Lecture 4: Musical instruments and musical expression

Home--Welcome--Syllabus--Assignments-- Glossary--Links--Test Yourself

PART 1: Video Intro LECTURE 4: Musical instruments & musical expression

Musical Instrument Families

Cat gut. Horse hair. Cane. Dead goats. Sounds dreadfully macabre and ugly. What do all these things have in common?

They all go into making the finest musical instruments. The strings of violins, violas, cellos, basses: Cat gut. The bows of these instruments: Horse hair. The reeds of oboes and other reed instruments: Cane.

And dead goats? In 18th century France the body "bag" of the goat was cleaned out, covered with silk brocade and fitted with ivory pipes inserted into the neck and foreleg openings to make one of the most popular (and elegant!) musical instruments of the day: the musette (or bagpipe.)

The list of materials used to make musical instruments is staggering, and goes much, much further than what was mentioned above-- shells, horns of animals, animal bladders, tree logs, tortoise shells, and even giant squash (hollowed out and with a single-reed tube inserted-- called the Tromba di Zucca!), to name just a few.

Visit a few of the world's great instrument collections:
Edinborough University
Smithsonian Institution
For a veritable treasure trove of links and info on all sorts of musical instruments issues (maintenance, history, technology, appraisers, dealers, builders, etc.) try
The Shrine to Music There are literally thousands of musical instruments from all around the world--obsolete ones, current ones, experimental ones--and a whole branch of study has grown up around them called organology. People who work in this field are usually either involved with museum collections (as curators), or are ethnomusicologists (people who study music outside the Western art tradition).
Click here for info in the Colloquium on Historical Musical Instrument Acoustics and Technology, sponsored by the Galpin Society (a musical instrument society) and the International Symposium on Musical Acoustics.

Musical instruments are usually classified into families, according to how they produce sound:

Idiophones
Chordophones
Aerophones
Membranophones
Electrophones

The following charts will give you an idea of the depth and breadth of instrument families as well as a feel for how each instrument produces sound:

Idiophones

Struck:
gong, triangle, bell, chimes, cymbals, glockenspiel, Chinese stone chimes

Shaken:
rattle

Plucked:
Jew's harp, music box

Rubbed:
glass harmonica

Aerophones

Free aerophones:
harmonium, accordion, regal (a type of organ)

Wind instruments:
Trumpets and horns.
Flutes (vertical, as in the panpipe; horizontal--or "transverse"--as in the typical metal flute)
Whistle flutes (as in the recorder)
Clarinets (single-reed instruments)
Oboes (double-reed instruments)

Membranophones

Membranophones are chiefly drums, including kettledrums, tubular drums, and frame drums. They are made of various materials, including wood, metal, gourds, coconut.

Chordophones

Zithers: The strings are stretched between the two ends of a flat board or stick.
This includes the family of "psalteries" in which the strings are plucked: harpsichord, virginal, spinet, psaltery, and zither.
The family of Dulcimers, in which the strings are struck with a hammer: piano, dulcimer, cimbalom, pantaleon.
The strings are touched by tangents: clavichord.

Lutes: Instruments having a body with neck.
Plucked: lute and guitar
Bowed: fiddles, violin family, viols, hurdy-gurdy.

Lyres: Instruments having a yoke (two projecting arms connected at their upper end by a crossbar)
kithara, lyra.

Harps: Instruments in which the strings are strung perpendicular to the soundboard.

Electrophones

Electronic instruments, including the Theremin, Ondes Martenot, synthesizer, midi

Acoustics is a fascinating science with application in the building of concert halls, but also in musical instruments. You can find an interesting article about this in Scientific American, October 1981, entitled "The Acoustics of Violins," by Carleen Hutchins. Also of interest by the same author: "The Physics of Violins" in Scientific American, November 1962. Among other techniques, Ms. Hutchins used hologram interferometry to examine the vibrational properties of fine violins.

