The medieval pipe was played by blowing directly into a mouthpiece, like a recorder or penny whistle. Although it usually had only three holes to finger, by varying the force of blowing, players could achieve a working range of about one-and-a-half octaves. It was played with the right hand; the left hand held a thick, stubby beater ...
of an animal-skin bag and a series of wooden pipes. The player held the bag under the arm and inflated it by blowing down one of the pipes. A second pipe, the ‘chanter’, contained a series of holes on which to play a melody, while the remainder, the ‘drones’, maintained a continuous, unvarying background chord. By keeping ...
the elbow to pass air into the pipes. The windbag is inflated by a blowpipe or bellows, and the melody is played by means of a chanter, a pipe with fingerholes. Although the bagpipe was essentially a folk instrument, it was played at court in several periods. Certainly Henry VIII (1491–1547) heard it and in Baroque France the ...
The bagpipe principle is simple: instead of the player blowing directly on a reed pipe, the air is supplied from a reservoir, usually made of animal skin, which is inflated either by mouth or by bellows. The result is the ability to produce a continuous tone, and the possibility of adding extra reed-pipes to enable a single ...
On the face of it, barrels and music would seem unlikely bedfellows. Their alliance, however, goes back at least to the ninth century, when the first detailed description of a barrel organ appeared in an Arab treatise. Mechanics of the Barrel Organ The mechanical principle underlying all such instruments, from the automated organ and piano to ...
(1908–92) who incorporated it into some of his orchestral pieces. Electric organs, notably the Hammond organ, were developed, too, and electronic mechanisms were now common on pipe organs. Cinema organs emerged at the beginning of the century and were usually used to play light music at leisure venues. The electric guitar was developed in the 1940s and ...
metal alternatives, no material has yet matched the blackwood for beauty of sound. Register Uniquely among wind instruments, the clarinet behaves as though it was a stopped cylindrical pipe – even though it is open at the bell end. Acoustically this means that there is a predominance of low vibrations in the clarinet’s sound: its lower register sounds an ...
groups like Nirvana, Oasis and Radiohead. Electric Organ The electric organ emerged in the early twentieth century, originally designed as an economical and compact substitute for the larger pipe organ. During its history, makers have employed various techniques for producing tones: vibrating reeds, spinning tone wheels, oscillator circuits and digital samplers. The most well known is ...
in the USA, where almost every school has its own wind band and where marching bands have a high public profile. Other types of wind band include the Scottish pipe band, consisting of bagpipes and drums, the Northern Irish flute band (flutes and drums) and the Russian ‘horn band’, popular in the late- eighteenth century and comprising of ...
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 ...
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 ...
deal of experimentation with free-reed instruments. In 1821, Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann (1805–64) built such an instrument, the Mundäoline, with 15 reeds. Intended merely as a pitch pipe, used to tune instruments, it turned out to be capable of being played itself. A German clockmaker began manufacturing small numbers of Buschmann’s invention: a hand-carved wooden body ...
, is directly affected by the speed of the pedalling, and multiple ranks of reeds constitute stops of varying tone quality and register, analogous to those of a pipe organ. In the larger harmoniums there are two ‘knee swells’, one of which, by a sideways pressure of the knee on a projecting piece of wood, brings the ...
new instruments and sonorities have been introduced. Ravel writes for swanee whistle in L’enfant et les sortilèges (1925) to create the effect of night sounds. The swanee whistle is a pipe with a plunger in the end so that the pitch can be changed in swooping slides as it is blown. In Benedict Mason’s (b. 1954) Concerto for Viola Section and ...
to make music is its ranks, or rows, of pipes, ranging from very large, for low pitches, to very small, for high pitches. Different pipe shapes and designs produce different tone qualities. Air is either pumped manually or, from the nineteenth century, produced by various mechanical means. It is held under pressure in ...
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