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• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

Originating in the fifteenth century, the sackbut, ancestor of the modern trombone, seems to have evolved from the medieval slide trumpet. Credit is usually given to the workshop of Hans Neuschel the Elder of Nuremberg (d. 1503/4) for significantly improving the emerging instrument. The bore was smaller than that of the modern trombone, producing a quieter, ...

• Instruments
• Brass

Modern brass instruments have much longer tubes, which makes the pitch easier to control. The Renaissance Cornett In the Renaissance ensemble, the cornett was typically partnered with the sackbut (a sixteenth-century version of the slide trombone). There was an entire family of cornetts, from the bass cornett to the high-pitched cornettino. However, little music composed for the ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Early Baroque

Not to be confused with the modern valved brass-band cornet, which is a kind of small trumpet, the cornett (with that extra final ‘t’) was made of two carved, lightly curved pieces of European hardwood (such as pear) bound together and wrapped in leather. The instrument is further unusual in that it has an octagonal finish. To the ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

bass. A century later, Praetorius referred to five standard sizes, with the lowest instruments extended by means of sliders. Styles & Forms | Renaissance | Classical Instruments | Sackbut | Renaissance | Classical ...

• 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

forms of music. History The birth of the synthesizer dates back to the mid-1940s when Canadian physicist, composer and instrument builder, Hugh le Caine (1914–77) built the electronic sackbut, an instrument widely regarded as the first true synthesizer. In the 1950s, RCA (Radio Corporation of America) built the huge Mark II Music Synthesizer, using vacuum-tube electronics ...

• Instruments
• Brass

A trombone is a brass instrument sounded by buzzing the lips into a mouthpiece. It is peculiar amongst brass instruments in using a double ‘U’-shaped slide to alter its pitch. The early history of the trombone is confused, mostly due to a lack of clarity in naming instruments. It is generally accepted that the immediate precursor to the trombone was ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Early Romantic

player can increase or decrease the distance that the wind travels between the mouthpiece and the terminating ‘bell’, thus lowering or raising the note. In its early incarnation as the sackbut, the trombone led an honoured and busy life in ecclesiastical and royal music. It did not really settle into the orchestra until late in the eighteenth century. Retaining its ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Late Baroque

Modern writers refer to the mixed instrumental chamber ensembles of the Renaissance as broken consorts. Different kinds of instruments were brought together with choirs for special occasions, but there was no large ensemble encompassing different families of instruments and performing its own recognizable genres of music, until the Baroque period. The introduction by Monteverdi of string players into the ...