Music Then and Now - A Brief History of Music and Woodwind Instruments

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Music envelopes us. It is a mainstay of our own society and is built into the souls individuals beings. Even in utero it is known that the fetus will be able to respond to music the mother plays or sings. Music can be found in just about every environment around us: calming or happy music in restaurants, grocers, doctor/dentist offices, department stores, elevators, schools, or weddings; majestic music at firework displays or parades; as well as serene music at a funeral. It can be heard on virtually every television commercial and in the theme of every television show. Some people crave music just like a drug and just cannot live without it playing in the car and even singing inside the shower.

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Every person has the ability to produce music whether vocally or which has a music instrument. Organic beef not all have accurate intonation or pitch vocally or might not produce a great sound because of difference in how we process auditory information, as Simon Cowell so blatantly highlights on "American Idol", but we now have the capability of producing music. With many coaching or instruction, like many of the cast members of the television show "Glee" as reported by Emile Menasche', we are able to deliver a powerful vocal performance.

After a while, music has developed into an extensively large various categories and subclasses. These could include classical, jazz, blues, swing, symphony, opera, rock, rap/hip-hop, country, folk, pop, R n B, theatre, heavy metal, Latin, techno, tango, children's, electronic, Native American, inspirational, marching band, gospel, romantic, melancholy, or spiritual. Many of these types of music have fallen about as a part of modifications in the structure and performance of our cultures.

Music also serves to be really therapeutic. From my own, personal experience as an occupational therapist, music helps persons with a range of different disabilities to enhance function whether it may be for communication or movement purposes. For instance, in working with persons who've sustained a stroke and also have expressive aphasia (able to understand language, but can not formulate the words to verbally express it), singing permits them to say what they want since this involves a different area of the brain. In working with children with autism spectrum disorders, I've discovered music helps develop more coordinated movement and motor planning as it provides the timing and rhythm the children are not able to access within their brain. Any music instrument can be therapeutic, whether it is woodwind instruments, brass instruments, or string instruments, or maybe even dancing to music.

But location did woodwind instruments originate? When we look back in history we could find out what the first woodwind instruments were. However, because late Curt Sachs so intelligently suggests, music originates back to pre-instrumental music and primitive man. According to him that "all higher creatures express emotion by motion" eg. stamping his foot in the grass, slapping his body, or clapping his hands. These audible actions were the precursors to first woodwind instruments and many likely man wasn't even consciously alert to sound as a separate idea.

Through archeological findings, the first true music instrument noted of all time was the strung rattle which contained nutshells, seeds, teeth, or bones strung in cords or tied in bunches and suspended from your part of the body (ankle, knee, waist, or neck) as a technique of adding sound to body movements or dancing. However, this was a delayed sound following the body movement. Later, the sound became more direct, although not exact, as gourd rattles filled with pebbles or small hard objects were shaken in tribal dances. Following that, other more direct sounding instruments were developed which used your toes or hands to generate sounds eg. stampers (used stamping sticks or devices to make sound on board or bark covering hole in ground), slit-drums (stamping on empty tree trunk over the pit), drums (used hands or later sticks to hit membrane stretched over opening of hollow body associated with a shape), friction instruments (by using a tortoise shell or rounded piece of hard wood with four notches reduce it and rubbing it on palms to generate a humming or squeaking noise), bull roarers (quickly whirling a thin board attached to a cord overhead making a roaring sound), and scrapers (scraping a notched stick, shell, bone, or gourd with a hard object).

The ribbon reed was the very first simple music instrument to get played with the mouth like the woodwind instruments. This was just a blade of grass obtained from a reed stretched between the two thumbs held side by side and also by blowing into the crack the blade would vibrate with a high pitched screeching noise (what youngster hasn't done this even today?). More developed civilizations rolled up a wide blade of grass spirally produce a funnel tube with all the thin end in the blade crossing the upper opening. Eventually, the flute originated which was played similar to other woodwind instruments: by blowing into the air column from the tube a vibration was created and produced a particular tone. Flutes and other reed woodwind instruments have been played considering that the Middle Ages (476-1400) and Renaissance period (1400-1600) as they have undergone various alterations in design, however, orchestral woodwind instruments have more recent origin.

The Baroque period (1600-1750) is famous for its radical revolution in music with the need for novelty in the style of composition. There were an emphasis on strong emotion ("What passion cannot music raise and quell" sung by Dryden) requiring a wide range of sound to express passion as well as the sudden changes from joy to grief. Similar to the Middle Ages, the monodic type of singular parts being emphasized returned to music in comparison to the polyphonic style of the Renaissance period through which equal weight was presented to all the string, brass, or woodwind instruments took part in concert. To achieve this sound, woodwind instruments underwent a variety of improvements and alterations. As opposed to being made from one piece of wood or other material, we were holding now made of a couple of pieces fitting tightly together in order to be able to regulate pitch by adjusting the gap. Reed woodwind instruments changed the cut of reed and the bore was changed for any smoother tone. Oboe-like instruments were dismissed in support of bassoons, smaller oboes, and flutes constructed the woodwind instruments of the orchestra.

Romanticism (1750-1900) created additional transformations for woodwind instruments, even though musical style was similar to the 16th century. The expressive emotional music brought about a significant increase in the quantity of timbres and woodwind instruments were changed in order to modulate from timbre to timbre with greater ease through a variety of technical enhancements. Woodwind instruments were required to have a stronger, more powerful sound in concurrence to society's consist of an aristocratic to democratic culture. Overall, the humanities evolved from aristocratic reserve to unrestrained passion. To relocate the woodwind instruments to satisfy the changing musical style, technical changes were created for improved musical flexibility, fluency of tonalities, accuracy of pitch, and freer modulation. Inclusion of keys, position of holes, key placement, key mechanisms, key padding, and sizes of bores were altered. This created more efficient woodwind instruments that were simpler to play and maneuver with the ranges. The woodwind instruments portion of an orchestra now included not only the oboe, flute, and bassoon, but also the saxophone and clarinet. Families of woodwind instruments were also created eg. soprano, alto, tenor, baritone to further improve the melodies and harmonies and make a fuller sound.

The twentieth century brought about many radical adjustments to musical styles such as jazz, swing, pop, and rock. However, apart from the introduction of electric instruments (eg. piano, organ, stringed instruments), how much changes to woodwind instruments are not as great. Woodwind instruments in the twenty first century today still retain their prototype from the nineteenth century, but could be made from different metals, their mouthpieces are constructed of differing lengths/widths and reed sizes, and a few persons prefer varying colors because of their woodwind instruments.