Wind instrument

“ But the conductors do not seem to notice any discrepancy.
To a considerable extent the fault lies not so much with the wind instruments, as in the character of the piano of the strings; for we do not possess a TRUE PIANO, just as we do not possess a TRUE FORTE; both are wanting in fulness of tone—to attain which our stringed instruments should watch the tone of the winds. Of course it is easy enough to produce a buzzing vibration by gently passing the bow over the strings; but it requires great artistic command of the breath to produce a delicate and pure tone upon a wind instrument. ”

“ If there are available a great many wind instruments and only a few strings, it will probably be better to admit only a few of the best wind instrument players to the orchestra (about two cornets and one trombone) and to organize a band in order to give the rest of the players an opportunity for practice. [2] It will probably be necessary for the conductor to warn his wind players to aim at a more mellow tone than they use when playing in a band, in order that the brass tone may blend with the string tone. ”

“ The first idea of a wind-instrument was doubtless suggested to man by the passing breezes as they struck against the open ends of broken reeds; and the fact that reeds of different lengths emitted murmurs varying in pitch may have further suggested that if placed in a particular order, they would produce an agreeable succession of sounds;—in other words, a short musical scale. ”

“ The Germans classify brass wind instruments as whole and half [1] according to whether, having the wide bore of the bugle, the whole length of the tube is available and gives the fundamental proper to an organ pipe of the same length or whether by reason of the narrow bore in proportion to the length, only half the length of the instrument is of practical utility, the harmonic series beginning with the second harmonic. ”

“ When the brass wind instruments with conical bore and cup-shaped mouthpiece first came into use, it was a well-understood principle that the tube of each instrument must theoretically be made twice as long as an organ pipe giving the same note ”

“ The horn is probably the most difficult of all the wind instruments, and that it is the most treacherous is evidenced by the slips occasionably made by even the finest performers. The F horn is a transposing instrument. ”

“ It is more difficult to establish a comparison in resonance between wood-wind and strings, as everything depends on the number of the latter, but, in an orchestra of medium formation, it may be taken for granted that in piano passages, the whole of one department (all 1st Violins or all 2nd Violins etc.) is equivalent in strength to one wind instrument, (Violins I = 1 Flute etc.) , and, in forte passages, to two wind instruments, (Violins I = 2 Flutes = 1 Oboe + 1 Clarinet, etc.) ”

“ Then also we have not only the stringed quartet, with occasional use of one or other wind instrument, in the recitatives, but, wherever it seems advisable the whole orchestra ORCHESTRA. [159] is employed; the wind instruments serving to accent and light up the most varied combinations. ”

“ In such symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument ensemble, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained with a simple distribution of the string parts. ”

“ A wooden wind instrument, which is used with the snare-drum for playing military music. The music is produced by blowing through a hole in a reed or tube, while the escape of air is regulated by the fingers stopping or opening a number of other holes in different parts of the pipe. ”

“ The scale played at the Health Exhibition, South Kensington, in 1884, by a native ti-tzu player, was a B flat scale with the third rather sharper than the minor but less than the major third, that is, a neuter third, which, as we have seen, is frequently met with in Eastern non-harmonic scales. However, there is great difficulty in determining wind instrument scales accurately, from the power the player has to alter intonation by blowing differently.
The Chinese So-na is a copper wind instrument—a kind of oboe—played with a double reed. ”

“ The place where the instrument is located should not, according to him, be exposed to the open air, but must be a closed one. The air, nevertheless, must have free access to it on both sides of the harp. The force of the wind may be concentrated upon such a point in different ways ”

“ Between the limbs of the syphon is placed a scale graduated from 0 to 3 in inches and 10ths, the zero being in the centre of the scale. When the instrument is used, it is only necessary to fill the tube with water to the zero of the scale, and then expose it to the wind. The natural consequence of wind acting on the surface of the water is to depress it in one limb and raise it in the other, and the sum of the depression and elevation is the height of a column of water which the wind is capable of sustaining at the time of observation. ”

“ Mr Galpin (who is always interesting on evolution) points out that the progenitor of the spinet is the plucked psaltery, whereas the piano forte (the earliest form of which appeared about 1709) is a descendant of the dulcimer in which the strings were struck.
Wind Instruments.
One of the most ancient of wind instruments is the panpipe, which used to be familiar in the Punch and Judy show of our childhood, when it was accompanied by another ancient instrument—the drum. ”

“ The American Organ acts by wind exhaustion. A vacuum is practically created in the air-chamber by the exhausting power of the footboards, and a current of air thus drawn downwards passes through any reeds that are left open, setting them in vibration. This instrument has therefore exhaust instead of force bellows. Valves in the board above the air-chamber give communication to reeds (fig. 2) made more slender than those of the harmonium and more or less bent, while the frames in which they are fixed are also differently shaped, being hollowed rather in spoon fashion. ”

“ CHAPTER XIII. APPARATUS EMPLOYED FOR REGISTERING THE DIRECTION, PRESSURE, AND VELOCITY OF THE WIND.
Fig. 86.
122. The Vane.—The instrument by which the wind’s direction is most generally noted, is the vane, or weather-cock, and all that need be said of it here is that the points north, east, south and west, usually attached to it, should indicate the true and not the magnetic directions; and that care should be taken to prevent its setting fast. Very complicated instruments are required for ascertaining the pressure and velocity of the wind, and these are called Anemometers. ”

