SEARCH RESULTS FOR: harmonium
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Often regarded as the country cousin (and hence the bumpkin) of the organ family, the harmonium did add a touch of warmth to many nineteenth-century rural homes, where the purchase of a piano would have been an unaffordable luxury. But the two instruments often cohabited, too. Harmonium Compositions Today, unlike the piano, the harmonium is a ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

without external force or manual operation, the most difficult and intricate compositions.’ For amateur piano players, the writing was on the wall. Introduction | Keyboards Instruments | Harmonium | Keyboards ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

The celesta is a type of keyboard glockenspiel, with a range of four octaves upwards from middle C, and a damping pedal like a piano. Inside the body of the instrument is a series of chromatically tuned metal bars, which are struck with felt hammers when the performer plays the keyboard. Creation of the Celesta The celesta was ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

a way for ordinary people to get to know the music of contemporary composers, and sheet-music sales rocketed as a result. A smaller alternative to the organ, the harmonium, was developed in the early-nineteenth century, being used in small churches and for domestic music-making. The harmonica, or mouth organ, and the accordion also date from ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

player – the left one mutes, the right sustains by letting all the strings resonate, and the one in the middle sustains only those notes originally held down. Harmonium The humble harmonium was patented by the French company Debain in the 1840s. Its volume was limited, the number of stops few and its versatility minimal, but with ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1988–present) This New York jam band initially favoured the extended blues rock format made popular by The Grateful Dead. John Popper (vocals, harmonium), Chan Kinchla (guitar), Bobby Sheehan (bass) and Brendan Hills (drums) built a solid following that was vastly amplified when aptly named fourth album – Four (1995) – sold four million copies on the back ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, general editor Michael Heatley

Thus he made the transition from the intensity of devotional sufi music to almost-pop star. Like the guitar-bass-drums rock line-up, qawwali ensembles have a tradition: a lead singer, harmonium players who take solo vocals and a chorus that also contains percussionists. The lyrics use metaphors and poetry to praise God, raising both performers and listeners to a state ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer

based on a Lennon guitar riff, was initially serviced to radio as the ‘preferred’ song, DJs quickly preferred the quirkier ‘We Can Work It Out’ with its one-note harmonium drone and sudden switch to waltz time on the chorus. A film of The Beatles lip-synching the song was made for television and can fairly claim to be the world’s ...

Source: The Beatles Revealed, by Hugh Fielder

The term electric, or electromechanical, organ is used to describe instruments that produce sounds using a dynamo-like system of moving parts – as opposed to electronic organs that employ solid-state electronics. Laurens Hammond In the same way that ‘Hoover’ is used instead of ‘vacuum cleaner’, the very name ‘Hammond’ has become synonymous with electric organs. The Hammond organ was ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

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 ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

In the 1950s, the American composer Babbitt was the first composer to work on a synthesizer which the US company RCA had developed. The resulting Composition for Synthesizer (1961) was Babbitt’s first fully synthesized work. It was followed in the same year by Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesizer, and then Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962–64). Babbitt appreciated the ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

The bizarre Telharmonium is widely regarded as the earliest example of a purely electronic instrument. Patented in 1897 by Thaddeus Cahill (1867–1934), a lawyer and inventor from Washington D.C., the Telharmonium pioneered several important technologies. The sound was generated by a series of electromechanical tone wheels (rather like the Hammond organ), each of which produced a pure sine tone ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

We think of electronic music as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, but one of the earliest electronic instruments, the telharmonium, dates from as early as 1895. Invented in the US by Thaddeus Cahill (who also interested himself in electric typewriters and pianos), the instrument was an electromechanical keyboard instrument. It used charge-bearing metal brushes and a rotating wheel with ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

The development of electric and electronic musical instruments – as well as associated music-production systems – is one of the defining strands in the history of music over the last century. In fact, the advent of electric instruments predates even the twentieth century. Some of the instruments discussed here – such as the electric guitar – are commonly recognizable. Others ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

Nineteenth-century music had developed with an unprecedented awareness of its own history, and by 1900 the European musical legacy seemed as permanent and unshakeable as the institutions – the opera houses, concert halls and conservatories – that nurtured it. Above all, classical tonality and its associated forms and genres, now the everyday stuff of textbooks, had ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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