1.
Berlin Musical Instrument Museum
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The Berlin Musical Instrument Museum is located at the Kulturforum on Tiergartenstraße in Berlin, Germany. The Museum holds over 3,500 musical instruments from the 16th century onward and is one of the largest and most representative musical instrument collections in Germany. Objects include a portable harpsichord once owned by Prussia’s Queen Sophie Charlotte, flutes from the collection of Frederick the Great, the Museum was founded in 1888 at the Royal Academy of Music in Berlin from a collection assembled by Philipp Spitta and Joseph Joachim. Thirty-four instruments from the Museum of Decorative Arts, which had once been heard at the court of the Kingdom of Prussia. By 1890 the Museum had purchased more from Leipzig publisher. The world famous Bach Cembalo is one of these, the largest acquisitions were made by Oskar Fleischer, first Director from 1892-1919, with financial support from Wilhelm II. Curt Sachs, Director from 1919-1933, brought a scientific approach to the collections and he was one of the founders of modern organology and co-authored the Sachs-Hornbostel system of instrument classification. The Museum rose to importance and his catalogs form the basis of academic research papers to this day. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Sachs was dismissed from his post by the Nazi Party, in 1935, the musical instrument collection was removed from the Academy to the new National Institute for German Music Research headed by Max Seiffert. The new Museum opened its doors at the Palais von Kreutz at Klosterstraße 36 in 1936, during the war, the Museum and its collection was almost completely destroyed. In 1943, holdings were evacuated from Berlin to protect them from Allied bombing, despite extensive security measures, a large portion was lost. In January 1945 by decree of the Reich Minister for Science, Education and Public Education, by wars end, the building was a ruin and only 700 instruments of the original collection survived. Despite sparse funding, an effort was mounted to reconstruct the musical instrument collection. In 1950, on the 200th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, alfred Berner, Director until 1975, largely succeeded in rebuilding the Museum and in addition a comprehensive library focusing on organology. Since 1984, the museum has been located in a Wisniewski-designed building at the Kemper Platz, today there are over 3,200 instruments in the collection and about 800 exhibits are presented in permanent exhibition. Those instruments that are playable are played regularly. Today the Musical Instrument Museum is part of the State Institute for Music Research, the Musical Instrument Museum and the State Institute for Music Research form a unit in Berlin. Their common building was constructed between 1979 and 1984 by Edgar Wisniewski after the designs of architect Hans Scharoun, who had died in 1972, the museum is one of the few places where a theater organ can be heard live, the 1929 Mighty Wurlitzer organ
2.
Hyacinthe Rigaud
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Hyacinthe Rigaud was a French baroque painter of Catalan origin whose career was based in Paris. Hyacinthe Rigaud was born in Perpignan, the grandson of painter-gilders from Roussillon and he was trained in tailoring in his fathers workshop but perfected his skills as a painter under Antoine Ranc at Montpellier from 1671 onwards, before moving to Lyon four years later. It was in cities that he became familiar with Flemish, Dutch and Italian painting, particularly that of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Titian. Arriving in Paris in 1681, he won the prix de Rome in 1682, received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1700, he rose to the top of this institution before retiring from it in 1735. Since Rigauds paintings captured very exact likenesses along with the costumes and background details. Rigaud was baptised with his Catalan name in the old cathédrale Saint-Jean de Perpignan on 20 July 1659 and he would not have become French had not Roussillon and the Cerdanya been annexed to France the following 7 November thanks to the Treaty of the Pyrenees. That Treaty also put an end to the wars that had taken place between France and Habsburg Spain since 1635 and married King Louis XIV of France to the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, few of these have survived to the present. On 13 March 1647 Hyacinthes father Matias Rigau, married Thérèse Faget, widowed shortly after, he decided to speedily remarry, to Maria Serra, daughter of a Perpignan textile merchant, on 20 December 1655. In 1665, he acquired a house en lo carrer de las casas cremades, by his second marriage, he also acquired a house on place de lHuile, but he soon sold it. Unfortunately, little is known about Rigauds activities in Lyon, due to the lack of surviving documents, however, as per tradition, artists from Montpellier had strong ties with this city, as had, for example, Samuel Boissière who was trained in there, in Lyon. The identity of Rigauds future depicted models shows that he worked for the cloth merchants. Rigauds portrait of Jean de Brunenc, painted in 1687, a merchant, banker and consul of Lyon. In his first will, dated 30 May 1707, the artist left the bust to the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIVs son, also in the document, Rigaud bequeathed the portrait containing the two profiles of Maria Serra to the elder son of his brother Gaspard, named Hyacinthe. He also applied sketches of his sister Claire, accompanied by her husband and their first daughter, in spring 1696, Hyacinthe Rigaud returned to Paris, where he painted one of his most important portraits of the year. This was in fact sollicited by the duke of Saint-Simon, to depict Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, in 1709 he was made a noble by his hometown of Perpignan. In 1727 he was made a knight of the Order of Saint Michael, Rigaud died in Paris in 1743 at the age of 84. He was one of the most important portrait painters during the reign of King Louis XIV and his instinct for impressive poses and grand presentations precisely suited the tastes of the royal personages, ambassadors, clerics, courtiers, and financiers who sat for him. His œuvre reads as a portrait gallery of the chief movers in France from 1680 to 1740
3.
