Already a successful instrument in the Renaissance, the Middle Ages and indeed earlier, the flute has a long continuous history. The Renaissance flute was made of wood in one or sometimes two pieces, with a cylindrical bore and six finger holes. Its distinguishing feature was that it was not blown into directly like the recorder: the player held ...
The flute most familiar to us from its use in orchestral and solo music is more properly known as a ‘transverse’ or ‘side-blown’ flute. The flute family is distinct from the other woodwind instruments in that it does not use a reed to generate sound. Instead, a stream of air striking the edge of an opening in the side of ...
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 ...
Weber (1786–1826), who in his Clarinet Concerto and orchestral music showed how effective it could be as a soloist. Theobald Boehm (1793–1881) brought out a simplified fingering system on the flute in 1832, and this led to similar systems on the oboe, clarinet and eventually bassoon, that made the instruments much easier to play and led composers to ...
a collaboration in the early 1840s between clarinettist Hyacinthe Eléonore Klosé and maker L.-A. Buffet. Buffet used the mechanical principles of Theobald Boehm – the man responsible for revolutionizing flute design – to create a system of keys that is the standard today. (Unfortunately for Buffet, the design carries Boehm’s name in spite of the fact that the latter ...
each player with just one or two tubes, while each player of the Russian kugikly or kuvikly has up to five. Finger Holes It is not necessary for a flute to have a separate tube for each note. It is possible to have a single tube and change the length of its air column. The usual method is to make ...
combination of instruments, 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’ ...
is taken further in the small range of single-pipe free-reed instruments, of which the best known is the ba-wu of China’s Yunnan region. It looks like a bamboo transverse flute, but a ‘V’-shaped brass free reed is set into it where a flute’s blowing hole would be. By blowing through the reed and fingering as one would a flute ...
that the rims were close together, he achieved an instrument on which chords and runs were possible. Although in 1791 Mozart composed a quintet (K617) for glass armonica, flute, oboe, viola and 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 ...
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 ...
the tube to make a thin edge at which the breath is directed. The rest of the tube’s diameter is sealed by the outside of the player’s lower lip. The flute is held vertically. Shakuhachi The best known of these notch flutes is the Japanese shakuhachi, an instrument of lumpy appearance but refined technique. The name derives from the Japanese ...
construction. The reed was mounted on a staple clear of the body of the instrument, without the shawm’s pirouette, to be held directly in the mouth. Like the flute, the oboe acquired an extra chromatic key. The modifications created a new instrument – one capable of a more refined and controllable sound and able to participate in mixed ...
pitches were 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 ...
Unlike all other instruments, the organ can actually form part of the building in which it performs and its effect on church architecture has been matched only by that of the choir. While the internal workings of the organ have changed little over the centuries, one thing that has changed is the organ case. Every instrument needs to be ...
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 ...
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