The oboe was developed in the mid-seventeenth century and the credit is usually given to Jean Hotteterre (c. 1605–90/2), a shawm player at the court of Louis XIV. Its immediate predecessor was the shawm and the oboe took over the French name for smaller shawms, hautbois or ‘loud woodwind instrument’. The distribution of the finger holes and the bore was ...
makers and thus pursued a more refined sound. Outside Vienna, it is now usually the French model that is used. Although there were experiments with a bass or baritone oboe in the eighteenth century, it was in the 1820s that a firm called Tribert began manufacturing the modern instrument. The tube was folded up like that of a bassoon ...
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 ...
length and an extra key. Similar depths are required by Shostakovich, who wrote for instruments with this extra range. Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | Oboe | Late Romantic | Classical ...
of the staple in an oboe: the reed that goes into the player’s mouth is mounted on it. The sound of the Baroque bassoon was not unlike that of the oboe – similarly buzzing, but deeper. The bassoon was usually relegated to the bass line, supporting other instruments, but a number of more challenging solo pieces appeared for ...
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 ...
, viols and most lutes disappeared from professional music. At the same time, new wind instruments were being developed, often by rethinking the design of older ones. The oboe was basically a redesigned shawm and its greater expressiveness, better tone and tuning led to it replacing the older instrument in the second half of the seventeenth century in ...
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 chalumeau had evolved in the seventeenth century ...
the bell end. Acoustically this means that there is a predominance of low vibrations in the clarinet’s sound: its lower register sounds an octave below that of a flute or oboe using the same length of pipe. This gives the lower chalumeau register a particularly rich, dark sound. The sound-wave formation of the clarinet means that it overblows at the ...
with virtuosic display music, particular from Venice, where composers wrote demanding and exciting music for cornetts and sackbuts. Styles & Forms | Early Baroque | Classical Instruments | Oboe | Early Baroque | Classical ...
prime features of a shawm are a double reed fitted into conical bored tube that usually ends in a flared bell. A strident sound is also characteristic. The western classical oboe and its orchestral relatives have key systems and a tamed tone, but are nevertheless types of shawm. Turkey and the surrounding area are shawm heartland, and many other ...
The English horn, or cor anglais, is a member of the oboe family. It is neither English nor a horn, and the name is usually written off as a mystery. Pitched a fifth below the oboe, it had been developed in 1760 by Ferlandis of Bergamo, but was rarely heard in the orchestra before the Romantic ...
in terms of volume. It is no accident that the more successful solo jazz instruments have proved to be more strident ones like the saxophone and trumpet rather than the oboe or recorder. An ensemble also needs a supply of quality music that exploits its particular strengths and that ‘sells’ that particular combination of instruments to audiences and performers. The music ...
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 Era | ...
The heckelphone was developed by William Heckel after he heard from Wagner in 1879 that the orchestra lacked a powerful baritone double-reed instrument. Accordingly, he experimented with the oboe family and produced the first heckelphone in 1904. Built in three sections, it has a wider bore than the oboe, and is played using a bassoon-type reed mounted on ...
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