When was the instrument invented

For the musically daring, it's hard to beat the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition , which takes place later this month at Georgia Institute of Technology. One previous winning entry turned whisks and garlic presses into music makers.

Another, the Double Slide Controller, borrowed the trombone's slide mechanism—a 15th-century innovation—to shape digitally produced tones into an otherworldly drone. Events like these would seem to signal a golden age for the adventurous musician.

New instruments have come to market at a steady clip in recent years, offering novel and occasionally fanciful ways to perform music. Maybe you've heard of the the Eigenharp , the Tenori-on , or the Harpejji? Or maybe not. Good luck hearing any of these contraptions on the recordings of prominent modern artists. You're more likely to come across Tibetan singing bowls Fleet Foxes , 17th-century Indonesian angklung Okkervil River , or the zither P. In other words, established pop and rock musicians seem more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one.

The turntable might be the last new implement to break into pop music; there's even debate over whether that qualifies as an instrument, despite having its own form of notation and a course at Berklee College of Music.

According to hip-hop lore, Grand Wizzard Theodore invented scratching 36 years ago. Suddenly, the turntable became a device used not just for listening to music, but performing it.

And like the guitar, it turned into a focal point in live performances. Now consider some of the instrumental developments in the 36 years prior: the solid-body electric guitar, the pedal-steel guitar, the steel drum, the electric bass, the synthesizer, and the drum machine. Music technology in general has charged forward, and computers, digital sampling and MIDI have dramatically shaped music.

But no one mimes to music on the "air sampler" and the idea of a "Software Hero" video game, with its own simulated laptop, is a little glum. Will a brand-new instrument ever capture hearts, minds, and speaker systems again? It's hard to overstate the importance of new musical instruments in history. The piano's dynamic range allowed for a subtlety in composition previously unimagined. The modern drum set paved the way for jazz. Rock and roll would not have happened without the electric guitar.

As composer Edgard Varese put it in , "It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony.

We have many other examples of other scales that do not use what we, in our culture, may consider to be pure tuning. Let us take just one example that may be familiar to many of us today, the Javanese gamelan. This uses two different scales, slendro and pelog.

Not one of the steps of slendro is the same as those of pelog. Nor were the slendro or pelog in Java exactly the same between one gamelan and another, though similar, before the recent days when almost all gamelans are tuned to the pitches used by Radio Yogyakarta. Nor even, save for the octave, are the pitches of Just Intonation the same as those of the Equal Temperament that we use on our pianos today.

Each culture develops the tuning system that best suits its ideas of musicality. It is up to the cognitive scientists to determine why this should be so, but they have to admit, if they are willing to listen to the exotic musics of the world, that these differences exist.

Let us now return to the history of music and of the instruments on which it was played. This series is, alas, incomplete, for its publication ceased with the reunification of Germany. We see also lutes, a hollowed sound box like a small trough, with the open top covered with a skin to form the belly. A rod acts as the neck and passes through slits in the skin to hold it in place. These also still appear in Africa today. All these instruments were plucked, either with the fingers or a plectrum—the bow, such as we use on our fiddles, was as yet far in the future.

There were pipes, usually double, held one in each hand, though sometimes, especially later in Egypt, lashed together so that the fingers of each hand could reach across both pipes. There were occasional drums, some very large, and many forms of rattles.

We also see many of these instruments combined into what appear to be ensembles. This use of bands of instruments is confirmed in literature, for example in chapter 3 of the book of Daniel in our Bible where, when all the instruments play together, all those present bow down to the deity. In ancient Greece, the lyre and the double pipe, the aulos , predominated. Lyres came in three forms. The simplest, the chelys or lyra , had a tortoise-shell body with two vertical curved wooden rods or horns, set in the shell with a third rod running horizontally as the cross bar.

The strings were attached at one end to the bottom of the shell and at the other were twisted with kollopes , strips of skin, and wound round the horizontal bar.

