Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, music teacher and organist of the Romantic era. He was a writer, a philanthropist, a Hungarian nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nineteenth century for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist, he was a friend, musical promoter and benefactor to many composers of his time, including Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Ole Bull, Joachim Raff, Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Borodin. A prolific composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School, he left behind an extensive and diverse body of work which influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. Among Liszt's musical contributions were the symphonic poem, developing thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form, radical innovations in harmony. Franz Liszt was born to Anna Liszt and Adam Liszt on 22 October 1811, in the village of Doborján in Sopron County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire.
Liszt's father played the piano, violin and guitar. He had been in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy and knew Haydn and Beethoven personally. At age six, Franz began listening attentively to his father's piano playing. Adam began teaching him the piano at age seven, Franz began composing in an elementary manner when he was eight, he appeared in concerts at Sopron and Pressburg in October and November 1820 at age 9. After the concerts, a group of wealthy sponsors offered to finance Franz's musical education in Vienna. There Liszt received piano lessons from Carl Czerny, who in his own youth had been a student of Beethoven and Hummel, he received lessons in composition from Ferdinando Paer and Antonio Salieri, the music director of the Viennese court. Liszt's public debut in Vienna on December 1, 1822, at a concert at the "Landständischer Saal", was a great success, he was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and met Beethoven and Schubert. In spring 1823, when his one-year leave of absence came to an end, Adam Liszt asked Prince Esterházy in vain for two more years.
Adam Liszt therefore took his leave of the Prince's services. At the end of April 1823, the family returned to Hungary for the last time. At the end of May 1823, the family went to Vienna again. Towards the end of 1823 or early 1824, Liszt's first composition to be published, his Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli, appeared as Variation 24 in Part II of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein; this anthology, commissioned by Anton Diabelli, includes 50 variations on his waltz by 50 different composers, Part I being taken up by Beethoven's 33 variations on the same theme, which are now separately better known as his Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. Liszt's inclusion in the Diabelli project—he was described in it as "an 11 year old boy, born in Hungary"—was certainly at the instigation of Czerny, his teacher and a participant. Liszt was the only child composer in the anthology. After his father's death in 1827, Liszt moved to Paris, he gave up touring. To earn money, Liszt gave lessons in piano playing and composition from early morning until late at night.
His students were scattered across the city and he had to cover long distances. Because of this, he kept uncertain hours and took up smoking and drinking—all habits he would continue throughout his life; the following year, he fell in love with one of his pupils, Caroline de Saint-Cricq, the daughter of Charles X's minister of commerce, Pierre de Saint-Cricq. Her father, insisted that the affair be broken off. Liszt fell ill, to the extent that an obituary notice was printed in a Paris newspaper, he underwent a long period of religious doubts and pessimism, he again was dissuaded this time by his mother. He had many discussions with the Abbé de Lamennais, who acted as his spiritual father, with Chrétien Urhan, a German-born violinist who introduced him to the Saint-Simonists. Urhan wrote music, anti-classical and subjective, with titles such as Elle et moi, La Salvation angélique and Les Regrets, may have whetted the young Liszt's taste for musical romanticism. Important for Liszt was Urhan's earnest championship of Schubert, which may have stimulated his own lifelong devotion to that composer's music.
During this period, Liszt read to overcome his lack of a general education, he soon came into contact with many of the leading authors and artists of his day, including Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and Heinrich Heine. He composed nothing in these years; the July Revolution of 1830 inspired him to sketch a Revolutionary Symphony based on the events of the "three glorious days," and he took a greater interest in events surrounding him. He met Hector Berlioz on December 1830, the day before the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique. Berlioz's music made a strong impression on Liszt later when he was writing for orchestra, he inherited from Berlioz the diabolic quality of many of his works. After attending a charity concert on 20 April 1832, for the victims of a Parisian cholera epidemic, organised by Niccolò Paganini, Liszt became determined to become as great a virtuoso on the piano as Paganini was on the violin. Paris in the 1830s had become the nexus
Ophicleide
The ophicleide is a keyed brass instrument similar to the tuba. It is a conical-bore keyed instrument belonging to the bugle family and has a similar shape to the sudrophone; the instrument's name comes from the Greek word ophis "serpent" + kleis "keys", since it was conceived of as a serpent with keys. Like the serpent, some found it difficult to play, early twentieth-century musicians felt it had a somewhat unpredictable sound; the ophicleide was invented in 1817 and patented in 1821 by French instrument maker Jean Hilaire Asté as an extension to the keyed bugle or Royal Kent bugle family. It was the structural cornerstone of the brass section of the Romantic orchestra replacing the serpent, a Renaissance instrument, thought to be outdated, its long tubing bends back on itself, it is played with a cupped mouthpiece similar to modern trombone and euphonium mouthpieces. It had nine keys expanded to as many as twelve keys, covering the large tone holes. Examples exist in E♭, C, B♭, A♭, F and E♭, B♭ and C, F or E♭.
