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Kelvin
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 Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 3:22 am Post subject: Woodwind Instruments |
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Taken from here
| Quote: | Woodwind Instruments
The principal woodwind instruments of the modern symphony orchestra are the FLUTE, CLARINET, OBOE, and BASSOON. Each of these instruments is the head of a family, or section. The flute family includes the flute and piccolo; the clarinet family includes the clarinet, bass clarinet, and E-flat clarinet; the oboe family includes the oboe and English horn; and the bassoon family includes the bassoon and contrabassoon. The saxophone is also considered a woodwind instrument.
A woodwind instrument is essentially a long tube, or pipe. In order for the instrument to sound, something must make the column of air inside the tube vibrate. The members of the clarinet, oboe, and bassoon families depend on reeds to set the air column vibrating; the player's breath makes the reed itself vibrate. The clarinet uses a single reed, which vibrates against the mouthpiece in which it's set, and the oboe and bassoon both use a double reed, whose split ends vibrate against each other between the player's lips. The members of the flute family are the only woodwind instruments that are not reed instruments. The mouthpiece of a flute is just an oval-shaped hole cut into the side of the instrument near one end. The player blows across (not into) the hole, and the stream of breath strikes the sharp, far edge of the hole, setting up localized air vibrations. These localized vibrations are what set the air column in the instrument vibrating. The same principle applies when blowing across the opening of a bottle to produce a sound.
On woodwind instruments, as on all wind instruments, playing different notes (that is, varying the pitch of notes) is a matter of changing the length of the vibrating air column. The longer the air column, the lower the frequency at which it vibrates and the lower the note; the shorter the air column, the higher the frequency and the higher the note. While brass players can change the actual length of their instrument's tubing, using either valves or a slide (as on the trombone), woodwind players can't � the length of tubing they have to work with is fixed. Woodwind players depend instead on a series of holes drilled into the sides of their instrument. By covering or uncovering the holes, the player changes the effective length of the tube: when all the holes are covered, for instance, the length of the air column is the same as the full length of the tube, but when a hole is open, it's as if the tube ended right at that hole. Uncovering a hole, in other words, shortens the length of the vibrating air column. (When a number of holes are uncovered, the one that determines the pitch of the note is the one closest to the vibration source, that is, the one that makes the air column the shortest.) While the air column can be shortened to varying degrees, there's no way to make it longer than the full length of the tube. This means that the lowest possible note on a woodwind instrument is the note that sounds when all the holes are covered.
Covering and uncovering holes is not the only way woodwind players can play different notes, however. Like brass players, woodwind players can increase their lip tension and breath pressure to produce changes in pressure within the air column. This technique is called �overblowing.� (Woodwind players and brass players both use the term overblowing, but the specific playing techniques are completely different. Overblowing is also different from one woodwind instrument to the next.) Overblowing causes the air column to vibrate in partial lengths, meaning at higher frequencies, and the result is higher pitches. When used in combination with covering and uncovering holes, overblowing greatly expands the range of possible pitches on a woodwind instrument.
Since there are far more holes on a woodwind instrument than a player has fingers, woodwind players must cover and uncover the necessary holes by using an array of metal keys, which are part of a system of levers, rods, and springs, all connected to felt-padded hole covers. The key mechanisms for the various instruments are quite elaborate and sophisticated, and the fingering systems can be extremely complex. The modern bassoon, for example, has between seventeen and twenty-two keys, and a look at a fingering chart for the bassoon � a chart that indicates which fingers must press which keys to play all the different notes � is enough to make a nonbassoonist dizzy.
Despite their name, not all woodwind instruments are made of wood. Most modern flutes, for example, are metal. Among professional players, silver flutes are the most common, but many professionals use fourteen-karat gold flutes, and some use flutes made of platinum. Oboes, clarinets, and bassoons are made of wood. Bassoons are made of maple, while oboes and clarinets are usually made of African blackwood (sometimes called grenadilla), a kind of rosewood that grows in Mozambique and Tanzania and that's so dense it doesn't float. Piccolos, too, are often made of African blackwood. Student model woodwind instruments are sometimes made of plastic.