“ In the case of wind instruments, such as flutes, trumpets, oboes, clarinets, imitated in the more complex orchestrions, the pins raise levers which open the valves admitting air, compressed by mechanical bellows, to various kinds of flue-pipes, and to others fitted with beating and free reeds. ”

“ Instruments of percussion of indefinite sonorousness or, in other words, pulsatile instruments which have not a sound of a fixed pitch, as the drum, rattle, castanets, etc., are most universal. Wind instruments of the flute kind—​including pipes, whistles, flutes, Pandean pipes, etc.—​are also to be found almost everywhere.
Much the same is the case with wind instruments of the trumpet kind. These are often made of the horns, bones, and tusks of animals; frequently of vegetable substances and of metal. ”

“ Those accustomed to deal with instruments having fixed notes, such as the piano and harp, hardly realize the extreme difficulties which confront both maker and performer in intricate wind instruments such as the horn, on which no sounds can be produced without conscious adjustment of lips and breath, and but few without the additional use of some such contrivance as slide, crook, piston of of the hand in the bell, in the case of the natural or hand horn.
The production of sound in wind instruments has a fourfold object: (1) pitch ”

“ It will be noted that out of about one hundred players almost three-quarters are performers upon stringed instruments, and it is this very large proportion of strings that gives the orchestral tone its characteristic smoothness, its infinite possibilities of dynamic shading, its almost unbelievable agility, and, of course, its inimitable sonority. The wind instruments are useful chiefly in supplying variety of color, and also in giving the conductor the possibility of occasionally obtaining enormous power by means of which to thrill the hearer at climacteric points. ”

“ Wind instruments constitute one of the genera of those which perform their vibrations longitudinally ; and through the air which vibrates in all of them is the same, yet they admit of such a variety in their form, and derive such different characters from this variety, that they may be regarded as a genus not less extensive and important than the class of bodies which vibrate by tension. ”

“ The instrument consists of a frame beautifully mounted on friction rollers, and recording direct on a chronograph barrel. The wind plane is attached to the front end of a bar, carried forward from the frame and clamped thereto, the pressure on the wind plane being taken by a carefully calibrated spring and the deflection recorded on the chronograph drum.
The experiments made with this instrument proved disappointing, the results, owing to the open air conditions, being no more consistent than those previously obtained with the resultant pressure recorder. ”

“ As in the case of stringed instruments, the harmonics of wind instruments naturally reinforce the prime note, but are separable from it by artificial means. In wind instruments this is done by varying the intensity or the direction of the air current from the mouth, which sets in vibration the air-column in the tube, so as to throw the air-column into vibrating portions of different lengths, as in the case of the aliquot parts of a string. The falsetto voice consists of harmonic octaves of the natural voice. ”

“ The flute, flageolet, humming-top, and the cavity of the mouth in whistling, may be considered as simple wind instruments, in which the quality of the sound is alone determined by the vibrations of the air. I have already explained the manner in which the oscillations of a string excite aërial undulations, and thus produce sound ”

“ There is at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich an instrument for noting the direction of the wind, the essential part being an ordinary wind-vane, the movements of which are automatically recorded on a sheet of paper.Illustration of spurious connection. As the wind shifts from north to east the pencil moves in one direction, and when it shifts back again towards the north the pencil moves in the reverse way. But sometimes the wind shifts continuously from north to east, south, west, and back to north again, the vane making a complete revolution ”

“ Lulli and Alessandro Scarlatti were for the most part satisfied with strings, which the former used crudely enough, but the latter with a good deal of perception of tone and appropriateness of style; sometimes with the addition of wind instruments. Early in the eighteenth century several wind instruments, such as oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and flutes, were added, though not often all together; and they served, for the most part, chiefly to strengthen the strings and give contrasting degrees of full sound rather than contrasts of colour and tone. ”

“ I will only remark here, that wind instruments, including the human voice, and stringed instruments, capable of continuous sound, have generally a beneficent effect—while the piano-forte, with such instruments as have no continuity of sound, has just the reverse. ”

“ Wood wind-instruments have the tube pierced with holes, which are covered by the fingers or by keys, and the uncovering of the holes shortens the amount of tube available for vibration and so gives notes of higher pitch. ”

“ It was only when the musical world gave up writing fugues and canons and turned its attention to the harmonic style, in which a song-like melody is supported by an accompaniment built on chords, that the value of the wind choir in the formation of these chords was appreciated. That fact once known, composers speedily established the balance of power between wind and strings, and arranged a suitable list of wind-instruments. ”

“ The wind instruments which have been most employed in chamber music are the flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. Occasionally there is a short bit for horn, or for English horn, and rarely something for trumpet or saxophone. No special combination of these instruments either by themselves or with the piano has obtained signal favor, and we may therefore confine ourselves to mentioning with brief notice the various works of the great masters in turn. We will include likewise here their chamber works for wind instruments without pianoforte. ”

“ If the number of flutes, clarinets, and bassoons be increased to three of each, the [Pg 95] composer has still more combinations. And when it is recollected that every one of these wind-instruments can be used as a solo voice, the range of variety becomes wider yet. But the reader must also bear in mind that the addition of horns and strings still further alters the tonal colors. In short, the wood-wind provides the most useful means of giving variety of color to an orchestral score, and all modern writing abounds in ingenious, surprising, and expressive effects made with the wood choir. ”