The most common members are the bass ophicleides pitched in B♭ or C. Soprano and contrabass instruments are rare. Adolphe Sax and the modern maker Robb Stewart have built examples of soprano ophicleides an octave above the bass. Only five contrabass ophicleides are known to exist. Three are in museums, two are owned: one in Cooperstown, New York and one in Petaluma, California; those in private hands were both are the only playable examples. The bass ophicleide was first scored for in the opera Olimpie by Gaspare Spontini in 1819. Other famous works which employ it include Felix Mendelssohn's Elias and Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, scored to include both an ophicleide and a serpent. Today, it is replaced with two tubas but the original effect is lost; the tubas are too loud for the intended sound. Https://bandestration.com/2014/02/01/ophicleide/ The instrument was standard in French mid-19th century serious operas by Meyerbeer, Saint-Saëns, Auber, as well as English operas by Michael Balfe, Vincent Wallace, others.
Verdi and Wagner composed for the ophicleide as did Sir Arthur Sullivan in his Overture Di Ballo. American composer William Perry has written a Concerto for Ophicleide and Orchestra for the Australian virtuoso, Nick Byrne. Titled Brass From the Past, it was premiered in 2012 and recorded by Naxos Records with Byrne as soloist; the ophicleide was used in Brazilian choro bands well into the 20th century—soloist Irineu de Almeida was the major performer on the instrument—until it was superseded by the saxophone. The ophicleide was succeeded by the tuba, although it remained popular in Italy until the early twentieth century; the euphonium can be called a successor instrument. One of the last great ophicleide players was the English musician Sam Hughes. There have been claims that the instrument was a direct ancestor of the saxophone: Adolphe Sax, while repairing an ophicleide, put a woodwind mouthpiece on the instrument and liked the sound leading Sax to design and create a purpose-built instrument.
However, this story is not considered plausible, since the developmental history of the saxophone is well documented and the ophicleide and saxophone are only superficially similar to each other in that both have a wide conical bore and large tone holes. A loud bass reed organ stop is named after the ophicleide; the ophicleide, like the keyed bugle, has a fingering system like no other wind instrument. All keys except one are closed, opening only when a finger presses the associated key lever. Just below the bell is the largest of the key-covered tone holes, open, closing only when the lever is pressed; this open tone hole is the acoustic bell, with the bell itself having little effect on sound or pitch. The sound produced with no key levers pressed is the nominal pitch of the instrument. If the player presses the lever for this open tone hole, that hole is closed and the now-longer air column extends past this hole up to the bell, lowering the pitch by one half step. In general, the player can obtain all the "partial" pitches available for a given air column length.
To play a higher series of partials, he opens one of the closed tone holes making that hole the "bell" of the instrument, with a corresponding shorter air column and higher series of pitches. The left hand controls three such tone holes plus the open one below the bell. Pitches in the upper and middle range of the instrument can be obtained by using only the left hand's set of tone holes, the right hand can hold and stabilize the instrument. At the point where the air column is shortened by opening all of the left hand tone holes, there comes a difficult couple of notes that can best be played by continuing to shorten the air column with two fingers of the right hand, before the series of partials "wraps" and the left hand is used again for another set of notes. In the lowest octave, some pitches cannot be obtained well using the holes closer to the bell. For these notes, the other fingers of the right hand can open a few more tone holes that are closer to the mouthpiece than to the bell; some instruments were made with between one and three extra right hand keys to provide better intonation for specific notes in this register.