These kollopes set firmly enough on the bar to hold a tuning, but could be turned on the bar to retune. This type of lyre was taught to, and used for after-dinner symposia, by all educated people. It traveled up the Nile to the Meroitic people, probably in the Hellenistic period, and eventually throughout East Africa, where it is still used today, with the skin kollopes replaced with strips of cloth and the tortoise-shell with a gourd or wooden body as the resonator, and a skin belly.

A more elegant form of Greek lyre, with longer curved arms, was called the barbiton. All three had gut strings that were normally plucked with a plectrum of wood, bone, or ivory, and all three are seen on many Greek vases and statues. The aulos passed on to Rome, where it was known as the tibia , to which quite elaborate tuning mechanisms were applied, with rings that could be turned to close off one hole and open another slightly differently placed, so as to play in a different key or mode.

There was also a single pipe, the monaulos , and that is still found today, with a large double reed, all down the Silk Road, from Turkey, Kurdistan, and Armenia to China, Korea, and Japan.

Whether it traveled east from Greece, or whether it originated in Central Asia like a number of other instruments and then traveled both east and west, is debatable. That several instruments originated in Central Asia, probably somewhere between Persia and the Caspian Sea, is undoubted.

The Chinese encyclopedias said that they got the gong from the West, which also suggests a Central Asian origin. Initially, this was a rough stick or reed scraping the string, but it was not long before it was modified with the strands of horsehair that we still use today. This at last allowed stringed instruments to produce a sustained sound, something that could emulate the human voice, as all wind instruments had been able to do ever since their introduction.

In the early thirteenth century, and probably a little earlier, there came a revolution of the instruments we used in Europe. This seems to have been due to the often-interrupted symbiosis of Moorish, Jewish, and Christian cultures in Spain, and possibly also with some effect from returning Crusaders from the Holy Land. Within the ensuing century, these spread all over western Europe and can be seen in a great many medieval manuscripts, church carvings, and other sources.

We know little of the extent that these played together. We do see large groups of instruments in manuscripts of the following centuries, but these are mostly portrayals of biblical scenes or of texts such as psalm and may not represent anything that actually happened in the Middle Ages.

Then, in the fourteenth century, came another revolution, this time an industrial one Gimpel, All over Europe, there had been windmills and watermills, primarily for grinding grain, but often also for minor industrial purposes. Now came the idea of siting watermills under the arches of bridges on major rivers, where the flow of water, restricted by the pillars of the bridge, thus produced far greater force.

This powered mills for working metals and, for our purposes, of drawing brass and iron wire to standard quality and in much finer gages than had been available earlier except in softer, and more costly, metals such as silver and gold.

The result was strings for harps, psalteries, and dulcimers and thence to keyboard instruments, first the clavichord, which was a keyed development of the monochord, and then the harpsichord.

All, as can be seen in the manuscript of Arnault de Zwolle from around , were established by that date Le Cerf and Labande, The use of keyboards led to a revision of musical pitch and tuning. Just Temperament had served well for unaccompanied voices and some solo instruments, but its inadequacies had now become more apparent.

If one depends on the partials of the harmonic series, their ratios makes it obvious that the step from 8 to 9 is greater than that of 9 to To avoid using sharps and flats, let us take these pitches as C for 8, D for 9, and E for The major tone of 8—9 is cents; the minor tone of 9—10 is cents, and together these make up the third, C to E, of cents.

Now if we want to play in C major, all is well, but if instead, we want to start a scale on D, we are in trouble, for where we need a major tone we have only a minor tone.

Voices have no trouble with this for they simply shift the D and the E, but for any instrument with strings such as those of a lyre, a harp, or keyboards, the player has to stop and retune all his strings. The problem was already recognized by the ancient Greeks, and it was allegedly Pythagoras who solved the problem and who decided to make all the wholetones the same size, with cents for each. However, adding those together produces a wildly sharp third of cents from C to E, which when used in a common chord with C and G was so intolerable that in the Middle Ages it was regarded as a dissonance.