The FLUTE is one of mankind's oldest instruments, and in one form or another it's been known to virtually every culture around the world. The modern flute used in Western classical music is known technically as a transverse flute because the player holds it out to one side and blows across a hole in the side of the instrument. Other flutes, such as the recorder, are �end-blown� � the player blows directly into an opening in one end of the instrument. Transverse flutes were known in Europe from medieval times, but up until the late 1600s their tonal and technical capabilities were quite limited. Most composers preferred to write for the recorder, which had a sweeter sound and more accurate pitch. French instrument makers made great improvements in the transverse flute, however, and by the mid-1700s it had generally replaced the recorder. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685�1750) and George Frideric Handel (1685�1759) wrote for both recorder and flute. The instrument they called flauto (Italian for �flute�) was actually the recorder. When they wrote for what we now call flute, they specified flauto traverso. The flute parts in Bach's Second and Fourth Brandenburg Concertos, for example, were originally intended for recorder, while his various sonatas for solo or accompanied flute, the trio sonatas with flute, and the Suite in B Minor for flute, strings, and basso continuo were composed for the transverse flute.
By the late 1700s, the time of Haydn and Mozart, most orchestras included at least a pair of flutes. The PICCOLO found its place somewhat later: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770�1827) became the first to give the instrument an important role in symphonic music by including piccolo parts in his Fifth (1808), Sixth (1808), and Ninth (1824) symphonies. Piccolo means �small� in Italian, and the piccolo is a small flute. It's half the length of a regular flute, in fact, and sounds an octave higher. It's the highest of the woodwind instruments, and its sound can �cut through� even the loudest and thickest orchestral sonorities.
In the 1830s and 1840s, a German flute virtuoso and flute maker (and goldsmith) named Theobald Boehm (1794�1881) revolutionized flute playing. Even with the improvements that had come before, the flute was still awkward to play, and its pitch remained unreliable. Boehm essentially reinvented the instrument, spacing and shaping the holes differently and developing an entirely new key mechanism and fingering system (used on the piccolo, as well). With only minor modifications, the Boehm flute has remained the standard ever since.
The chamber music repertoire for flute is extensive. It includes, in addition to an enormous quantity of Baroque music and a steadily growing body of contemporary work, the four quartets for flute and strings by Mozart, the Beethoven Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25, the Sonata for flute, viola, and harp (1915) by Claude Debussy, and sonatas for flute and piano by Joseph Haydn (1732�1809), Bohuslav Martinu (1890�1959), Sergei Prokofiev (1891�1953), Darius Milhaud, (1892�1924), Paul Hindemith (1895�1963), and Francis Poulenc (1899�1963). Solo works include Debussy's Syrinx (1912) for unaccompanied flute, and concertos by Antonio Vivaldi (ca. 1675�1741), George Frideric Handel, C.P.E. Bach (1714�1788), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756�1791), Carl Nielsen (1865�1931), Jacques Ibert (1890�1962), and Walter Piston (1894�1976). A person who plays the flute may be called either a �flutist� or a �flautist,� although in the United States, flutist is now the more common designation.
The modern OBOE most likely originated in France during the 1600s. The word oboe, which is the instrument's name in both English and Italian, comes from the French name, hautbois (pronounced �oh-bwah�), meaning �high wood,�, or �loud wood.� Early English versions included hautboy, howboie, hoyboye, and hoboy. The double-reed forerunner of the oboe was an instrument called the �shawm.� Shawms in various sizes had been known in Europe since at least the thirteenth century, and in fact the French originally used the word hautbois as a name for small shawms.
The sound of the �new and improved� hautbois � the oboe � was more pleasing and varied than the shawm's, and easier for the player to control because of certain differences in the way the reed was held between the lips. The oboe very quickly became popular throughout Europe, and by 1700 most orchestras included a pair of oboes. Oboes predated flutes in the orchestra, in other words, and for much of the eighteenth century oboes were the primary high woodwind instruments of the orchestra. Since 1700, there's hardly been an orchestral composition that has not included oboes.
In addition to countless Baroque works, important chamber music works featuring the oboe include the following: Mozart's Quartet for oboe and strings, K. 370; Robert Schumann's Three Romances for oboe and piano, Op. 94; a trio for oboe, bassoon, and piano by Poulenc; the Fantasy Quartet for oboe and strings by Benjamin Britten (1913�1976); Prokofiev's Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and bass, Op. 43; and sonatas for oboe and piano by Hindemith, Poulenc, Milhaud, and Camille Saint-Sa�ns (1835�1921). Solo works include Britten's Six Metamorphoses for unaccompanied oboe, J. S. Bach's Double Concerto for oboe and violin, two concertos by Handel, eight by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681�1767), two dozen by Tomaso Albinoni (1671�1751), and concertos by Richard Strauss (1864�1949) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872�1958).
