Square1-music.com - About Musical Instruments and Electronic Music

Musical Instruments and Equipment

A musical instrument is a device constructed or modified for the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument. The term "musical instrument", however, is generally reserved for items that have a specific musical purpose. The academic study of musical instruments is called organology. Contents

Musical Instrument History

Archaelogical evidence for musical instruments was discovered in excavations at the Royal Cemetery in the Sumerian city of Ur. These instruments include nine lyres, two harps, a silver double flute, sistra and cymbals. These excavations, carried out by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, uncovered non-degradable fragments of instruments and the voids left by the degraded segments which, together, have been used to reconstruct them. The graves to which these instruments were related have been carbon dated to between 2600 and 2500 BCE, providing evidence that these instruments were being used in Sumeria by this time.

A cuneiform tablet from Nippur in Mesopotamia dated to 2000 BCE indicates the names of strings on the lyre and represents the the earliest known example of music notation.

Musical instrument classification

There are different methods of classifying musical instruments. One method is to examine the general physical properties of the instrument and how it interacts with its environment; this may be called a physics-based classification scheme. Another method is to examine the instrument's operation or place in an ensemble.

Musical Performance

One of the oldest and most widely taught classification systems for musical instruments is the Strings, Percussion, and Wind classification scheme which organizes instruments based on how players produce sound with the instrument.

Range

Western instruments are also often classified by their musical range in comparison with other instruments in the same family. These terms are named after singing voice classifications:

Soprano instruments: flute, clarinet, recorder, violin, trumpet
Alto instruments: oboe, alto flute, viola, horn
Tenor instruments: English horn, trombone
Bass instruments: bassoon, double bass, bass clarinet, tuba

Some instruments fall into more than one category: for example, the cello may be considered either tenor or bass, depending on how its music fits into the ensemble, and the trombone may be alto, tenor, or bass and the French horn, bass, baritone, tenor, or alto, depending on which range it is played.

Many instruments have their range as part of their name: soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, baritone horn, alto flute, bass flute, alto recorder, bass guitar, etc. Additional adjectives describe instruments above the soprano range or below the bass, for example: sopranino saxophone, contrabass clarinet.

When used in the name of an instrument, these terms are relative, describing the instrument's range in comparison to other instruments of its family and not in comparison to the human voice range or instruments of other families. For example, a bass flute's range is from C3 to F6, while a bass clarinet plays about one octave lower.

Electronic Music and Equipment

Electronic music is music which is made by electronic equipment such as tape recorders or computers.

After World War II, when tape recorders had been invented and were becoming popular, composers started to use them to make music. The tape recorder was needed for the performance. Composers used them to combine lots of different sounds. Sometimes it was music played on ordinary (acoustic) instruments which was then changed in some way by the tape recorder. Sometimes they took sounds from everyday life such as the sound of water, traffic noise or bird song. All these noises were put together in the way the composer wanted by using the tape recorder. Tapes of sounds were often cut into pieces, then the pieces were 'spliced' - put back together in a different order. The results were often very interesting, but there were problems. Some people asked: "Is it music?" Others thought it was boring to just look at a tape recorder during a concert instead of being able to watch live musicians play.

Composers in Paris were experimenting with electronic music in the 1940s. They called it"Musique concrete" because they used natural, concrete sounds. ("Concrete" in this sense meant the opposite of "abstract" music which was written down for performance). The sounds were played back at different speeds, combined in lots of ways, played backwards or played continuously (repeated in a 'loop'), or played into a mixer and re-recorded onto another tape recorder. The sounds could be filtered. Effects such as vibrato or echo could be added. Sometimes composers used synthesizers which were machines that could make electronic music in real time. They sounded more like normal instruments than the sound effects on a tape recorder.

Computers have often been used for composing electronic music.

Classical music

Composers who have used these ways of making music include John Cage (1912-1992), Bruno Maderna (1920-1973) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (b.1928). Very often composers combined electronic music with ordinary instruments being played.

Popular music

In popular music, The use of electronics to create new sounds began in the 1960s. Producer Joe Meek and inventor Bob Moog both expanded the range of sounds that could be used in pop music, and by the end of that decade electronics had become accepted in the industry. In the next few years the work of people like Giorgio Moroder, Jean-Michel Jarre, Brian Eno and Kraftwerk made electronic music famous.

In the early 1980s electronic music became fashionable, and bands like The Human League, and Soft Cell became famous.

In the 21st Century electronics are so much a part of popular music that using it is no longer strange - in fact, many artists use nothing else.

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