Musical instrument M Musical instrument A musical instrument is an object constructed or used for the purpose of making the sounds of music . In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the beginnings of human culture. The academic study of musical instruments is called organology. The date and origin of the first device considered to be a musical instrument is the subject of modern debate. Archaeologists tend to debate the matter in terms of the validity of various physical evidence such as artifacts and cultural works. An artifact of disputed status as a musical instrument dates back as far as 67,000 years old; artifacts commonly accepted to be early flutes date back as far as about 37,000 years old. However, most historians believe determining a specific time of musical instrument invention to be impossible due to the subjectivity of the definition. Musical instruments developed independently in many populated regions of the world. However, contact among civilizations resulted in the rapid spread and adaptation of most instruments in places far from their origin. By the Middle Ages , instruments from Mesopotamia could be found in the Malay Archipelago and Europeans were playing instruments from North Africa.

Development in the Americas occurred at a slower pace, but cultures of North, Central, and South America shared musical instruments. Archaeology In pursuit of understanding who developed the first musical instruments and when, researchers have discovered various archaeological evidence of musical instruments in many parts of the world. Some finds are as much as 67,000 years old, but their status as musical instruments is often in dispute. Consensus solidifies about artifacts dated back to around 37,000 years old and later. Only artifacts made from durable materials or using durable methods tend to survive. As such, the specimens found cannot be irrefutably placed as the earliest musical instruments. In July 1995, Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Turk discovered a bone carving in the northwest region of Slovenia . The carving, named the Divje Babe flute, features four holes that Canadian musicologist Bob Fink determined could have been used to play four notes of a diatonic scale . Researchers estimate the flute's age to be between 43,400 and 67,000 years, making it the oldest known musical instrument and the only musical instrument associated with the Neanderthal culture.

However, some archaeologists question the flute's status as a musical instrument. German archaeologists have found mammoth bone and swan bone flutes dating back to 30,000 to 37,000 years old in the Swabian Alb. The flutes were made in the Upper Paleolithic age, and are more commonly accepted as being the oldest known musical instruments. Archaeological evidence of musical instruments was discovered in excavations at the Royal Cemetery in the Sumerian city of Ur (see Lyres of Ur). These instruments include nine lyres , two harps , a silver double flute , sistra and cymbals . A set of reed-sounded silver pipes discovered in Ur was the likely predecessor of modern bagpipes. The cylindrical pipes feature three side-holes that allowed players to produce whole tone scales. 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 earliest known example of music notation. History Scholars agree that there are no completely reliable methods of determining the exact chronology of musical instruments across cultures. Comparing and organizing instruments based on their complexity is misleading, since advancements in musical instruments have sometimes reduced complexity. For example, construction of early slit drums involved felling and hollowing out large trees; later slit drums were made by opening bamboo stalks, a much simpler task. It is likewise misleading to arrange the development of musical instruments by workmanship since all cultures advance at different levels and have access to different materials. For example, anthropologists attempting to compare musical instruments made by two cultures that existed at the same time but who differed in organization, culture, and handicraft cannot determine which instruments are more "primitive". Ordering instruments by geography is also partially unreliable, as one cannot determine when and how cultures contacted one another and shared knowledge.

German musicologist Curt Sachs, one of the most prominent musicologists and musical ethnologists in modern times, proposed that a geographical chronology until approximately 1400 is preferable, however, due to its limited subjectivity. Beyond 1400, one can follow the overall development of musical instruments by time period. The science of marking the order of musical instrument development relies on archaeological artifacts, artistic depictions, and literary references. Since data in one research path can be inconclusive, all three paths provide a better historical picture. Primitive and prehistoric Until the 19th century AD, European written music histories began with mythological accounts of how musical instruments were invented. Such accounts included Jubal, descendant of Cain and "father of all such as handle the harp and the organ", Pan, inventor of the pan pipes, and Mercury, who is said to have made a dried tortoise shell into the first lyre. Modern histories have replaced such mythology with anthropological speculation, occasionally informed by archeological evidence. Scholars agree that there was no definitive "invention" of the musical instrument since the definition of the term "musical instrument" is completely subjective to both the scholar and the would-be inventor.

For example, a Homo habilis slapping his body could be the makings of a musical instrument regardless of the being's intent. Among the first devices external to the human body considered to be instruments are rattles, stampers, and various drums . These earliest instruments evolved due to the human motor impulse to add sound to emotional movements such as dancing. Eventually, some cultures assigned ritual functions to their musical instruments. Those cultures developed more complex percussion instruments and other instruments such as ribbon reeds, flutes, and trumpets. Some of these labels carry far different connotations from those used in modern day; early flutes and trumpets are so-labeled for their basic operation and function rather than any resemblance to modern instruments. Among early cultures for whom drums developed ritual, even sacred importance are the Chukchi people of the Russian Far East, the indigenous people of Melanesia , and many cultures of Africa . In fact, drums were pervasive throughout every African culture. One East African tribe, the Wahinda, believed it was so holy that seeing a drum would be fatal to any person other than the sultan. Humans eventually developed the concept of using musical instruments for producing a melody .

Until this time in the evolutions of musical instruments, melody was common only in singing. Similar to the process of reduplication in language, instrument players first developed repetition and then arrangement. An early form of melody was produced by pounding two stamping tubes of slightly different sizes—one tube would produce a "clear" sound and the other would answer with a "darker" sound. Such instrument pairs also included bullroarers, slit drums, shell trumpets, and skin drums. Cultures who used these instrument pairs associated genders with them; the "father" was the bigger or more energetic instrument, while the "mother" was the smaller or duller instrument. Musical instruments existed in this form for thousands of years before patterns of three or more tones would evolve in the form of the earliest xylophone . Xylophones originated in the mainland and archipelago of Southeast Asia , eventually spreading to Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Along with xylophones, which ranged from simple sets of three "leg bars" to carefully-tuned sets of parallel bars, various cultures developed instruments such as the ground harp, ground zither , musical bow, and jaw harp .

Antiquity Images of musical instruments begin to appear in Mesopotamian artifacts in 2800 BC or earlier. Beginning around 2000 BC, Sumerian and Babylonian cultures began delineating two distinct classes of musical instruments due to division of labor and the evolving class system. Popular instruments, simple and playable by anyone, evolved differently from professional instruments whose development focused on effectiveness and skill. Despite this development, very few musical instruments have been recovered in Mesopotamia. Scholars must rely on artifacts and cuneiform texts written in Sumerian or Akkadian to reconstruct the early history of musical instruments in Mesopotamia. Even the process of assigning names to these instruments is challenging since there is no clear distinction among various instruments and the words used to describe them. Although Sumerian and Babylonian artists mainly depicted ceremonial instruments, historians have been able to distinguish six idiophones used in early Mesopotamia: concussion clubs, clappers, sistra, bells, cymbals, and rattles.