The right hand keys may be used in the upper registers as
String instrument
String instruments, stringed instruments, or chordophones are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when the performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner. Musicians play some string instruments by plucking the strings with their fingers or a plectrum—and others by hitting the strings with a light wooden hammer or by rubbing the strings with a bow. In some keyboard instruments, such as the harpsichord, the musician presses a key that plucks the string. With bowed instruments, the player pulls a rosined horsehair bow across the strings, causing them to vibrate. With a hurdy-gurdy, the musician cranks. Bowed instruments include the string section instruments of the Classical music orchestra and a number of other instruments. All of the bowed string instruments can be plucked with the fingers, a technique called "pizzicato". A wide variety of techniques are used to sound notes on the electric guitar, including plucking with the fingernails or a plectrum, strumming and "tapping" on the fingerboard and using feedback from a loud, distorted guitar amplifier to produce a sustained sound.
Some types of string instrument are plucked, such as the harp and the electric bass. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, used in organology, string instruments are called chordophones. Other examples include the sitar, banjo, mandolin and bouzouki. In most string instruments, the vibrations are transmitted to the body of the instrument, which incorporates some sort of hollow or enclosed area; the body of the instrument vibrates, along with the air inside it. The vibration of the body of the instrument and the enclosed hollow or chamber make the vibration of the string more audible to the performer and audience; the body of most string instruments is hollow. Some, however—such as electric guitar and other instruments that rely on electronic amplification—may have a solid wood body. Dating to around c. 13,000 BC, a cave painting in the Trois Frères cave in France depicts what some believe is a musical bow, a hunting bow used as a single-stringed musical instrument.
From the musical bow, families of stringed instruments developed. In turn, this led to being able to play chords. Another innovation occurred when the bow harp was straightened out and a bridge used to lift the strings off the stick-neck, creating the lute; this picture of musical bow to harp bow has been contested. In 1965 Franz Jahnel wrote his criticism stating that the early ancestors of plucked instruments are not known, he felt that the harp bow was a long cry from the sophistication of the 4th-century BC civilization that took the primitive technology and created "technically and artistically well-made harps, lyres and lutes."Archaeological digs have identified some of the earliest stringed instruments in Ancient Mesopotamian sites, like the lyres of Ur, which include artifacts over three thousand years old. The development of lyre instruments required the technology to create a tuning mechanism to tighten and loosen the string tension. Lyres with wooden bodies and strings used for plucking or playing with a bow represent key instruments that point towards harps and violin-type instruments.
Musicologists have put forth examples of that 4th-century BC technology, looking at engraved images that have survived. The earliest image showing a lute-like instrument came from Mesopotamia prior to 3000 BC. A cylinder seal from c. 3100 BC or earlier shows. From the surviving images, theororists have categorized the Mesopotamian lutes, showing that they developed into a long variety and a short; the line of long lutes may have developed into pandura. The line of short lutes was further developed to the east of Mesopotamia, in Bactria and Northwest India, shown in sculpture from the 2nd century BC through the 4th or 5th centuries AD. During the medieval era, instrument development varied from country to country. Middle Eastern rebecs represented breakthroughs in terms of shape and strings, with a half a pear shape using three strings. Early versions of the violin and fiddle, by comparison, emerged in Europe through instruments such as the gittern, a four-stringed precursor to the guitar, basic lutes.
These instruments used catgut and other materials, including silk, for their strings. String instrument design refined during the Renaissance and into the Baroque period of musical history. Violins and guitars became more consistent in design and were similar to what we use in the 2000s and into the present day; the violins of the Renaissance featured intricate woodwork and stringing, while more elaborate bass instruments such as the bandora were produced alongside quill-plucked citterns, Spanish body guitars. In the 19th century, string instruments were made more available through mass production, with wood string instruments a key part of orchestras – cellos and upright basses, for example, were now standard instruments for chamber ensembles and smaller orchestras. At the same time, the 19th-century guitar became more associated with six string models, rather than traditional five string versions. Major changes to string instruments in the 20th century involved innovations in electro
Serpent (instrument)
The serpent is a bass wind instrument, descended from the cornett, a distant ancestor of the tuba, with a mouthpiece like a brass instrument but side holes like a woodwind. It is a long cone bent into a snakelike shape, hence the name; the serpent is related to the cornett, although it is not part of the cornett family, due to the absence of a thumb hole. It is made out of wood, with walnut being a popular choice; the outside is covered with black leather. Despite wooden construction and the fact that it has fingerholes rather than valves, it is classed as a brass; the serpent's range varies according to the instrument and the player, but covers one from two octaves below middle C to at least half an octave above middle C. The serpent has six holes, which are ordered in two groups of three. On early models, the fingerholes were keyless, like those of a recorder; however models added keys as on a clarinet, although they were for additional holes, while the original holes remained unkeyed, are covered or uncovered directly by the player's fingers.
