)
Oct
1
Horn parts are written in treble and bass clefs without key signature, accidentals being written in as they occur. The horn is a transposing instrument and sounds a fifth lower than written in the treble clef but a fourth higher in the bass clef.
In his book on the French horn Morley Pegge described the sound of the instrument as ‘the most refined and poetical voice in the symphony orchestra’. Its emotional range certainly covers the moods from martial to melancholy. (More…)
Aug
23
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
Whatever the shape and size of those earlier pianos, the makers always strove for elegance. The cabinets of the small squares, supported on elegantly turned legs, became collectors’ pieces of furniture, and many an action was ripped out in order to convert the silent shell into something more useful such as a cocktail cabinet or dressing table. Woods were carefully chosen for their grain and craftsmen indulged in filigree fretwork for the music rack on either side of which glowed merry brass candlesticks. Some grands were decorated with brass inlay and one piano at least was made entirely of brass. Hand-pleated silk of superior quality concealed the sound board and strings of the uprights. All this contributed to making pianos desirable adornments of the home, a pleasure to look at as well as to hear. Mass production spoiled all that and all pianos began to sound alike and to look alike — hence the necessity for writing the name on the instrument as well as in the concert or recital programme. (More…)
Jul
26
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
