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• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

A notable entry into the field of electronic music was made by Luigi Russolo and Ugo Piatti. Members of the Futurist movement, they developed a family of machines called ‘noise-intoners’. One of these contained a wheel with a rosined or toothed circumference, which could be brought into contact with a string, whose tension could be varied and which ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

were built, each different from the other. They were huge, heavy and enormously expensive to build. None survives. Styles & Forms | Modern Era | Classical Instruments | Noise-Intoners | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

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 ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The twentieth century has seen a wealth of special effects employed in music, in much the same way as they are used in film, beginning with the intonarumori (‘noise-intoners’) invented by Luigi Russolo. A football rattle (called a ‘bird scare’ by the composer) was required by Havergal Brian (1876–1972) for his Gothic Symphony No. 1 (1927). The sound of ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

Western classical music since the seventeenth century, because it placed great emphasis on harmonic subtlety and tensions between keys, had been less interested in melodic flexibility (a maximum of 12 notes to the octave, while Indian music uses 22) and in rhythm (regular division into bars, normally of two, three, four or six beats; Indian ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

The drum is perhaps the oldest instrument known to man. Drummers have always sought increasingly sophisticated ways of refining their art and gaining access to as broad a palette of sounds as possible and, in many instances, have embraced the electronic revolution as enthusiastically as their keyboard-playing counterparts. Early Electronic Drums Early electronic drum systems included the Electro-Harmonix Space ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

The term ‘guitar synthesizer’ refers to a system consisting of a guitar controller interfaced to a synthesizer sound-module. Such instruments afford the guitar player access to not only synthesized (or sampled) emulations of guitar sounds but also to a vast array of electronic tones and instrumental simulations. In this way, the guitarist can bring techniques, such as string bending ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Like the jew’s harp and mechanical music box, the African mbira or thumb piano is a lamellaphone, in which the sound is produced by plucking metal tongues or plates. A mbira has between 22 and 52 thin metal tongues, arranged in two or three layers on a hardwood soundboard. The longest tongues are placed in the middle of ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

Of the woodwind instruments, the oboe has experienced perhaps the most organic development. There is no single, revolutionary moment at which the oboe became a modern instrument, and it retains strong links with the past both in sound and design. Shawm The modern oboe is a direct descendant of the shawm and the hautboy. The shawm was a ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

There can be few environments as challenging and exciting to the musician as the recording studio. Since the post-war introduction of the magnetic tape recorder, the technology used to capture musical performance has become an increasingly important part of our culture. The studio has long been more than simply an acoustically pleasing environment in which to capture and document a ...

• Dance

Dancing is as old as time, and its one constant is music that you can do it to. And while not all music is designed for dancing, some revolutionary dance music has been produced since records began. Some of it is intentionally disposable, but it is surprising just how much of the dance music made in the last ...

• Electric & Electronic
• Instruments

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 ...

• Percussion
• Instruments

Percussion instruments are a diverse and interesting family. Every human culture plays them, and they are among the oldest instruments known to man. Percussion instruments are indispensable to practically every genre and style of music. In many cultures, the leader of a musical ensemble plays a percussion instrument to give signals to the other performers, such as when ...