While it does not have a rigidly defined fingering system such as other wind instruments employ, the serpent requires an extraordinary amount of effort from the player, who must select the desired pitch with the lips in falset overriding the tone the instrument prefers to sound with any particular fingering. The serpent player has a unique right-hand finger position, in that the index finger may be further down the tube towards the bell than the other fingers of that hand. In this respect the fingering of the right hand is reversed to that found in all other keyed wind instruments, where the keys and holes controlled by the index fingers are further up towards the mouthpiece than the other fingers; this is because the serpent was held vertically, with both of the player's hands oriented palm-down. Players began to hold the instrument horizontally; the instrument is claimed to have been invented by Canon Edmé Guillaume in 1590 in Auxerre and was first used to strengthen the sound of choirs in plainchant.
This date for the invention of the serpent did not appear until 1743, in Jean Lebœuf's "Mémoires Concernant l’Histoire Ecclésiastique et Civile d’Auxerre." Herbert Heyde asserts the serpent evolved from a type of bass cornetto and was invented in Italy in the 16th century. Around the middle of the 18th century, it began to appear in military bands and orchestras, Mozart used two serpentini in his 1771 opera Ascanio in Alba. Richard Wagner used the serpent in place of the double bassoon in his opera Rienzi; the instrument appears in operatic scores by Spontini and Bellini, but it was replaced in the 19th century by a keyed brass instrument, the ophicleide, on by valved bass brass instruments such as the euphonium and tuba. After that the serpent dropped off in popularity for a period of time. Bernard Herrmann used a serpent in the scores of White Witch Doctor and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as did Jerry Goldsmith in his score for Alien. In the 1970s, instrument-maker Christopher Monk began playing, making Serpents, in 1976 he founded the London Serpent Trio.
Since the instrument has undergone a revival of sorts. In 1987, Simon Proctor wrote the first concerto for the instrument; the Serpent Concerto was first performed on 21 October 1989 at the First International Serpent Festival, celebrating the 399th anniversary of the serpent, with serpent soloist Alan Lumsden. Since the Serpent Concerto has been performed in public on many occasions, most notably by Douglas Yeo of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra, who played the solo part with the Boston Pops under the direction of John Williams; the concerto appears on a commercial CD recording, Le Monde du Serpent, on the Berlioz Historic Brass label, BHB 101, with the Berlioz Historical Brass, Gloria Dei Cantores choir, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra et al. In 2008, Douglas Yeo premiered another serpent concerto, "Old Dances in New Shoes" Gordon Bowie, with the Boston Classical Orchestra, conducted by Steven Lipsitt. On 14July 2012 in the Monopoli Conservatory of Music was performed the world premiere of a Serpent Concerto with the title "Diversita': NO LIMIT" by Italian composer Luigi Morleo.
The soundtrack by Austin Wintory of the PlayStation 3 videogame Journey uses a serpent as one of the five soloists. There are two main types of serpent: straight/upright. Within the curved style, there are two variations; the Church serpent is the original type, popularized in France, is distinguished by gentle, sweeping curves and little metal reinforcements. The Military serpent was made in England, its characteristics include having tighter bends and a more compact overall size as a result, with lots of metal bands and stays between the tubing. Furthermore, there are several different sizes besides the common "church" Serpent, including Contrabass and Soprano. Only the original bass size, the tenor, were made during the serpent's heyday; the soprano is a fanciful modern variant, the contrabass is based on a single known original made after the serpent was fading in populari
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, author, music lecturer, pianist. He was among the first conductors educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, his Mass, a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works. Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death, he was a skilled pianist conducting piano concertos from the keyboard. He was a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer he was most passionately interested in.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet and theatre music, choral works, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story, he was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents Jennie and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hairdressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rivne. His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Massachusetts, his grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferred. He changed his name to Leonard when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother's death. To his friends and many others he was known as "Lenny", his father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a hair product store in downtown Lawrence on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestral concerts in his teenage years and supported his music education.
At a young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was captivated. Bernstein attended Boston Latin School; as a child, he was close to his younger sister Shirley, would play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth, including Helen Coates, who became his secretary. After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, among others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis entitled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music", Bernstein's main intellectual influence at Harvard was the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life. One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play The Birds in the original Greek.
Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet Fancy Free. During his time at Harvard he was an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club. Bernstein mounted a student production of The Cradle Will Rock, directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a influence on Bernstein. Bernstein met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at the time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos's charisma and power as a musician were a major influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he influenced some of Bernstein's habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and his interest in Mahler; the other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and at a party afterwards on Copland's birthday in 1938.
At the party Bernstein played Copland's Piano Variations, a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland's student as such, Bernstein would seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would cite him as "his only real composition teacher". After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939, he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner, piano with Isabelle Vengerova, orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle. Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears not to have enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although in his life he would mention Reiner when discussing important mentors. After he left Curtis, Bernstein lived in New York, he shared an apartment with his friend Adolph Green and accompanied Green, Betty Comden, Judy Holliday in a comedy trou
Harp
The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has a number of individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard. Harps have been known since antiquity in Asia and Europe, dating back at least as early as 3500 BC; the instrument had great popularity in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, where it evolved into a wide range of variants with new technologies, was disseminated to Europe's colonies, finding particular popularity in Latin America. Although some ancient members of the harp family died out in the Near East and South Asia, descendants of early harps are still played in Myanmar and parts of Africa, other defunct variants in Europe and Asia have been utilized by musicians in the modern era. Harps vary globally in many ways. In terms of size, many smaller harps can be played on the lap, whereas larger harps are quite heavy and rest on the floor. Different harps may use strings of catgut, metal, or some combination. While all harps have a neck and strings, frame harps have a pillar at their long end to support the strings, while open harps, such as arch harps and bow harps, do not.
Modern harps vary in techniques used to extend the range and chromaticism of the strings, such as adjusting a string's note mid-performance with levers or pedals which modify the pitch. The pedal harp is a standard instrument in the orchestra of the Romantic music era and the contemporary music era; the earliest harps and lyres were found in Sumer, 3500 BC, several harps were found in burial pits and royal tombs in Ur. The oldest depictions of harps without a forepillar can be seen adjacent to the Near East, in the wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs in the Nile Valley, which date from as early as 3000 BC; these murals show an instrument that resembles the hunter's bow, without the pillar that we find in modern harps. The chang flourished in Persia in many forms from its introduction, about 4000 BC, until the 17th century. Around 1900 BC arched harps in the Iraq–Iran region were replaced by angular harps with vertical or horizontal sound boxes. By the start of the Common Era, "robust, angular harps", which had become predominant in the Hellenistic world, were cherished in the Sasanian court.
In the last century of the Sasanian period, angular harps were redesigned to make them as light as possible. At the height of the Persian tradition of illustrated book production, such light harps were still depicted, although their use as musical instruments was reaching its end; the works of the Tamil Sangam literature describe the harp and its variants, as early as 200 BC. Variants were described ranging from 14 to 17 strings, the instrument used by wandering minstrels for accompaniment. Iconographic evidence in of the yaal appears in temple statues dated as early as 500 BC One of the Sangam works, the Kallaadam recounts how the first yaaḻ harp was inspired by an archer's bow, when he heard the musical sound of its twang. Another early South Asian harp was the ancient veena; some Samudragupta gold coins show of the mid-4th century AD show the king Samudragupta himself playing the instrument. The ancient veena survives today in the form of the saung harp still played there; the harp was popular in ancient China and neighboring regions, though harps are extinct in East Asia in the modern day.
The Chinese konghou harp is documented as early as the Spring and Autumn period, became extinct during the Ming Dynasty. A similar harp, the gonghu was played in ancient Korea, documented as early as the Goguryeo period. Harps are triangular and made of wood. Strings are made of gut or wire replaced in the modern day by nylon, or metal; the top end of each string is secured on the crossbar or neck, where each will have a tuning peg or similar device to adjust the pitch. From the crossbar, the string runs down to the sounding board on the resonating body, where it is secured with a knot, it is the distance between the tuning peg and the soundboard, as well as tension and weight of the string, which decide the pitch of the string. The body is hollow, when a taut string is plucked, the body resonates, projecting sound; the longest side of the harp is called the column or pillar, though some earlier harps, such as a "bow harp", lack a pillar. On most harps the sole purpose of the pillar is to hold up the neck against the great strain of the strings.