Aix-en-Provence
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Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, is a city-commune in the south of France, about 30 km north of Marseille. It is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte dAzur, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, the population of Aix numbers approximately 143,000. Its inhabitants are called Aixois or, less commonly, Aquisextains, Aix was founded in 123 BC by the Roman consul Sextius Calvinus, who gave his name to its springs, following the destruction of the nearby Gallic oppidum at Entremont. In the 4th century AD it became the metropolis of Narbonensis Secunda and it was occupied by the Visigoths in 477. In the succeeding century, the town was plundered by the Franks and Lombards. Aix passed to the crown of France with the rest of Provence in 1487, and in 1501 Louis XII established there the parliament of Provence, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the town was the seat of the Intendance of Provence. Current archeological excavations in the Ville des Tours, a suburb of Aix, have unearthed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre. The city slopes gently north to south and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire can easily be seen to the east. Aixs position in the south of France gives it a warm climate and it has an average January temperature of 5 °C and a July average of 23 °C. It has an average of 300 days of sunshine and only 91 days of rain, while it is partially protected from the Mistral, Aix still occasionally experiences the cooler and gusty conditions it brings. Unlike most of France which has a climate, Aix-en-Provence has a Mediterranean climate. The Cours Mirabeau is a thoroughfare, planted with double rows of plane-trees, bordered by fine houses. It follows the line of the old city wall and divides the town into two sections. The new town extends to the south and west, the old town, with its narrow, along this avenue, which is lined on one side with banks and on the other with cafés, is the Deux Garçons, the most famous brasserie in Aix. Built in 1792, it has been frequented by the likes of Paul Cézanne, Émile Zola, the Cathedral of the Holy Saviour is situated to the north in the medieval part of Aix. The archbishops palace and a Romanesque cloister adjoin the cathedral on its south side, the Archbishopric of Aix is now shared with Arles. Among its other public institutions, Aix also has the second most important Appeal Court outside of Paris, the Hôtel de Ville, a building in the classical style of the middle of the 17th century, looks onto a picturesque square. It contains some fine woodwork and tapestries, at its side rises a handsome clock-tower erected in 1510
4.
Denis Diderot
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Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne, and began his formal education at a Jesuit collège in Langres. His parents were Didier Diderot a cutler, maître coutelier, three of five siblings survived to adulthood, Denise Diderot and their youngest brother Pierre-Didier Diderot, and finally their sister Angélique Diderot. According to Arthur McCandless Wilson, Denis Diderot greatly admired his sister Denise, in 1732 Denis Diderot earned the Master of Arts degree in philosophy. Then he entered the Collège dHarcourt of the University of Paris and he abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study at the Paris Law Faculty. His study of law was short-lived however and in 1734 Diderot decided to become a writer, because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence. In 1742 he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1743 he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion, a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered due to Champions low social standing, poor education, fatherless status. She was about three years older than Diderot, the marriage in October 1743 produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angélique, after both Diderots dead mother and sister, the death of his sister, a nun, from overwork in the convent may have affected Diderots opinion of religion. Babuti, Madeleine de Puisieux, Sophie Volland and Mme de Maux and his letters to Sophie Volland are known for their candor and are regarded to be among the literary treasures of the eighteenth century. Though his work was broad as well as rigorous, it did not bring Diderot riches, when the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no alternative than to sell his library. When Empress Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library and she then requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, and act as her librarian with a yearly salary. Between October 1773 and March 1774, the sick Diderot spent a few months at the court in Saint Petersburg. Diderot died of thrombosis in Paris on 31 July 1784. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia and this idea seems to have been shelved. In 1745, he published a translation of Shaftesburys Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, in 1746, Diderot wrote his first original work, the Philosophical Thoughts. In this book, Diderot argued for a reconciliation of reason with feeling so as to establish harmony, according to Diderot, without feeling there would be a detrimental effect on virtue and no possibility of creating sublime work
5.
