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 ...
The clarinet is a wooden instrument of cylindrical bore, with a single vibrating reed in a mouthpiece. Clarinets began to appear in music by J. C. Bach and Arne in the 1760s, although they differed in several ways from the modern instrument. The famous Mannheim orchestra championed it. Mozart wrote parts for it in his Divertimento K113, perhaps ...
The clarinet is a wooden instrument with a cylindrical bore and a single beating reed. Instead of being a kind of flattened drinking straw wedged on to a thin metal tube, as in the case of the oboe and bassoon, it is more like a thin spatula tied on to an open-topped recorder mouthpiece. A single-reed woodwind instrument called ...
The German player and maker Iwan Müller had developed a 13-keyed instrument in about 1812 and the music being written for the clarinet at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Weber, among others, made an instrument with 13 keys essential. While its chamber-music life in the classical period had produced such masterpieces as the Beethoven Septet (op. 20) ...
been claimed as the man who, in 1700, devised and built the first of these instruments. Like all the best stories, however, the history of the clarinet is shrouded in mystery. The instrument attributed to Denner, which now resides in the National Museum in Bayern, Germany, is in fact a chalumeau. The chalumeau is ...
bass part in the rhythm section. It is rarely seen in Europe. Saxophone Musicologists say, with justification, that the saxophone is a wind instrument because it combines a clarinet mouthpiece and an oboe-like body. But the instrument has always been a slightly uneasy hybrid because of its brass construction – and now sits as comfortably in a brass section ...
was occasionally used in the orchestra, first of all by Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803–69) and the operatic composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Woodwind instruments were further developed and refined. The clarinet was improved and championed by composers such as Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), who in his Clarinet Concerto and orchestral music showed how effective it could be as a soloist. ...
von Dittersdorf (1739–99) began to write lively lines for it and even treated it as the soloist in his concertos. Styles & Forms | Late Baroque | Classical Instruments | Clarinet | Late Baroque | Classical ...
, or either add or take away instruments from an existing ensemble. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) once had a dream in which he saw a flute, a clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets and two trombones playing in a group. This then formed the instrumentation for his Octet. In jazz, small ‘swing combos’ occasionally performed in ...
The birthplace of free reeds seems to have been eastern Asia. There, it is typical to place a small free reed, made of metal or bamboo, into a bamboo tube cut to the appropriate length so that its air column resonates at the reed’s frequency, increasing the volume and allowing the player to allow it to sound ...
cello for the famous blind performer Marianne Kirchgessner (1769–1808), the instrument had fallen out of fashion by the mid-nineteenth century. Styles & Forms | Classical Era | Classical Instruments | Clarinet | Classical Era | Classical ...
a concerto by Boieldieu. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (1892–94) features a famous role for two harps, while Ravel’s Introduction et allegro (1905) for string quartet, clarinet, flute and harp is among the most famous works in the harp repertory. Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | Organ | Late Romantic | Classical ...
completely inaccessible and many others could only be played using a complex system of fingering. This limited the instrument’s use at a time when its siblings, the flute and clarinet, were developing rapidly and gaining in popularity. The peculiarities of the hautboy’s timbre were highly prized up to the beginning of nineteenth century. The very design features that gave ...
The organ is an instrument of extremes – the biggest, the loudest, the lowest, the highest, the oldest, the newest and the most complex, it is also among the smallest, the most intimate, the most modest, and the simplest. Organ Extremes The aptly named portative organ – much played from the twelfth ...
seem to have overestimated how low it could play. Perhaps its most famous appearance is in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (‘Chinese Dance’). Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | Clarinet | Late Romantic | Classical ...
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