Some consider the ENGLISH HORN a �tenor� oboe, though most think of it as an �alto� oboe. Either way, it's a longer, lower, and mellower instrument than the regular oboe, which all agree is the �soprano� of the family. Besides the difference in length (about 31 � inches for the English horn compared to just over 23 inches for the oboe), the most noticeable physical difference between the two is that the oboe has a slightly flared bottom end, or bell, while the English horn has a bulb-shaped bell. The English horn has been in existence, in various forms, since the late 1600s, but it's been a standard member of the orchestra only since the 1830s. It acquired its present shape in about 1839, thanks to a French instrument maker named Henri Brod, but strangely enough, nobody really knows when or how it acquired its name. Famous solo passages for the English horn are found in the Roman Carnival Overture (1844) by Hector Berlioz, C�sar Franck's Symphony in D Minor (1886�1888), Anton�n Dvor�k's Ninth Symphony ( From the New World, 1893), and The Swan of Tuonela (1893) by Jean Sibelius.
If the oboe is the soprano and the English born is the alto or tenor, the BASSOON is the bass of the double-reed family. It consists of a long wooden tube constructed with a tight bend so that it doubles back on itself, forming two parallel columns. If it weren't doubled, it would extend to a length of about eight and a half feet and would be impossible to play. The reed isn't inserted directly in the instrument, as on the oboe, but fits on the end of a long, curved metal tube called the crook, or bocal. (The English horn also uses a bocal, but a much shorter one.)
The bassoon's family tree has a number of very old branches, all of them fairly twisted, but the modern bassoon seems to have originated among the same group of seventeenth-century French instrument makers who improved the flute and created the oboe. The bassoon joined the orchestra around the same time as the oboe, the two instruments forming the foundation of what would develop into the modern woodwind section. One of the important figures in the early history of music for the bassoon was Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632�1687), court composer to King Louis XIV of France. In his ballets and operas, Lully often paired one bassoon with two oboes for the �trio� sections of his minuets. During the Baroque period (ca. 1600�1750), many composers wrote sonatas and trio sonatas with bassoon, and many also wrote bassoon concertos. Antonio Vivaldi alone wrote thirty-eight bassoon concertos.
The greatest of bassoon concertos is the Mozart Bassoon Concerto, composed in 1774, when Mozart was eighteen. Mozart also wrote a delightful Duo for bassoon and cello. Carl Maria von Weber (1786�1826) wrote a Concerto and also an Andante and Hungarian Rondo for bassoon and orchestra, and about a hundred years later Edward Elgar (1857�1934) wrote a Romance for bassoon and orchestra. The post-Baroque chamber music repertoire with bassoon as the featured instrument is unfortunately neither extensive nor terribly distinguished. The Poulenc Trio for oboe, bassoon, and piano is worth mentioning again, and there are also sonatas for bassoon and piano by Saint-Sa�ns and Hindemith.
The �sub-bass� of the double-reed family is the CONTRABASSOON, also called the double bassoon. Contra is Latin for �against,� but in this context contra and double both mean �lower octave,� which describes the pitch range of the contrabassoon as compared to the bassoon. It's a range in which the sound vibrations can often be felt as well as heard. Double also refers to the instrument's length, however, for the only way the contrabassoon can produce such low sounds is for the tube to be twice as long as that of the bassoon. The contrabassoon is tremendously heavy and cumbersome, with four parallel wooden columns as opposed to the bassoon's two, and a metal bell. Contrabassoonists always play sitting down, with the weight of the instrument supported by the floor.
Both Handel and Haydn wrote occasional parts for an early form of the double bassoon, and Beethoven called for double bassoon in his Fifth and Ninth symphonies. The modern contrabassoon did not appear until the 1870s, however, when a completely new design was developed by the Heckel company of Wiesbaden, Germany. Pieces with prominent parts for the contrabassoon include The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897), by Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose (1911), and Ravel's Piano Concerto for the left hand (1930). The contrabassoon is about the furthest thing imaginable from a flashy solo instrument, but there is one excellent concerto for contrabassoon and orchestra, written in 1978 by the American composer Gunther Schuller.
The CLARINET was the last of the principal woodwind instruments to join the orchestra. The modern clarinet evolved from earlier forms in the early 1700s � later than the oboe, bassoon, and flute � and it wasn't until quite late in the century that orchestral composers included it in their scores with any regularity. Of Mozart's forty-one symphonies, for example, only four, Nos. 31 (1778), 35 (1782), 39 (1788), and 40 (1788), include parts for clarinet. All of Beethoven's symphonies, on the other hand, call for a pair of clarinets: by 1800, the clarinet was in the orchestra to stay.
The flute, oboe, and bassoon all have characteristic tone qualities that give them strong and very appealing individual identities, or �personalities.� Of all the woodwinds, though, the clarinet is the one with the widest range of tone qualities. The sound of the very low register of the clarinet, for example, is worlds apart from the sound of the high register, and the clarinet can go from the smoothest and gentlest of singing sounds � in any register � to all manner of boisterous exclamation and flourishes, not to mention honks and shrieks.