Sistra are depicted prominently in a great relief of Amenhotep III, and are of particular interest because similar designs have been found in far-reaching places such as Tbilisi , Georgia and among the Native American Yaqui tribe. The people of Mesopotamia preferred stringed instruments to any other, as evidenced by their proliferation in Mesopotamian figurines, plaques, and seals. Innumerable varieties of harps are depicted, as well as lyres and lutes, the forerunner of modern stringed instruments such as the violin. Musical instruments used by the Egyptian culture before 2700 BC bore striking similarity to those of Mesopotamia, leading historians to conclude that the civilizations must have been in contact with one another. Sachs notes that Egypt did not possess any instruments that the Sumerian culture did not also possess. However, by 2700 BC the cultural contacts seem to have dissipated; the lyre, a prominent ceremonial instrument in Sumer, did not appear in Egypt for another 800 years. Clappers and concussion sticks appear on Egyptian vases as early as 3000 BC.

The civilization also made use of sistra, vertical flutes, double clarinets, arched and angular harps, and various drums. Little history is available in the period between 2700 BC and 1500 BC, as Egypt (and indeed, Babylon) entered a long violent period of war and destruction. This period saw the Kassites destroy the Babylonian empire in Mesopotamia and the Hyksos destroy the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. When the Pharaohs of Egypt conquered Southwest Asia in around 1500 BC, the cultural ties to Mesopotamia were renewed and Egypt's musical instruments also reflected heavy influence from Asiatic cultures. Under their new cultural influences, the people of the New Kingdom began using oboes, trumpets, lyres, lutes, castanets, and cymbals. In contrast with Mesopotamia and Egypt, professional musicians did not exist in Israel between 2000 and 1000 BC. While the history of musical instruments in Mesopotamia and Egypt relies on artistic representations, the culture in Israel produced few such representations. Scholars must therefore rely on information gleaned from the Bible and the Talmud .

The Hebrew texts mention two prominent instruments associated with Jubal, ugabs and kinnors. These may be translated as pan pipes and lyres, respectively. Other instruments of the period included tofs, or frame drums, small bells or jingles called pa'amon, shofars , and the trumpet-like hasosra. The introduction of a monarchy in Israel during the 11th century BC produced the first professional musicians and with them a drastic increase in the number and variety of musical instruments. However, identifying and classifying the instruments remains a challenge due to the lack of artistic interpretations. For example, stringed instruments of uncertain design called nevals and asors existed, but neither archaeology nor etymology can clearly define them. In her book A Survey of Musical Instruments, American musicologist Sibyl Marcuse proposes that the nevel must be similar to vertical harp due to its relation to "nabla", the Phoenician term for "harp". In Greece , Rome, and Etruria , the use and development of musical instruments stood in stark contrast to those cultures' achievements in architecture and sculpture. The instruments of the time were simple and virtually all of them were imported from other cultures.

Lyres were the principal instrument, as musicians used them to honor the gods. Greeks played a variety of wind instruments they classified as aulos (reeds) or syrinx (flutes); Greek writing from that time reflects a serious study of reed production and playing technique. Romans played reed instruments named tibia featuring side-holes that could be opened or closed, allowing for greater flexibility in playing modes. Other instruments in common use in the region included vertical harps derived from those of the Orient , lutes of Egyptian design, various pipes and organs, and clappers, which were played primarily by women. Evidence of musical instruments in use by early civilizations of India is almost completely lacking, making it impossible to reliably attribute instruments to the Munda and Dravidian language-speaking cultures that first settled the area. Rather, the history of musical instruments in the area begins with the Indus Valley Civilization that emerged around 3000 BC. Various rattles and whistles found among excavated artifacts are the only physical evidence of musical instruments. A clay statuette indicates the use of drums, and examination of the Indus script has also revealed representations of vertical arched harps identical in design to those depicted in Sumerian artifacts.

This discovery is among many indications that the Indus Valley and Sumerian cultures maintained cultural contact. Subsequent developments in musical instruments in India occurred with the Rigveda, or religious hymns. These songs used various drums, shell trumpets, harps, and flutes. Other prominent instruments in use during the early centuries AD were the snake charmer's double clarinet, bagpipes, barrel drums, cross flutes, and short lutes. In all, India had no unique musical instruments until the Middle Ages. Musical instruments such as zithers appear in Chinese literature written around 1100 BC and earlier. Early Chinese philosophers such as Confucius (551–479 BC), Mencius (372–289 BC), and Laozi shaped the development of musical instruments in China, adopting an attitude toward music similar to that of the Greeks. The Chinese believed that music was an essential part of character and community, and developed a unique system of classifying their musical instruments according to their material makeup. Idiophones were extremely important in Chinese music, hence the majority of early instruments were idiophones.

Poetry of the Shang Dynasty mentions bells, chimes, drums, and globular flutes carved from bone, the latter of which has been excavated and preserved by archaeologists. The Zhou Dynasty introduced percussion instruments such as clappers, troughs, wooden fish, and yu. Wind instruments such as flute, pan-pipes, pitch-pipes, and mouth organs also appeared in this time period. The short lute, a pear-shaped form of a western instrument that spread through many cultures, came into use in China during the Han Dynasty . Although civilizations in Central America attained a relatively high level of sophistication by the eleventh century AD, they lagged behind other civilizations in the development of musical instruments. For example, they had no stringed instruments; all of their instruments were idiophones, drums, and wind instruments such as flutes and trumpets. Of these, only the flute was capable of producing a melody. In contrast, pre-Columbian South American civilizations in areas such as modern-day Peru , Colombia , Ecuador , Bolivia , and Chile were less advanced culturally but more advanced musically. South American cultures of the time used pan-pipes as well as varieties of flutes, idiophones, drums, and shell or wood trumpets.

Middle Ages During the period of time loosely referred to as the Middle Ages, China developed a tradition of integrating musical influence obtained by either conquering foreign countries or by being conquered. The first record of this type of influence is in 384 AD, when China established an East Turkestanic orchestra in its imperial court after a conquest in Turkestan . Influences from India, Mongolia , and other countries followed. In fact, Chinese tradition attributes most musical instruments of the time to those countries. Cymbals and gongs gained popularity, along with more advanced trumpets, clarinets, oboes, flutes, drums, and lutes. Some of the first bowed zithers appeared in China in the 9th or 10th century, influenced by Mongolian culture. India experienced similar development to China in the Middle Ages; however, stringed instruments developed differently to accommodate different styles of music. While stringed instruments of China were designed to produce precise tones capable of matching the tones of chimes, stringed instruments of India were considerably more flexible. This flexibility suited the slides and tremolos of Hindu music.

Rhythm was of paramount importance in Indian music of the time, as evidenced by the frequent depiction of drums in reliefs dating to the Middle Ages. The emphasis on rhythm is an aspect native to Indian music. Historians divide the development of musical instruments in Middle Age India between pre-Islamic and Islamic periods due to the different influence each period provided. In pre-Islamic times, idiophones such hand bells, cymbals, and peculiar instruments resembling gongs came into wide use in Hindu music. The gong-like instrument was a bronze disk that was struck with a hammer instead of a mallet. Tubular drums, stick zithers named veena, short fiddles, double and triple flutes, coiled trumpets, and curved India horns emerged in this time period. Islamic influences brought new types of drums, perfectly circular or octagonal as opposed to the irregular pre-Islamic drums. Persian influence brought oboes and sitars, although Persian sitars had three strings and Indian version had from four to seven. Southeast Asia was responsible for a series of innovations in musical instruments, particularly once their period of Indian influence ended in around 920 AD.

