0.3 Chapter 2: musical instruments and ensembles  (Page 3/5)

Most music for the voice involves the delivery of words. Indeed, speech itself, which is characterized by both up and down pitch inflections and durational variations of individual sounds, could be considered a primitive form of melody. The pitches of normal speech are relatively narrow in range, neither a robot-like monotone nor extremes of high and low, but even these modest fluctuations are important in punctuating the flow of ideas and communicating emotion. The setting of words to music involves the purposeful shaping of melodic and other musical elements and can invest a text with remarkable expressive power.

Vocal music is often identified as sacred or secular on the basis of its text. Sacred music may be based on a scriptural text, the words of a religious ceremony, or deal with a religious subject. The words in secular music may express feelings, narrate a story, describe activities associated with work or play, comment on social or political situations, convey a nationalistic message, and so on.

Western categories of instruments

Instruments are commonly classified in families, according to their method of generating sounds. The most familiar designations for these groupings are strings (sound produced by vibrating strings), winds (by a vibrating column of air), and percussion (by an object shaken or struck).

The members of the string family of the Western orchestra are violin, viola, cello (or violoncello), and bass (or double bass). All are similar in structure and appearance and also quite homogeneous in tone color, although of different pitch ranges because of differences in the length and diameter of their strings. Sound is produced by drawing a horsehair bow across the strings, less often by plucking with the fingertips (called pizzicato). The harp is a plucked string instrument often found in the orchestra after 1830.

In wind instruments, the player blows through a mouthpiece that is attached to a conical or cylindrical tube filled with air. The winds are subdivided into woodwinds and brass. The nomenclature of the orchestral winds can be both confusing and misleading. For example, the modern flute, classified as a woodwind, is made of metal while ancestors of some modern brass instruments were made of wood; the French horn is a brass instrument, but the English horn is a woodwind; and the saxophone, a relatively new instrument associated principally with jazz and bands, is classified as a woodwind because its mouthpiece is similar to that of the clarinet, although its body is metal.

The main orchestral woodwinds are flute, clarinet, oboe, and bassoon. Their very distinctive tone colors are due in part to the different ways in which the air in the body of the instrument is set in vibration. In the flute (and the piccolo) the player blows into the mouthpiece at a sharp angle, in the clarinet into a mouthpiece with a single reed, and in the oboe and bassoon (also the less common English horn) through two reeds bound together. In all woodwinds, pitch is determined by varying the pressure of the breath in conjunction with opening and closing holes along the side of the instrument, either with the fingers or by keys and pads activated by the fingers.