Mozart was the first major composer to recognize and exploit the clarinet's potential, and his Clarinet Concerto remains the jewel of the solo clarinet literature (although it was originally intended for a hybrid instrument called the �basset-clarinet,� a cross between the clarinet and an older, slightly lower clarinetlike instrument called the �basset horn�). Other composers who have written important clarinet concertos include Weber (two concertos), Gioacchino Rossini (1792�1868; Variations for clarinet and orchestra), Debussy (First Rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra), Hindemith, Carl Nielsen, and Aaron Copland (1900�1990). Igor Stravinsky (1882�1971) wrote a piece called Ebony Concerto, for clarinet and jazz band.
The clarinet has by far the richest post-Baroque chamber music repertoire of all the woodwind instruments. Among the masterpieces of this repertoire are the Quintet for clarinet and strings, K. 581, and the Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, K. 498, by Mozart, the Beethoven Trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, Op. 11, Schumann's Fairy Tales for clarinet, viola, and piano, Op. 132, and Fantasy Pieces for clarinet and piano, Op. 73, and four works by Johannes Brahms (1833�1897): the Trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, Op. 114, the Quintet for clarinet and strings, Op. 115, and the two Sonatas for clarinet and piano, Op. 120, Nos. 1 and 2. Other composers who have written substantial chamber works featuring the clarinet include Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778�1837), Felix Mendelssohn (1809�1847), Saint Sa�ns, Vincent d'Indy (1851�1931), Max Reger (1873�1916), Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen (1908�1992; Quartet for the End of Time), and B�la Bart�k (1881�1945), whose Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano (1938) was commissioned by the jazz great Benny Goodman. Contemporary composers who have made significant contributions include Seymour Barab, John Harbison, Robert Muczynski, Max Raimi, Bruce Saylor, and Paul Schoenfield, among many others.
Two other members of the clarinet family, the BASS CLARINET and the E-FLAT CLARINET, are employed fairly often in the modern symphony orchestra. The E-flat clarinet is a small, high-pitched clarinet. It was originally a military band instrument, and was first used in the orchestra by Hector Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique (1830). The bass clarinet sounds an octave lower than the clarinet. To make its greater length manageable for the player, it curves upward at the lower end and downward at the upper end. The instrument was invented near the end of the eighteenth century, and Berlioz was one of the first to write for it. It's often found in the large-scale works of Richard Wagner (1813�1883), Gustav Mahler (1860�1911), Arnold Schoenberg (1874�1951), and Igor Stravinsky.
The SAXOPHONE was invented by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax (1814�1894) in about 1840. It uses a clarinet-style mouthpiece with a single reed and is generally considered a woodwind instrument, but it's made of brass. It comes in a variety of sizes, the most common of which are the soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, and tenor saxophone. Sax originally intended the instrument for use in military bands, and it became well known in the United States starting in the late 1800s largely through the efforts of the bandmaster John Philip Sousa (1854�1932). Its importance as a jazz instrument dates from the 1920s.
The saxophone is used only occasionally in the orchestra. Among the composers who have written significant orchestral saxophone parts are Richard Strauss, in his Symphonia Domestica; Ravel, in Bolero and in his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition; Prokofiev, in the Lieutenant Kij� Suite and the ballet Romeo and Juliet; Alban Berg (1885�1935) in the opera Lulu, and Britten in the opera Billy Budd. Important solo works include the Debussy Rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra (1908), the Concerto for saxophone and orchestra (1934) by Alexander Glazunov (1865�1936), and Ibert's Concertino da camera for saxophone and eleven instruments (1935).
There are a number of well-known chamber music pieces that call for several woodwind instruments in combination with at least one other instrument. Among the great works in this category are the Mozart Quintet for piano and winds (clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and French horn), K. 452, the Beethoven Quintet for piano and winds, Op. 16, the Beethoven Septet for violin, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn, Op. 20, and the Schubert Octet, which adds another violin to the Beethoven Septet combination. There is also a substantial repertoire for the woodwind quintet formation, which consists of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn, and for larger woodwind ensembles. The French horn is a brass instrument, but its sound blends very well with the woodwinds, and it often joins forces with them, especially in chamber music. |
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rowanlim
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| Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:02 am Post subject: |
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Wow...so much about woodwind instruments! I rarely see orchestral performance with saxophone...if got, we have to go see 
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ash
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| Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 1:43 pm Post subject: |
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Yup if there are saxophone would be more interesting in terms of music and performance. Sometimes its not just about typical classical
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rowanlim
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| Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 3:57 pm Post subject: |
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Maybe I will find some videos/mp3 with saxophone music
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