Balinese and Javanese music made prominent use of xylophones and metallophones, bronze versions of the former. The most prominent and important musical instrument of Southeast Asia was the gong. While the gong likely originated in the geographical area between Tibet and Burma , it was part of every category of human activity in Southeast Asian areas such as Java and the Malay Archipelago. The areas of Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula experiences rapid growth and sharing of musical instruments once they were united by Islamic culture in the seventh century. Frame drums and cylindrical drums of various depths were immensely important in all genres of music. Conical oboes were involved in the music that accompanied wedding and circumcision ceremonies. Persian miniatures provide information on the development of kettle drums in Mesopotamia that spread as far as Java. Various lutes, zithers, dulcimers, and harps spread as far as Madagascar to the south and modern-day Sulawesi to the east. Despite the influences of Greece and Rome, most musical instruments in Europe during the Middles Ages came from Asia. The lyre is the only musical instrument that may have been invented in Europe until this period. Stringed instruments were prominent in Middle Age Europe.

The central and northern regions used mainly lyres, stringed instruments with necks, while the southern region used lutes, which featured a two-armed body and a crossbar. Various harps served Central and Northern Europe as far north as Ireland, where the harp eventually became a national symbol. Lyres propagated through the same areas, as far east as Estonia . European music between 800 and 1100 became more sophisticated, more frequently requiring instruments capable of polyphony . The Persian geographer of the 9th century (Ibn Khordadbeh), mentioned in his lexicographical discussion of music instruments that in the Byzantine Empire typical instruments included the urghun (organ), shilyani (probably a type of harp or lyre), salandj (probably a bagpipe ) and the Byzantine lyra (Greek: λύρα ~ lūrā) . Lyra was a medieval pear-shaped bowed string instrument with three to five strings, held upright and is an ancestor of most European bowed instruments, including the violin . The monochord served as a precise measure of the notes of a musical scale, allowing more accurate musical arrangements.

Mechanical hurdy-gurdies allowed single musicians to play more complicated arrangements than a fiddle would; both were prominent folk instruments in the Middle Ages. Southern Europeans played short and long lutes whose pegs extended to the sides, unlike the rear-facing pegs of Central and Northern European instruments. Idiophones such as bells and clappers served various practical purposes, such as warning of the approach of a leper . The ninth century revealed the first bagpipes, which spread throughout Europe and had many uses from folk instruments to military instruments. The construction of pneumatic organs evolved in Europe starting in fifth century Spain, spreading to England in about 700. The resulting instruments varied in size and use from portable organs worn around the neck to large pipe organs. Literary accounts of organs being played in English Benedictine abbeys toward the end of the tenth century are the first references to organs being connected to churches. Reed players of the Middle Ages were limited to oboes; no evidence of clarinets exists during this period. Modern Renaissance Musical instrument development was dominated by the Western Occident from 1400 on—indeed, the most profound changes occurred during the Renaissance period.

Instruments took on other purposes than accompanying singing or dance, and performers used them as solo instruments. Keyboards and lutes developed as polyphonic instruments, and composers arranged increasingly complex pieces using more advanced tablature . Composers also began designing pieces of music for specific instruments. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, orchestration came into common practice as a method of writing music for a variety of instruments. Composers now specified orchestration where individual performers once applied their own discretion. The polyphonic style dominated popular music, and the instrument makers responded accordingly. Beginning in about 1400, the rate of development of musical instruments increased in earnest as compositions demanded more dynamic sounds. People also began writing books about creating, playing, and cataloging musical instruments; the first such book was Sebastian Virdung's 1511 treatise Musica getuscht und angezogen (English: Music Germanized and Abstracted). Virdung's work is noted as being particularly thorough for including descriptions of "irregular" instruments such as hunters' horns and cow bells, though Virdung is critical of the same.

Other books followed, including Arnolt Schlick's Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten (English: Mirror of Organ Makers and Organ Players) the same year, a treatise on organ building and organ playing. Of the instructional books and references published in the Renaissance era, one is noted for its detailed description and depiction of all wind and stringed instruments, including their relative sizes. This book, the Syntagma musicum by Michael Praetorius, is now considered an authoritative reference of sixteenth century musical instruments. In the sixteenth century, musical instrument builders gave most instruments, such as the violin, the "classical shapes" they retain today. An emphasis on aesthetic beauty also developed—listeners were as pleased with the physical appearance of an instrument as they were with its sound. Therefore, builders paid special attention to materials and workmanship, and instruments became collectibles in homes and museums. It was during this period that makers began constructing instruments of the same type in various sizes to meet the demand of consorts, or ensembles playing works written for these groups of instruments. Instrument builders developed other features that endure today.

For example, while organs with multiple keyboards and pedals already existed, the first organs with solo stops emerged in the early fifteenth century. These stops were meant to produce a mixture of timbres, a development needed for the complexity of music of the time. Trumpets evolved into their modern form to improve portability, and players used mutes to properly blend into chamber music . Baroque Beginning in the seventeenth century, composers began creating works of a more emotional style. They felt that a monophonic style better suited the emotional music and wrote musical parts for instruments that would complement the singing human voice. As a result, many instruments that were incapable of larger ranges and dynamics, and therefore were seen as unemotional, fell out of favor. One such instrument was the oboe. Bowed instruments such as the violin, viola, baryton, and various lutes dominated popular music. Beginning in around 1750, however, the lute disappeared from musical compositions in favor of the rising popularity of the guitar . As the prevalence of string orchestras rose, wind instruments such as the flute, oboe, and bassoon began to be readmitted to counteract the monotony of hearing only strings.

In the mid-seventeenth century, what was known as a hunter's horn underwent transformation into an "art instrument" consisting of a lengthened tube, a narrower bore, a wider bell, and much wider range. The details of this transformation are unclear, but the modern horn or, more colloquially, French horn, had emerged by 1725. The slide trumpet appeared, a variation which includes a long-throated mouthpiece that slid in and out, allowing the player infinite adjustments in pitch. This variation on the trumpet was unpopular due to the difficulty involved in playing it. Organs underwent tonal changes in the Baroque period, as manufacturers such as Abraham Jordan of London made the stops more expressive and added devices such as expressive pedals. Sachs viewed this trend as a "degeneration" of the general organ sound. Classification There are many different methods of classifying musical instruments. All methods examine some combination of the physical properties of the instrument, how music is performed on the instrument, the range of the instrument, and the instrument's place in an orchestra or other ensemble. Some methods arise as a result of disagreements between experts on how instruments should be classified.

While a complete survey of the systems of classifications is beyond the scope of this article, a summary of major systems follows. Ancient systems An ancient system, dating from at least the 1st century BC, divides instruments into four main classification groups: instruments where the sound is produced by vibrating strings; instruments where the sound is produced by vibrating columns of air; percussion instruments made of wood or metal; and percussion instruments with skin heads, or drums. Victor-Charles Mahillon later adopted a system very similar to this. He was the curator of the musical instrument collection of the conservatoire in Brussels , and for the 1888 catalogue of the collection divided instruments into four groups: string instruments, wind instruments , percussion instruments , and drums. Sachs-Hornbostel Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs later took up the ancient scheme and published an extensive new scheme for classification in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914. Their scheme is widely used today, and is most often known as the Hornbostel-Sachs system.