The study of musical instruments is a lifetime study, especially because in some cultures, instruments have a cultural significance or religious function far exceeding what the Western art music tradition has assigned to them. The proper study of these instruments takes in their sociology and symbolism, as well as history and development.

For example, in Java, Sumatra, and Bali the bronze "orchestra" called the gamelan is made up of a set of small and large bronze kettle drums. These gamelan were played at ceremonies such as the elevation of a village elder, a rice ceremony to ensure a good harvest, or to give thanks for a successful harvest. Of all the gongs, the largest one (called "gong ageng") was revered, and was thought to hold the spirit of the orchestra. The water that was used to wash out that great drum was in fact sold as holy, healing water.

The Didjeridu, the horn of the Aboriginal people, comes in various lengths, up to about 9 feet in length. It was traditionally made out of a tree branch that had been hollowed out by termites, or a bamboo shoot with the membranes burnt out. Nowadays most Didjeridus are made from plastic. The Didjeridu is both blown and sung into: the performer blows into the horn while also mouthing a secret message.

The Mbira, or thumb piano, is one of the most popular traditional instruments of Africa. The "Mbira of the Ancestors" is an important ritual instrument and is thought to have the power to project its sound into the heavens, attracting the attention of ancestral spirits. Skillful players are supposed to be able to draw these spirits down to earth to inhabit or possess mediums or unsuspecting people.

For further reading- Curt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments. W.W. Norton, 1940.

Finally, here is an array of unusual instruments that you might enjoy looking at.

A German Bagpipe, called a Dudelsack. The bagpipe was made from the body of a sheep or goat. One or two pipes (called chanter) had sound holes to provide the melody, while the other pipes, called drones, produced only one tone each and were used for accompaniment. In Lecture 11 you'll hear an example of it!
	A type of organ called a Bible Regal, so called because it could be folded together like a book. The instrument needed two people to work it: one to play the keyboard and another to pump the bellows (what look like the books). The Regal was invented c.1450 and used especially during the 16th and 17th centuries.
An Oliphant- a medieval horn used for signaling. It was made from an elephant tusk and was often beautifully carved.
	The Hurdy-Gurdy. A medieval stringed instrument operated by a rosined wheel which the player rotated with a handle. It usually also had one or two drone strings and two melody strings (these latter were stopped by tangents connected to the little keyboard). The Hurdy-Gurdy was popular between the 10th - 14th centuries but was later disdained as a street musician's instrument.

Expression Marks-- the art of tempo and dynamics

You’ve probably heard songs like the Beatle's In My Life, that were composed with a fast tempo (meaning pacing, or speed) in mind but that were later performed in a very slow arrangement, such as the one Judy Collins did. Her version worked just beautifully, even though the character of the song was radically changed. On the other hand, certain pieces are so subtly tied to their tempo that even a minute change faster or slower can ruin it. In any case, finding the right tempo is an art--one that belongs to both the composer and the performer.

Nowadays if a composer wants to be very specific about the tempo of a piece, he or she can set a metronome marking for it. The metronome was invented around 1812. Before the invention of the metronome writers used various means to establish a beat, measuring it, for instance, against the heartbeat (Ramos de Pereira, 1482); or comparing it to walking (Buchner), breathing (Gaffurius), or even vegetable chopping! (Finck).

For hundreds of years composers did not use dynamic or tempo markings, mainly because people basically played their own music--and they knew how it was supposed to go! There was no need to write in directions. However, when more composers began to publish their work for others to play it became more common to add dynamic and tempo markings for guidance.

Tempo and expression marks are usually in Italian, which is the lingua franca of music. The Italian language obtained this status because Italy was so prominent in the European musical scene during the years 1600-1750, when most of our current terms were introduced.

In your textbook you'll find a listing of some of the more common terms used to describe both tempo and expression. Be sure to go over these because they are a convenient vocabulary you can use to express your own ideas about music.