The invention of valves meant that brass instruments could now explore the bass register, and soon after 1835 bass tubas started being manufactured in Germany. Essentially a keyed bugle by descent, the bass tuba (confusingly, the name tuba comes from the Latin word for trumpet) has a very wide conical bore and as a result requires a good ...
The bluesman who took the blues into the mainstream, B.B. King (b. 1925) is also its ambassador to the world. His solid, seasoned style is heard internationally. King’s style draws on the Mississippi blues of Elmore James and Muddy Waters, the Chicago blues of Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, and the West-Coast blues of T-Bone Walker ...
The double bass is the only survivor from the viol family to have found a regular place in the orchestra. Like other members of the viol family, it initially carried frets – tiny knotted pieces of gut that measured out the fingerboard. As it was adopted into the violin family, it settled down as a four-stringed instrument, shed ...
Drum’n’bass was a kind of re-branding that came from the scene itself – the producer side that wanted to allow filmic sounds to speak for them rather than some patois MC. By downplaying the ragga, producers and DJs were effectively saying that they wished to communicate a message or mood sonically rather than verbally. Some have argued that drum’n’bass is ...
Commonly pitched in B flat like the standard orchestral clarinet, but sounding an octave below it, the bass clarinet began life as an eighteenth-century instrument that looked faintly like a dulcian, though with an upward-pointing bell. Adolphe Sax (1814–94) and L. A. Buffet (fl. 1839–43) both worked on the instrument in the nineteenth century. Sax developed one with ...
Attempts were made in the nineteenth century to turn the bassoon into a metal instrument: Charles and Adolphe Sax experimented with brass bassoons and the latter patented such an instrument, with 24 keys, in 1851. There were rival arrangements of keys (which implied different ways of fingering) available in the nineteenth century. There continue to be French and German ...
A brass instrument with the tubing curled in an elliptical loop ending in a small bell and fingered using four valves, this is a type of tuba probably based on the saxhorn. When writing the Ring, Wagner wanted a brass instrument to bridge the gap between the French horns and the trombones. The 1853 sketch for Das Rheingold specifies ...
Like the snare drum and tenor drum, the bass drum originated in the Middle East. It is a large instrument with a cylindrical body and two heads, and is the drum used to keep the rhythm in marching bands. The modern orchestral bass drum (100 cm/70 in diameter and 50 cm/20 in long) is double headed and rod tensioned. ...
The tuba is essentially a large, valved bugle, designed to take the bass part in an orchestra or band. Like the trumpet, it is sounded by buzzing the lips into a mouthpiece. It is conically bored, like the horn, and consequently has a smooth, velvety sound. History The tuba is a youngster among brass instruments; ...
As ensemble music became more popular during the sixteenth century there was increased demand for wind instruments that could elegantly negotiate the lower ranges. Large versions of wind instruments intended for the higher registers lacked volume and agility and were often difficult to play. Various elements of existing instruments – the bass recorder’s crook and the shawm’s double reed, for ...
The electric bass is similar in both appearance and operation to the electric guitar, but is actually a descendent of the upright acoustic double bass. The double bass had long been an integral part of the jazz rhythm section, but the increasing need to compete with amplified instruments – not to mention the transportation problems caused by its sheer ...
Composed: 1965 Premiered: 1966, Salzburg Libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman after Euripides’ The Bacchae First Movement Cadmus, King of Thebes, has abdicated in favour of his grandson, Pentheus, who intends to break with the traditional religious order and establish monotheism. An offstage voice announces that ‘the God Dionysus has entered Boeotia’. If legend ...
The bassoon, constructed in three parts, started being made in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps in France in imitation of the flute and oboe. Built with three keys by the Denners of Nuremberg, the new instrument allowed greater virtuosity in the player than the one-piece curtal and dulcian, which began to decline in favour of the bassoon ...
Bugle Best known in its military guise, the bugle is one of the simplest of brass instruments in terms of construction, but it is very difficult to play. The single tube of metal has no valves to help create different notes, so players have to do all the work by changing their embouchure – a combination of the ...
The cornet is a looped brass instrument with a wide bore and three valves. Beginning life as a development of the circular looped post horn, it became a valved instrument in France in the late 1820s. It apparently reached Britain in the 1830s, where its bright sound soon displaced the keyed bugle from amateur wind bands. Most often to ...
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