The original Sachs-Hornbostel system classified instruments into four main groups: Idiophones, such as the xylophone and rattle, produce sound by vibrating themselves; they are sorted into concussion, percussion, shaken, scraped, split, and plucked idiophones. Membranophones , such as drums or kazoos , produce sound by a vibrating membrane; they are sorted into predrum membranophones, tubular drums, friction idiophones, kettledrums, friction drums, and mirlitons. Chordophones , such as the piano or cello , produce sound by vibrating strings; they are sorted into zithers, keyboard chordophones, lyres, harps, lutes, and bowed chordophones. Aerophones, such as the pipe organ or oboe , produce sound by vibrating columns of air; they are sorted into free aerophones, flutes, organs, reedpipes, and lip-vibrated aerophones. Sachs later added a fifth category, electrophones, such as theremins , which produce sound by electronic means. Within each category are many subgroups.

The system has been criticised and revised over the years, but remains widely used by ethnomusicologists and organologists. Schaeffner Andre Schaeffner, a curator at the Musée de l'Homme, disagreed with the Hornbostel-Sachs system and developed his own system in 1932. Schaeffner believed that the physical structure of a musical instrument, rather than its playing method, should determine its classification. His system divided instruments into two categories: instruments with solid, vibrating bodies and instruments containing vibrating air. 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, recorder, violin, trumpet , clarinet , oboe, cornet , flugelhorn , piccolo trumpet, piccolo , Alto instruments: alto saxophone, alto flute, viola, horn, Alto Horn Tenor instruments: trombone , Tenor Saxophone, bass trumpet Baritone instruments: Bassoon , English Horn, Baritone Saxophone, Baritone Horn, Bass Clarinet, Cello , Euphonium , bass trombone Bass instruments: Contrabassoon , Bass Saxophone, double bass , tuba ContraBass instruments : Contrabass saxophone, Contrabass Bugle 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, 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 F♯6, while a bass clarinet plays about one octave lower. Construction Musical instrument construction is a specialized trade that requires years of training, practice, and sometimes an apprenticeship. Most makers of musical instruments specialize in one genre of instruments; for example, a luthier makes only stringed instruments. Some make only one type of instrument such as a piano. User interfaces Regardless of how the sound in an instrument is produced, many musical instruments have a keyboard as the user-interface. Keyboard instruments are any instruments that are played with a musical keyboard.

Every key generates one or more sounds; most keyboard instruments have extra means (pedals for a piano, stops for an organ) to manipulate these sounds. They may produce sound by wind being fanned (organ) or pumped ( accordion ), vibrating strings either hammered ( piano ) or plucked ( harpsichord ), by electronic means ( synthesizer ), or in some other way. Sometimes, instruments that do not usually have a keyboard, such as the glockenspiel , are fitted with one. Though they have no moving parts and are struck by mallets held in the player's hands, they have the same physical arrangement of keys and produce soundwaves in a similar manner. (Wikipedia) percussion instrument | musical instrument | Britannica.com Percussion instrument xylophone Percussion instrument, any musical instrument belonging to either of two groups, idiophones or membranophones. Idiophones are instruments whose own substance vibrates to produce sound (as opposed to the strings of a guitar or the air column of a flute); examples include bells, clappers, and rattles. Membranophones emit sound by the vibration of a stretched membrane; the prime examples are drums .

The term percussion instrument refers to the fact that most idiophones and membranophones are sounded by being struck, although other playing methods include rubbing, shaking, plucking, and scraping. Although many idiophones and some membranophones are tunable and hence may be melody instruments, both groups serve typically to delineate or emphasize rhythm . Percussion instruments form the third section of the modern Western orchestra , stringed and wind instruments making up the other two sections. The term percussion instrument dates to 1619, when the German music theorist and composer Michael Praetorius wrote of percussa, klopfende Instrument (German klopfen, “to beat”), as any struck instrument, including struck chordophones (stringed instruments). The same combination, including prebow chordophones, constituted the divisio rhythmica in the 7th-century Etymologiae of Isidore , archbishop of Sevilla (Seville). Some of the percussion instruments of the Western orchestra (clockwise, from top): xylophone, gong, … Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Classification Idiophones Idiophones form a diverse and disparate group.

Concussion instruments, consisting of two similar components struck together, include clappers, concussion stones, castanets , and cymbals . Percussion idiophones, instruments struck by a nonsonorous striker, form a large subgroup, including triangles and simple percussion sticks; percussion beams, such as the semanterion ; percussion disks and plaques, single and in sets; xylophones , lithophones (sonorous stones), and metallophones (sets of tuned metal bars); percussion tubes, such as stamping tubes, slit drums, and tubular chimes; and percussion vessels varying from struck gourds and pots to gongs , kettle gongs, steel drums , bells , and musical cups. Similar Topics electronic instrument Shaken idiophones, or rattles , include vessels filled with rattling material, such as gourd, basketry, and hollow-ring rattles, as well as pellet bells; strung rattles, such as dancers’ leg rattles or anklets; stick rattles, including the sistrum , originally a forked stick with crossbars on which rattling shells, etc., have been strung; pendant rattles with suspended rattling objects; and sliding rattles.

Bronze Egyptian sistrum, dated after 850 bc (crossbars and jingles are modern); in the British … Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum, London Other categories include scraped idiophones, comprising scrapers and cog rattles; split idiophones made of split hollow cane, including the Southeast Asian “tuning fork” idiophones and the chopstick; plucked idiophones, such as the jew’s harp , mbira , and music box ; friction idiophones, including friction sticks, simple or combined, and musical glasses; and blown idiophones, such as the 19th-century Äolsklavier and piano chanteur.

Membranophones Musical instruments in which the sound-producing medium is a vibrating membrane fall into four main groups: kettledrums and bowl-shaped drums ; tubular drums—whether cylindrical, barrel, conical, double conical, hourglass, goblet, or shallow—and rattle drums, the membranes of which are set in motion by enclosed pellets or by knotted ends of a thong or cord; friction drums , with membranes caused to vibrate by friction; and mirlitons , whose membranes are set in motion by the sound of an instrument or the human voice. Strictly speaking, mirlitons are voice modifiers rather than true musical instruments inasmuch as they have no pitch of their own. Kettledrums and tubular drums occur in both tunable and nontunable forms; friction drums and mirlitons are not tunable. The membranes of the first two groups are either glued, nailed, lapped, or laced to the body, or shell; if they are glued or nailed, the pitch can be modified by exposure to heat.

Lapped and laced heads are readily tunable by tightening the lacings or screws, and wooden wedges may be inserted between the shell and lacings to further increase the membrane’s tension and thus raise the pitch. The membranes of such instruments and of friction drums are set in vibration by percussion, while those of mirlitons vibrate by impact of sound waves. In all groups the shell plays a subordinate acoustical part, acting as resonator only—the greater the diameter of a head, the deeper its sound; and the greater its tension, the higher the pitch. In Western culture the only drums tuned to a definite pitch are kettledrums (the orchestral timpani ). Flemish rommelpot friction drum; in the Musical Instruments … Courtesy of the Musée Instrumental, IV Department of the MRAH; © IRPA-KIK, Brussels Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Kettledrums and tubular drums may be struck with the hands, with beaters, or with both combined or with the knotted ends of a thong or cord.