Jean le Rond d'Alembert
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Jean-Baptiste le Rond dAlembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie, DAlemberts formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is referred to as dAlemberts equation. Born in Paris, dAlembert was the son of the writer Claudine Guérin de Tencin and the chevalier Louis-Camus Destouches. Destouches was abroad at the time of dAlemberts birth, days after birth his mother left him on the steps of the Saint-Jean-le-Rond de Paris church. According to custom, he was named after the saint of the church. DAlembert was placed in an orphanage for foundling children, but his father found him and placed him with the wife of a glazier, Madame Rousseau, Destouches secretly paid for the education of Jean le Rond, but did not want his paternity officially recognized. DAlembert first attended a private school, the chevalier Destouches left dAlembert an annuity of 1200 livres on his death in 1726. Under the influence of the Destouches family, at the age of twelve entered the Jansenist Collège des Quatre-Nations. Here he studied philosophy, law, and the arts, graduating as baccalauréat en arts in 1735, in his later life, DAlembert scorned the Cartesian principles he had been taught by the Jansenists, physical promotion, innate ideas and the vortices. The Jansenists steered DAlembert toward a career, attempting to deter him from pursuits such as poetry. Theology was, however, rather unsubstantial fodder for dAlembert and he entered law school for two years, and was nominated avocat in 1738. He was also interested in medicine and mathematics, Jean was first registered under the name Daremberg, but later changed it to dAlembert. The name dAlembert was proposed by Johann Heinrich Lambert for a moon of Venus. In July 1739 he made his first contribution to the field of mathematics, at the time Lanalyse démontrée was a standard work, which dAlembert himself had used to study the foundations of mathematics. DAlembert was also a Latin scholar of note and worked in the latter part of his life on a superb translation of Tacitus. In 1740, he submitted his second scientific work from the field of fluid mechanics Mémoire sur la réfraction des corps solides, in this work dAlembert theoretically explained refraction. In 1741, after failed attempts, dAlembert was elected into the Académie des Sciences
6.
Bagpipes
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Bagpipes are a wind instrument using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The term bagpipe is equally correct in the singular or plural, though pipers usually refer to the bagpipes as the pipes, a set of bagpipes minimally consists of an air supply, a bag, a chanter, and usually at least one drone. Many bagpipes have more than one drone in various combinations, held in place in stocks—sockets that fasten the various pipes to the bag, the most common method of supplying air to the bag is through blowing into a blowpipe, or blowstick. In some pipes the player must cover the tip of the blowpipe with their tongue while inhaling, an innovation, dating from the 16th or 17th century, is the use of a bellows to supply air. In these pipes, sometimes called cauld wind pipes, air is not heated or moistened by the players breathing, the bag is an airtight reservoir that holds air and regulates its flow via arm pressure, allowing the player to maintain continuous even sound. The player keeps the bag inflated by blowing air into it through a blowpipe or pumping air into it with a bellows, materials used for bags vary widely, but the most common are the skins of local animals such as goats, dogs, sheep, and cows. More recently, bags made of materials including Gore-Tex have become much more common. A drawback of the bag is the potential for fungal spores to colonise the bag because of a reduction in necessary cleaning. An advantage of a bag is that they have a zip which allows the user to fit a more effective moisture trap to the inside of the bag. Bags cut from larger materials are usually saddle-stitched with an extra strip folded over the seam, holes are then cut to accommodate the stocks. The chanter is the pipe, played with two hands. Almost all bagpipes have at least one chanter, some pipes have two chanters, particularly those in North Africa, the Balkans in Southern Europe, and Southwest Asia. A chanter can be bored internally so that the walls are parallel for its full length. The chanter is usually open-ended, so there is no way for the player to stop the pipe from sounding. Thus most bagpipes share a constant, legato sound where there are no rests in the music, primarily because of this inability to stop playing, technical movements are used to break up notes and to create the illusion of articulation and accents. Because of their importance, these embellishments are often highly technical systems specific to each bagpipe, a few bagpipes have closed ends or stop the end on the players leg, so that when the player closes the chanter becomes silent. A practice chanter is a chanter without bag or drones, allowing a player to practice the instrument quietly, the term chanter is derived from the Latin cantare, or to sing, much like the modern French word chanteur. The note from the chanter is produced by a reed installed at its top, the reed may be a single or double reed
7.