On harps which have pedals, the pillar is a hollow column and encloses the rods which adjust the pitches, which are levered by pressing pedals at the base of the instrument. On harps of earlier design, a given string can play only a single note without retuning. In many cases this means such a harp can only play in one key at a time and must be manually retuned to play in another key. Various remedies to this limitation evolved: the addition of extra strings to cover chromatic notes, addition of small levers on the crossbar which when actuated raise the pitch of a string by a set interval, or use of pedals at the base of the instrument which change the pitch of a string when pressed with the foot; these solutions increase the versatility of a harp at the cost of adding complexity and expense. While the angle and bow harps held popularity
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. As on all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Nearly all trombones have a telescoping slide mechanism that varies the length of the instrument to change the pitch. Many modern trombone models use a valve attachment to lower the pitch of the instrument. Variants such as the valve trombone and superbone have three valves similar to those on the trumpet; the word "trombone" derives from Italian tromba and -one, so the name means "large trumpet". The trombone has a predominantly cylindrical bore like its valved counterpart the baritone and in contrast to its conical valved counterparts, the cornet, the euphonium, the French horn; the most encountered trombones are the tenor trombone and bass trombone. The most common variant, the tenor, is a non-transposing instrument pitched in B♭, an octave below the B♭ trumpet and an octave above the pedal B♭ tuba; the once common E♭ alto trombone became less used as improvements in technique extended the upper range of the tenor, but it is now enjoying a resurgence due to its lighter sonority, appreciated in many classical and early romantic works.
Trombone music is written in concert pitch in either bass or tenor clef, although exceptions do occur, notably in British brass-band music where the tenor trombone is presented as a B♭ transposing instrument, written in treble clef. A person who plays the trombone is called a trombone player; the trombone is a predominantly cylindrical tube bent into an elongated "S" shape. Rather than being cylindrical from end to end, the tube is a complex series of tapers with the smallest at the mouthpiece receiver and the largest just before the bell flare; the design of these tapers affects the intonation of the instrument. As with other brass instruments, sound is produced by blowing air through pursed lips producing a vibration that creates a standing wave in the instrument; the detachable cup-shaped mouthpiece is similar to that of the baritone horn and related to that of the trumpet. It has the venturi: a small constriction of the air column that adds resistance affecting the tone of the instrument and is inserted into the mouthpiece receiver in the slide section.
The slide section consists of a leadpipe, the inner and outer slide tubes, the bracing, or "stays". Modern stays are soldered, while sackbuts were made with unsoldered stays. The'slide', the most distinctive feature of the trombone, allows the player to extend the length of the air column, lowering the pitch. To prevent friction from slowing the action of the slide, additional sleeves were developed during the Renaissance, these "stocking" were soldered onto the ends of the inner slide tubes. Nowadays, the stockings are incorporated into the manufacturing process of the inner slide tubes and represent a fractional widening of the tube to accommodate the necessary method of alleviating friction; this part of the slide must be lubricated frequently. Additional tubing connects the slide to the bell of the instrument through a neckpipe, bell or back bow; the joint connecting the slide and bell sections is furnished with a ferrule to secure the connection of the two parts of the instrument, though older models from the early 20th century and before were equipped with friction joints and no ancillary mechanism to tighten the joint.
The adjustment of intonation is most accomplished with a tuning slide, a short slide between the neckpipe and the bell incorporating the bell bow. However, unlike other instrumentalists, are not subject to the intonation issues resulting from valved or keyed instruments, since they can adjust intonation "on the fly" by subtly altering slide positions when necessary. For example, second position "A" is not in the same place on the slide as second position "E". Many types of trombone include one or more rotary valves used to increase the length of the instrument by directing the air flow through additional tubing; this allows the instrument to reach notes that are otherwise not possible without the valve as well as play other notes in alternate positions. Like the trumpet, the trombone is considered a cylindrical bore instrument since it has extensive sections of tubing, principally in the slide section, that are of unchanging diameter. Tenor trombones have a bore of 0.450 inches to 0.547 inches after the leadpipe and through the slide.
The bore expands through the gooseneck to the bell, between 7 and 8 1⁄2 inches. A number of common variations on trombone construction are noted below. "Trombone" comes from the Italian word tromba plus the suffix -one, meaning "big trumpet". During the Renaissance, the equivalent English term was "sackbut"; the word first appears in court records in 1495 as "shakbusshe" at about the time King Henry VII married a Portuguese princess who brought musicians with her. "Shakbusshe" is similar to "sacabuche", attested in Spain as early as 1478. The French equivalent "saqueboute" appears in 1466; the German "Posaune" long predates the invention of the slide and could refer to a natural trumpet as late as the early fifteenth century. Both towns and courts sponsored bands of shaw
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