Beaters can be cylindrical, club-shaped, straight, curved, or angled, with or without knobs or padding, or may take the form of a switch or wire brush. Friction drums are sounded by rubbing the membrane with a piece of hide or by the more usual method of working an inserted friction stick or cord up and down or by rubbing the membrane with a player’s wet fingers. Acoustically , they are subject to the same laws as other membranophones, but the speed of friction is an influencing factor. They occur in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia (India and Japan), and Hawaii. Mirlitons are sounded by directing against the membrane the vibrating air column of a voice, be it human (as in a kazoo) or instrumental (as when affixed, for example, to African xylophone resonators), or by holding the membrane against the player’s vibrating vocal cords. Music: Fact or Fiction? In addition to the four major categories of membranophones, a small group composed of ground drums and pot drums can also be distinguished. Ground drums, consisting in their simplest form of an animal skin stretched over the opening of a pit, are found in many parts of the world.

The skin may also be held taut by several players, each beating it with a stick. These and similar ground drums are played by women in Africa and Australia, and in North America usually by men. By their very nature ground drums are nonportable; a similar type of instrument was made by stretching a skin over the opening of a gourd, clay pot, or other object. Among the Swazi of southern Africa such skins are not attached but held taut. Pot drums are found in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—in Africa and the Americas often in connection with exorcism. Percussion instruments in Europe Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Antiquity Europe received most of its percussion instruments either directly or indirectly from the sophisticated cultures of the ancient Middle East or from Egypt, a country regarded by the Greeks and Romans as forming part of Asia rather than Africa (a practice that will be followed in this article for convenience). Idiophones European antiquity knew many idiophones. Dancers ’ clappers , held pairwise in the hands of maenads (female participants in Dionysian rites) and other female dancers, often stressed the rhythm of accompanying auloi (the ancient Greek reed pipes).

The time-beating foot clappers of chorus leaders, attached to the right foot like a sandal, were known in Greece as kroupezai, or kroupala, and were adopted by Rome as the scabella. Other idiophones included bells, cymbals, the unidentified ēcheion, and an instrument simply called “the bronze” ( chalkos), probably a metal percussion disk. When the Egyptian cult of Isis spread to Greece and Rome, her sistrum followed, always in the hands of a priest or—rarely—priestess. Egyptian ivory clappers, c. 2000 bc; in the British Museum, London. Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum, London With the exception of clappers, all these instruments were of bronze ; as such they were credited with the apotropaic powers (the special protective powers against evil) accorded this metal in the East. For example, both in various Asian islands and in Greece, it was customary to “sound the chalkos at eclipses of the Moon because it has power to purify and to drive off pollutions” (a scholiast, writing on Theocritus ).

According to the Roman poet Ovid , the annual visit of ghosts of the dead to their former homes was terminated by requests to depart emphasized by the clanging of a bronze plate. The thin bronze percussion disks were affixed to metal handles; one from Pompeii is even garnished with pellet bells . Small bronze bells, which made a clanging rather than ringing sound, warded off evil spirits, averted the evil eye, served as sentinels’ and watchmen’s signal instruments, or were attached to the handle of a Greek warrior’s shield in order to terrify the enemy by their clamour. Small bells were also frequently worn on anklets by jesters, dancers, and courtesans, particularly in Hellenistic times. In Rome, tintinnabulae (“bells”) served as signal instruments or were suspended from the necks of herd animals—again to ward off evil. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Deeply cupped cymbals, played together with a frame drum, were sounded in religious rites and at secular dances.

Forked cymbals known as crotala traveled from Egypt to Greece and Rome, and finger cymbals were introduced from the East, chiefly for dancers, a pair being attached to the thumb and middle finger of each hand. Among the oldest instruments, rattles originally combined the functions of prophylactic amulets and children’s toys, and both functions continued to coexist as late as Roman times. Membranophones Only a few kinds of drums, none indigenous , were known to antiquity. The frame drum came from Mesopotamia at an early date. The barrel drum was possibly known in Hellenistic times, for it appears in the Greco-Indian culture of Kushan. A shallow drum is depicted on a Greco-Scythian metal gorytus, or bow-and-arrow case, of the 4th century bce, but there is no evidence of its having been known to Greece.

Frame drums were known in ancient Egypt , where they occurred in circular, square, and rectangular shapes; traditionally women’s instruments in the Middle East , they remained in the hands of female players and dancers in Greece, and the Eastern playing technique was maintained: held upright on edge in the palm of one hand, the drum was tapped with the fingers of the other. Probably introduced into Greece in the 6th century bce with the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods , Cybele , the frame drum is depicted as being played by maenads and was also a cult instrument in rites of the Orphic religion. From Greece the frame drum passed into Rome, where it was also associated with Cybele. Romans also had double-headed drums and spread them as far north as the Isle of Wight , in Britain, where one is represented on a mosaic pavement as a dancing girl’s instrument. In the late days of the Roman Empire, frame drums became instruments of street musicians and joculatores (professional entertainers); the latter may have been responsible for spreading them beyond the Italian Peninsula . Frame drumming techniques, as demonstrated by musician Tom Teasley.

Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner) The Middle Ages Eyjafjallajökull volcano Idiophones Greek and Roman idiophones were passed on to post-Classical Europe, their distribution undoubtedly aided by joculatores and civic or court musicians ( minstrels ). Whereas prior to the adoption of Christianity most were ritual instruments, their function in medieval times—with the notable exception of the bell—was strictly secular. Clappers (tabulae), flat pieces of bone or wood, were used to flush out birds for hunting and to provide rhythm for popular dancing. Lepers also sounded them to warn others of their approach. Dancers’ castanets , hollow clappers in bivalve form, were played in Spain throughout the Middle Ages; they are illustrated from the 11th century on. Already in Roman times, dancers of Cádiz are known to have played metal castanets, but those of sonorous hardwoods have been preferred since. They are mentioned in the Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X (the Wise).

Cymbals remained virtually unchanged throughout the medieval period, resembling closely those used by the Greeks and the Romans. Probably cast rather than spun, they were held horizontally, one above the other. Small cup-shaped cymbals called acetabulae, made of brass or silver, are mentioned by Cassiodorus (died c. 580) and Isidore of Sevilla. Although the modern practice of striking a single cymbal with a stick was anticipated by Isidore and by the Suda lexicon (late 10th century), larger cymbals continued to be played pairwise and—at least in the later Middle Ages—were found among the “loud” instruments that accompanied dancing and were played at seigneurial festivities. Bells were still thought to possess the power to avert evil; with their adoption, the Christian church took over the belief that ghosts and demons could be put to flight by the sound of metal, a power henceforth augmented by the protection afforded by association with the divine cult and, more specifically, by baptism . The rite of baptizing bells is first recorded in a capitulary (civil ordinance) of Charlemagne of 789.