Double reed
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A double reed is a type of reed used to produce sound in various wind instruments. The term double reed comes from the fact there are two pieces of cane vibrating against each other. A single reed consists of one piece of cane which vibrates against a mouthpiece made of metal, hardened rubber, resin, the term double reeds can also refer collectively to the class of instruments which use double reeds. There are several differences, the most obvious being size, between various types of reeds, for example between that for a bassoon and that for an oboe or a cor anglais. Typically, Arundo donax cane is used for the making of double reeds, for bassoon reeds, tubes of this cane are first split lengthwise then gouged to a certain thickness. The chosen piece of cane is cut to shape and the centre portion is thinned. The cane is folded end to end to form the two blades of the reed, the unprofiled end of the cane is shaped into a tube with the aid of a mandrel and bound with three strategically placed wires. A turban made out of thread is added on the third wire and it provides a hand hold for the reed that isnt a sharp wire. The folded tip is cut off to allow the blades to vibrate and final adjustments to the interior of the using a reamer. The reed is then ready to fit to the bocal of the bassoon, note that there are many schools of thought and processes for making reeds. However, because the oboe does not have a bocal, the cane must be fastened to a metal tube, the staple is then inserted into the farrow at the upper end of the oboe. There are many different methods of making reeds and many variations of design have been developed, players can buy reeds either ready-made, or in various stages of formation, such as part-scraped, reed blanks, or buy the staples and cane separately. Cane is sold in forms, as tubes, gouged, gouged and shaped. Bassoon cane has the option of being profiled before purchase. Cane from several different regions is used in reed making, traditionally from southern France, there are also many options with regard to staples, shaping equipment, and so forth, which all have a subtle effect on the tone quality a reed will produce. While cane is by far the most common material for double reeds, reeds made out of synthetic materials may be used, these reeds often last longer and are less sensitive to temperature and humidity flucutations. Most reeds produced from synthetic materials have a quality that is dissimilar to that of a cane reed and are not favored by musicians. However, some recent manufacturers produce synthetic reeds that are used in a professional setting, oboe double reeds are about 7 mm in width
8.
Oboe
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Oboes /ˈoʊboʊ/ OH-boh are a family of double reed woodwind musical instruments. The most common oboe plays in the treble or soprano range, oboes are usually made of wood, but there are also oboes made of synthetic materials. A soprano oboe measures roughly 65 cm long, with keys, a conical bore. Sound is produced by blowing into the reed and vibrating a column of air, the distinctive oboe tone is versatile, and has been described as bright. When the term oboe is used alone, it is taken to mean the standard treble instrument rather than other instruments of the family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called a hautbois, hoboy. The spelling of oboe was adopted into English c.1770 from the Italian oboè, a musician who plays the oboe is called an oboist or simply an oboe player. In comparison to other woodwind instruments, the treble oboe is sometimes referred to as having a clear. The Sprightly Companion, a book published by Henry Playford in 1695, describes the oboe as Majestical and Stately. Humorously, the sound of the oboe is described in the play Angels in America as like that of a if the duck were a songbird. The rich timbre of the oboe is derived from its conical bore, as a result, oboes are readily audible over other instruments in large ensembles. The highest note of the oboe is a lower than the nominally highest note of the B♭ clarinet. Since the clarinet has a range of notes, the lowest note of the B♭ clarinet is significantly deeper than the lowest note of the oboe. Music for the oboe is written in concert pitch. Orchestras normally tune to a concert A played by the oboe, according to the League of American Orchestras, this is done because the pitch of the oboe is secure and its penetrating sound makes it ideal for tuning purposes. The pitch of the oboe is affected by the way in which the reed is made. The reed has a significant effect on the sound of the instrument, Variations in cane and other construction materials, the age of the reed, and differences in scrape and length all affect the pitch of the instrument. German and French reeds, for instance, differ in many ways, weather conditions such as temperature and humidity also affect the pitch
