Sound effects and instruments trouvés include found objects and specialist machines for making noises. Composers have made extensive use of both sound effects and found objects in orchestral music, especially in music for theatre, dance and opera. Sound Effects The wind machine was originally a theatrical sound effect, and is a cylinder of wooden slats with a canvas ...
The Nashville sound has been both praised and maligned. Occasionally called ‘crossover country’, ‘easy listening country’ or ‘countrypolitan’, it was a trend more than an innovation. As such, it arose as much from commercial considerations as it did from personal artistry. All through the decades there have been periodic cross-pollinations between the country world and the wider pop audience. From ...
No one had ever produced records like Phil Spector. There had been lavish orchestrations and raucous sounds, but until the early 1960s, the elements were clearly defined in recordings, with a fair amount of separation allotted to a limited number of rhythm and percussion instruments within the confines of a mainly monaural medium. Spector changed all that. Applying ...
As part of the Renaissance (literally ‘rebirth’), which began in Italy in around 1450, the Baroque era was a revolution within a revolution. It saw a break from the Medieval view of humanity as innately sinful. Instead, Renaissance thinking cast individuals as a dynamic force in their own right and gave free rein to human imagination, ingenuity and ...
The son of the Brussels wind-instrument maker Charles-Joseph Sax, Adolphe Sax (1814–94) studied the clarinet at the Conservatoire in Brussels. Accordingly, his first experiments with instruments were designs for improving the clarinet and then plans for a bass clarinet. Sax patented the saxhorn in 1845. He took the existing valved brass instruments and came up with the idea of ...
The term ‘Impressionism’ is associated in music primarily with the work of Debussy, but is also used in connection with Ravel, Stravinsky, Szymanowski and others. While Debussy did not enjoy a personal association with any of the leading Impressionists, certain analogies between his aesthetic and techniques and those of painters such as Monet, Renoir and Pissarro ...
The Italian city of Cremona has been celebrated since the sixteenth century for the manufacture of stringed instruments. The first famous family of makers there was the Amati. Andrea Amati (c. 1505–80) founded a dynasty that included his sons Antonio (c. 1538–95) and Girolamo (1561–1630). But it is the latter’s son Nicolo (1596–1684) who is usually regarded as the most outstanding ...
In 1880 a meeting was held between a group of wealthy businessmen in New York. Their uniting cause was the limited number of box seats available at the Academy of Music, the city’s primary venue for opera. The solution they posited was to build an entirely new opera house. A design was commissioned from J. Cleaveland Cady that included boxes ...
From the late 1940s onwards, John Cage was a figure of major significance as a thinker, inventor and exemplar whose approach drew crucial sustenance from outside the Western tradition. A different conception of time and sound informed Cage’s music from the start, including his influential makeover of the conventional piano, which he ‘prepared’ by inserting bolts, ...
Gamelan is an orchestral tradition in Java and Bali, where every instrument – various gongs and drums – is a member of the percussion family. The tradition emphasizes respect for the instruments and cooperation between the players. In 1887, the Paris Conservatoire acquired a gamelan. In 1889, Debussy went to the Paris Exhibition, where he heard the ...
The influence of jazz on concert music stretches back almost to the emergence of jazz itself from roots in gospel, ragtime and blues. One of the most popular black American dances of the 1890s was taken up by Debussy in his ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ (from the piano suite Children’s Corner, 1906–08). Ragtime found its way into Satie’s ballet Parade and ...
In the early Baroque bow, the horsehair (which strokes the string and produces the sound) was fastened at the hand end, known as the ‘heel’, by an immovable ‘nut’ or ‘frog’, a kind of clip. During the seventeenth century, makers developed a frog in which the mechanism for attaching the horse hair could be released and then clipped ...
Du Fay’s Mass L’homme armé was one of the first of several dozen Masses of that name composed between the years 1450 and 1700. ‘L’homme armé’ (‘The Armed Man’) was a popular, probably satirical, tune which may have been aimed at the less-valiant members of the French army during the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Attracted by ...
The term contenance angloise (‘English manner’), was first coined by the poet Martin Le Franc in his poem ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (c. 1440–42), in which he described new French music and implied that Du Fay and Binchois had ‘taken on the contenance angloise and followed Dunstaple’. Although the poet did not define the term, the text immediately before this ...
The term ‘counterpoint’ is derived from the Latin contra punctum (‘[note] against note’). It is generally understood to refer to a technique of composition in which continuous lines move (horizontally) against each other, as opposed to chordal writing, in which the sound can be thought of in vertical blocks. Strictly speaking, these two types of writing are called ...
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