Exorcizing celebrants sounded handbells or wore bells on their garments. St. John Chrysostom (died 407) felt compelled to protest the custom of attaching bells to the clothing or bracelets of children in order to preserve them against demons, yet small bells or pellet bells continued to adorn the vestments of priests , a practice inherited from the ancient Middle East (51 bells ornamented the cope of Lanfranc , an 11th-century archbishop of Canterbury). The tolling of passing bells was intended to ward off evil spirits from dying persons. Church bells announced the time of day, summoned the faithful to worship, sounded alarms, fought off lightning, broadcast the news of peace or the birth of a princeling, and praised God. In secular life handbells were played in mixed instrumental ensembles, usually one bell in each of the player’s hands. Tuned bells strung together to form chimes were the most highly regarded percussion instruments of the Middle Ages. They appear frequently in manuscript illuminations from the 10th century onward, particularly associated with representations of King David, the second of the Israelite kings.

Chimes are generally shown in groups of from four to nine as clapperless hemispheric bells struck on the outside by a hammer . According to the monk Theophilus (12th century), their pitch was determined by the thickness of the casting rather than the size. From the 13th century, thanks to the wholesale adoption of Islamic techniques for making astronomical hardware and automata, linkwork, and gearing, chimes were connected to clockwork and struck mechanically. As bells grew larger and the compass of the chime was extended, it became known as a carillon . The distinction today is merely one of compass, any set exceeding 11/2 or 2 octaves in compass being considered a carillon. In secular life, pellet bells were suspended from ladies’ belts or worn by jesters. During the 15th century in particular, dancers of the popular moriscas, or Morris dances , attached small bells to their hose. Before the introduction of bells in the Greek Orthodox Church in the 11th century, the semanterion , a percussion beam sounded by a striker, summoned the congregation, and in the Roman Catholic Church it has been used as a substitute for bells during Holy Week.

Triangles first appear in the 14th century; originally a number of loose rattling rings were threaded on the lower portion. Scraped idiophones, known in Europe since Paleolithic times, are encountered as scraped pots intermittently from the 12th century on; such noisemakers were played—to judge by a 14th-century miniature—with other percussive instruments, such as jingle rings and pellet bells, for merrymaking. Few instruments are as suitable for personal music making as the jew’s harp , which was known in the West by the mid-14th century. Most of the above idiophones are nontonal; with the exception of bells and percussion beams, they form part of the musica irregularis decried by writers such as the German organologist Sebastian Virdung in 1511 and as such were restricted to popular entertainment or signaling. Written music of this period does not help to determine whether, or how, idiophones were played with voices or with other instruments. Membranophones Frame drums were popular from the era of the Crusades.

The most common form was the tambourine, or timbrel, a single head on a shallow body, furnished with four or more sets of jingles placed equidistantly around its rim. Pictorial sources show the instrument being played by both males and females, particularly for accompanying the voice. Literary evidence supports this as well, and in the 14th century Giovanni Boccaccio writes of it as accompanying singing too. Jingle rings and pellet bells were also found during this era in popular music making. Tambourine with snare and jingles, detail from an early 14th-century English manuscript (add. … Reproduced by permission of the British Library, London Double-headed drums served to provide rhythmic accompaniment in the Middle Ages, and in the 7th century is found the first evidence of their being played with drumsticks, a technique adopted from Asia. The small rope-strung cylinder drum known as the tabor entered western Europe during the Crusades; the earliest known pictorial evidence is a 12th-century English illumination showing a jongleur disguised as a bear striking a barrel drum suspended from his neck.

Varied in size and depth, the tabor was provided with a snare (material such as gut stretched across the head to produce a rattling sound) and struck with a stick. Played together with the three-holed pipe, it formed a lively one-man band and was found in both aristocratic and popular circles as an accompaniment for the dance. The larger double-headed cylindrical, or long, drum was associated with the military. Slung at an angle to the player’s left, it was played with two sticks and was popularized by Swiss mercenary troops serving in European armies from the 15th century. The naker (naqqārah), a small kettledrum of Arab or Saracen origin, was made of clay, wood, leather, or metal. It was bowl-shaped, with a diameter ranging from 15 to 25 cm (about 6 to 10 inches). Carried in pairs at the player’s waist by means of a belt or harness, each tuned to different indistinct pitches, nakers were played with two short wooden sticks. The skin was tensioned by means of a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened or loosened.

Nakers spread rapidly throughout Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries. They are mentioned in epic poems of the time, and records indicate that almost every court employed a nakerer among its regular stable of musicians. Larger kettledrums were known for some time to the Crusaders, merchants, and other travelers to the Middle East, but it was not until the 15th century that these instruments, mounted in pairs on horseback, found their way into western Europe. They created a sensation in 1457 when a Hungarian embassy entered Paris; such “large cauldrons” had never before been seen, and the horses pranced to the rhythm of the drums. The skins, mounted on rims attached to the instrument by screws, could be tensioned precisely, thus producing true musical notes. Henceforth, following Eastern custom, kettledrums were associated with nobility as an adjunct to pomp and circumstance and a symbol of power and prestige . The less-common friction drum first appears, complete with friction rod, in the late 12th-century sculpture of the archbishop’s palace at Santiago de Compostela , in Spain.

Although it undoubtedly continued to be used, it is not known to be either pictured or mentioned again until the 17th century. The Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods Idiophones Additional idiophones came into use from the Renaissance on. The xylophone , long widespread throughout Asia and Africa, was illustrated in 1529 by the composer and music theorist Martin Agricola . In 1618 Praetorius depicted an instrument with 15 bars from 15 to 53 cm (6 to 21 inches) in length, tuned diatonically. It remained little exploited until the Flemish carillonneurs combined it with a keyboard and transformed it into a practice instrument in the first half of the 17th century. The older form remained a folk instrument, chiefly in and east of Germany. In the West, gongs have always been considered exotic instruments: although the word gong was known in the 16th century, its use is not further recorded until 1791, when it was first employed in orchestral music by the French composer François-Joseph Gossec .

Since then, gongs of indefinite pitch have been included in orchestral scores by Giacomo Meyerbeer , Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , and others for arresting effect. Cymbals were apparently forgotten during the Renaissance; they reappear in the German composer Nicolaus Adam Strungk’s opera Esther (1680) to provide local colour but seem not to have been in general use until the craze for Turkish Janissary music gripped Europe a century later. Christoph Gluck used cymbals in Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), as did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782; The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Joseph Haydn in his Symphony No. 100 (Military Symphony) some 11 years later. By the time of Ludwig van Beethoven, they had acquired a permanent place in the orchestra.

Bells grew larger until the largest ever produced, the Tsar Kolokol III ( Emperor Bell III ; 1733–35) of Moscow, weighing about 180,000 kg (400,000 pounds), proved too cumbersome and heavy for hanging. The hemispheric form was abandoned early as chimes became larger, culminating in tower-borne carillons brought into existence by progress in casting methods and mechanization. Chime bells were connected to town clocks and then hung in separate bell towers, along with a mechanism of external hammers—Chinese in origin—for hitting the bells. Carillons in the Low Countries and northern France had in addition one of the first examples of the stored program. A large wooden barrel or metal cylinder revolved by weight and pulley, furnished with appropriately placed iron pegs indicating the melody; the pegs activated the levers and jack work releasing the hammers that struck the bells. Chorale preludes, hymns, and popular melodies announced the time of day in European carillons, while in Britain, short chime sequences activated by a clock fulfilled the same role.

In addition, British tower bells could be rung in “changes”—a series of mathematical permutations—on bells hung dead. (See change ringing .) The role of small bells became negligible, although handbell ringing was (and still is) a hobby in some parts of the world. Metallophones reached northern Europe from Indonesia in the second half of the 17th century and, like xylophones, were promptly adopted by carillonneurs. In both the Low Countries and the regions to which such instruments spread from there, steel was the metal employed for bars. A specially constructed instrument with keyboard-activated hammers was employed by George Frideric Handel in 1739 in his oratorio Saul and in his revival of Acis and Galatea (1718); another, struck with a beater, is found in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791; The Magic Flute ). Plucked idiophones became more important after the Middle Ages. Jew’s harps were part of the regular stock-in-trade of instrument dealers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the mid-18th century the playing of multiple jew’s harps is mentioned.

Several of these little instruments combined in a single frame were played by virtuosos in the late 18th and 19th centuries and enjoyed enormous popularity. Miniaturization of musical clocks resulted in the creation of the music box , a plucked idiophone provided with a metal-comb mechanism made from about 1770 on, chiefly in Switzerland. In its heyday—1810 to 1910—it was an immensely popular household instrument with a repertoire of opera arias, folk songs, popular tunes of the day, and waltzes (after the mid-century). In the late 19th century it was transformed into a free-reed aerophone (wind instrument) by the substitution of free reeds for the metal comb, but both forms were rendered obsolete by the phonograph and later technologies. A Sakha group (from eastern Siberia) playing the khomus, a … Sovfoto Emerald Polyphon music box with 22-inch- (56-cm-) diameter disc and 16 bells, from Germany, c.

… Courtesy of the Musical Wonder House, Wiscasset, Maine During the 18th century several friction idiophones were introduced, among them the nail violin of Johann Wilde (c. 1740), with its tuned nails bowed by a violin bow. More characteristic of the period were the friction-bar instruments arising as a result of the German acoustician Ernst Chladni ’s late 18th-century experiments, particularly those concerned with the transmission of vibrations by friction. Chladni’s own instrument, the euphone of 1790, and the aiuton of Charles Claggett of about the same time were the first in a series of models, some with piano keyboard and horizontal friction cylinder or cone acting on upright bars and others with bars stroked by the player’s fingers or bowed by a continuous bow. Musical glasses are considerably older: the tuned metal cups or bowls of Asia (sometimes played in India as friction vessels) were transformed in Europe into tuned glasses and are first seen in the Musica theoretica (1492) of the Italian musical theorist Franchino Gafori.

One hears of them intermittently thereafter until they come to the fore in the mid-18th century as concert instruments. The rims of glasses of graduated sizes containing enough water to tune them were rubbed by the player’s moistened fingers. By the 1760s they had attracted the attention of the American scientist and philosopher Benjamin Franklin , who proceeded to convert them into a more efficient and, above all, a polyphonic (many-voiced) instrument, which he called armonica—now known as the glass harmonica . Its popularity was immediate. Mozart’s Adagio und Rondo K 617 was written for it, as was his Adagio für Harmonika K 356, both performed in 1791. Efforts to combine it with a keyboard enjoyed only a passing vogue. Among the last to write for it was the French composer Hector Berlioz in his 1830 orchestral fantasia on Shakespeare’s The Tempest; a decade later it was replaced by the growing family of free reeds.

Membranophones By the Renaissance, Europe had a variety of drums performing specialized functions: frame drums and small tabors accompanied dance and song; larger tabors served as time beaters in small mixed ensembles; great cylinder drums with fifes were placed at the disposal of foot troops; large kettledrums and trumpets were restricted to cavalry and ceremonial music of the aristocracy . The music was at first improvised; later both outdoor carousel music and indoor polychoral sacred music were written for one or two pairs of instruments, sometimes in two contrasting ensembles or choirs—for example, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer’s Arie per il balletto a cavallo (1667). Kettledrums were introduced into the orchestra about 1675–90 by, among others, Jean-Baptiste Lully in Thésée (first performed 1675) and by Henry Purcell in his Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (1692).

With the development of new playing techniques, modified drumstick heads, and the possibility of notating their music (hitherto prohibited by the rules of secrecy imposed upon guild members), kettledrums, henceforth called timpani, triumphantly entered orchestra, opera, and church, soon becoming the most important percussion instrument in the orchestra. Johann Sebastian Bach included a timpani solo in his Cantata No. 214 (Tönet, ihr Pauken!; “Sound, You Timpani!”) and again in his Christmas Oratorio (1735). Haydn also wrote significant parts for the instrument. It was Beethoven , however, who liberated the drums from merely rhythmic functions and their conventional tunings; he was also one of the first to write chords for the instrument. The snare drum remained primarily a military instrument, although Handel used it in his Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749) and Gluck wrote for it in his opera Iphigénie en Tauride (1779).

The bass , or “Turkish,” drum was rare in Europe until the craze for Janissary music in the later 18th century; it was found in Gluck’s Le Cadi dupé (1761), Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Haydn’s Military Symphony. The northern frame drum, or tambourine , was given the status of a salon instrument by 18th-century French society, and, combined with harp or keyboard instrument , it could be heard at fashionable soirees . Friction drums maintained an existence in various parts of Europe, where they were played at Christmas, during the carnival season, or to greet the New Year; some of these traditions continued into the 21st century. Developments after 1800 In general, until the early 19th century, the trend in Western musical culture had been to make diminishing use of nontonal percussion instruments. Those that succeeded in gaining access to the orchestra were used sparingly, often only as special effects or indications of local colour.

By the mid-20th century, this trend had been reversed, especially in popular music, in which percussion instruments, both traditional and alien, play a basic part. Castanets , for example, either clicked together rhythmically or in sustained rolls, had been little more than dancers’ instruments since the 16th century. Richard Wagner was probably the first major composer to use them, in the Paris version of his opera Tannhäuser (1861); 14 years later Georges Bizet employed them with great effect in his opera Carmen. Now, modern rhythm bands frequently include one or two single castanets or a pair attached to a long handle for ease in clicking. On the other hand, tonal percussion instruments have assumed increasing importance. Those inherited from the Middle Ages, such as xylophones and jew’s harps, were expanded to the limit of their potential; others were imported and modified to meet local requirements. Influenced by the great popularity of the piano, keyboards were adapted to numerous 19th-century idiophones in an attempt to render hitherto monophonic (single-voiced) instruments polyphonic.

The 19th century The 19th century saw a rise in the use of percussion instruments in orchestral music. For example, Berlioz called for 10 cymbals in his Requiem (1837), some to be struck together, others to be hit with various drumsticks. Tchaikovsky used syncopated cymbal crashes in his overture Romeo and Juliet (1870). The solo triangle appeared in Franz Liszt ’s First Piano Concerto (1849), and Wagner called for rolls or tremolos on the instrument in both Die Walküre (1856; The Valkyrie) and Die Meistersinger (1868; The Mastersingers). Camille Saint-Saëns included a xylophone solo in his Danse macabre (1874). Among membranophones, the snare drum is given a solo in Gioachino Rossini ’s overture to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1817), and Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss each made use of the tenor, or long, drum.

The bass drum was employed by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony (1824) and by Giuseppe Verdi , who asked for hard, loud blows in his Requiem (1874). Several new instruments—or at least new versions—were introduced in the 19th century. The glockenspiel (from the German Glockenspiel, “bell chime”) was originally a bell chime , as its name indicates. Its transformation into a metallophone was in response to the need for a portable instrument. For marching bands the bars were hung in a lyre-shaped frame; for symphony and opera orchestras—and today rhythm bands as well—a large horizontal glockenspiel shaped like a xylophone is used. Late 18th-century experiments with graduated sets of tuning forks struck by hammers from a keyboard produced the 19th-century “tuning-fork pianos,” the most noteworthy of which were different models of Victor Mustel of Paris from 1865 on.

Graduated steel bars struck from a keyboard by piano hammers form the celesta , patented in 1886 by Auguste and Alphonse Mustel of Paris; Tchaikovsky used the celesta in his ballets The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892), and it is found in opera scores and light orchestral music as well. Tubular bells are European adaptations of Southeast Asian bamboo chimes. They started appearing as substitutes for traditional bells, which were both expensive and cumbersome, in the 19th century, first in the form of steel bars, then hollow bronze cylinders, and finally brass tubes struck with wooden mallets. Mirlitons , with their ability of amplifying and colouring tone, had been known in Europe since at least the 16th century, but they did not gain popularity until the early 19th century. From 1883 on, a French toy maker named Bigot brought out a series called bigophones, which were shaped like orchestral instruments. Popular in the mid-20th century was the tubular kazoo .

The importance of timpani in the orchestra became firmly established in the 19th century. Meyerbeer wrote a melodic solo for four timpani for his opera Robert le Diable (1831). Berlioz required 10 players on 16 drums in his Requiem, and Wagner used 2 players, each with a pair of drums, throughout his opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Russian composers often wrote for small kettledrums with high pitches. Pedal, or machine, drums, which allow players to make almost instantaneous pitch changes, were developed in the 1880s and were soon featured in the tone poems and operas of Richard Strauss and Vincent d’Indy ’s Second Symphony (1902). The 20th and 21st centuries The exploitation of various and unusual tone colours and effects characterizes the use of percussion instruments in 20th- and 21st-century music, classical and popular alike.

Clappers , for example, have been used sparingly but to great effect in, among others, Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1908), to simulate the cracking of a whip, and Gustav Mahler ’s Sixth Symphony (1904). Claves, of Cuban origin, consist of two cylindrical hardwood sticks and are found primarily in dance orchestras, but symphonic composers have written for them as well ( Edgard Varèse in Ionisation, 1931, and Aaron Copland in his Third Symphony, 1946). Castanets are found in Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905). The xylophone appeared in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony; it is also scored, in two different sizes, in Giacomo Puccini ’s Turandot (1926). Alan Hovhaness called for a xylophone solo in his Fantasy on Japanese Wood Prints (1965). The marimba , a xylophone with metal resonating tubes suspended beneath its wooden bars, is featured in Darius Milhaud ’s Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone (1947).

The vibraphone is similar to a celesta but has motor-driven revolving vanes inside each resonator, giving it its unique pulsating tone. Since its development in the 1920s, it has found widespread use in jazz but is also heard increasingly in art music such as Alban Berg ’s Lulu (1934) and Michael Tippett ’s Third Symphony (1972). The glockenspiel is featured throughout the modern era, from Claude Debussy ’s La Mer (1905; “The Sea”) to Pierre Boulez ’s Pli selon pli (1962; “Fold According to Fold”) and beyond. Tubular bells were employed effectively in Ernst von Dohnányi ’s Variations on a Nursery Tune (1914). Rattles are used primarily in modern rhythm bands, but various types are found, for example, in Carl Orff ’s Weihnachtsspiel (1960) and Benjamin Britten ’s The Prodigal Son (1968).

Scraped gourds are now part of the professional percussionist’s equipment, and scrapers , in the form of blocks covered with sandpaper, are rubbed together in Morton Gould ’s Latin-American Symphonette (1941). Scrapers also survive today as carnival noisemakers. Twentieth- and 21st-century composers have frequently called for instruments to be played in new and unusual ways. The gong, for example, is played on the rim with a triangle beater in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; The Woman Without a Shadow), set in vibration by a violin bow in Krzysztof Penderecki ’s Dimensions of Time and Silence (1960), and lowered and raised into a tub of water after being struck in John Cage and Frank Harrison’s Double Music (1941).

Likewise, cymbals have been rubbed together in a circular motion in Béla Bartók ’s Second Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra (1944), played by drawing a cello bow over the edge in Arnold Schoenberg ’s Five Orchestral Pieces (1909), and placed on the heads of a pair of timpani in Arthur Bliss ’s Meditations on a Theme of John Blow (1955). In William Walton ’s Façade (1923) the triangle is used to strike a cymbal, while William Russell’s Fugue for Eight Percussion Instruments (1933) requires three muffled triangles of different sizes. The tambourine is dropped on the floor in Igor Stravinsky ’s Petrushka (1911), its jingles flicked in Walton’s Façade, brushed in Constant Lambert ’s The Rio Grande (1927), and played without jingles in Manuel de Falla ’s El retablo de maese Pedro (1922). Drumming in the 20th century in the West gained an important place outside its traditional preserves of orchestra and military band.

Film and musical theatre scores are full of percussion, and their metamorphoses into symphonic suites by arrangers such as Robert Russell Bennett take optimum advantage of all percussion instruments. Both jazz ensembles, or combos, and experimental music have explored new fields. In the former, the drum, or trap, set—bass drum with foot-operated beater, snare drum, set of tom-toms (cylindrical drums graduated in size), and suspended cymbals—is treated as a solo instrument among its peers. The latter has been preoccupied with rhythmic stress and has exploited drum tones for their own sake. On a popular level, rhythm is stressed or punctuated, often by the clarity and opposing pitches of Latin American drums. Consequently, both the role of the drum and playing techniques have become freer—in orchestral as well as popular music. The snare drum, for example, plays an important solo role in Maurice Ravel ’s Boléro (1928) and an unconventional improvisatory one in Carl Nielsen ’s Fifth Symphony (1922).

Glissando passages on the timpani are found in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), and stepwise ascending and descending chromatic passages are used in Britten’s Nocturne for tenor solo, seven obbligato instruments, and string orchestra (1958). Franco Donatoni’s Concerto for Strings, Brass, and Timpani (1953) calls for the drum to be hit in the centre of the head, while other composers stipulate that it be struck on the head and rim simultaneously (a rim shot). Britten directed that the bass drum be hit with a snare-drum stick in Peter Grimes (1945), but soft wire brushes or other types of sticks may also be used, as in Harold Farberman’s Concerto for [Five] Timpani and Orchestra (1962). Musician playing an elaborate drum set. © .shock/Fotolia

Question: The handtool which may be struck or bowed as a musical instrument is a 'singing (what)'?
Answer: Saw