Thus the Pythagorean Temperament was intolerable on the new keyboard instruments, and the music theorist Pietro Aron devised a new temperament in He returned to the natural third of cents and, taking its mean or average of cents for each whole tone, created the Quarter-comma Meantone Temperament.

To the modern ear, accustomed to the Equal Temperament of our piano, with its wholetones of cents and semitones of cents, these differences may seem small, but if one listens to music played in other temperaments, it really does sound different—even today a cent third still sounds quite badly out of tune. This whole subject is quite complex and Barbour, , or the article on Temperaments in the New Grove Dictionary of Music , will give fuller details.

Somehow those 22 cents, called a comma, have to be brought back into the octave, and this is done, with greater or lesser success, by using one of the various so-called irregular temperaments. We have been neglecting vocal music. This has continued unchecked through the ages. When and how choral music, in our modern sense of song, evolved we do not know, but it had certainly appeared by biblical times and by that of the Greek dramatists.

While we have mentioned some early suggested musical notations, music was normally taught by rote or simply by listening to others and joining in. What, if any, types of harmony were used, other than singing in octaves, we cannot know for we have no notation system, other than those early ones mentioned above for a basic melody, until we reach the early church chants.

Here, we meet Gregorian and other church chants. These appear initially to have been purely monophonic, with everyone singing in unison. The earliest notation, called neumes, shows musical movement rather than precise pitches, and can only have served as a reminder of how music, already learned by rote, was to proceed.

What pitch the music started on would depend on the preferred vocal range of the singers. Not until the thirteenth century do we start to see music written on a staff, then usually on only four lines rather than our present five-line stave, and with a symbol to tell us which line is C, similarly to our own alto or tenor clefs. By the end of the twelfth century, we have composers such as Perotin writing organum, two or more parallel lines a fifth, fourth, or octave apart, with some slight freedom for each line to ornament a little.

Organum probably derives from the organ itself, for while the first organs, which appeared in Alexandria in the second century BCE, were purely monophonic, though with the ability to play a chord, the larger church organs of the ninth or tenth centuries CE, used a system called Blockwerk.

This meant that each key, when depressed, sounded a chord, a group of fourths or fifths and octaves. We have vivid descriptions of the tenth-century organ of Winchester Cathedral in Britain Perrot, , and we have surviving pipes from the organ of Bethlehem from the eleventh century of the Latin Kingdom of the Crusaders; the groups of lengths of these pipes show that this organ must also have used Blockwerk Montagu, What about secular music?

Here, our earliest manuscripts seem to be from the thirteenth century with Adam de la Halle and his contemporaries writing motets for singers, and with anonymous, usually monophonic, dance music. Early polyphony, music in more than one part, was normally based on a cantus firmus, or tenor, often derived from a church chant, around which other, more elaborate parts, were woven.

Polyphony of this sort seems to have been a purely European development; other cultures then, and in many cases still, prefer a single line or monophony, or if singing in groups or a single line with accompaniment, using heterophony, people all singing much, but by no means exactly, the same.

Later motets might have three or four independent lines, sometimes each with their own text, woven together. These, in the early Renaissance, led to the madrigals and thence to our various styles of choral music today. How do we define public performance, and how far back does it go? If one defines it as making music where other people can hear you, it must be as early as music ever existed.

Any dance, whether Australian corroborees, war or hunting dances, people dancing on the village green, or any other similar occasions, must have involved music of some sort—how else could people keep their movement together? Here, we return to the use of rhythm, and surely to that of concussion or percussion of some sort, whether just body or hand clapping or that of instruments.

The shaman has always used music of some sort, often to help to throw him- or herself into the necessary trance. The bard has always been a valued member of society—and has always chanted and sung his lays, and always to self-accompaniment on an instrument.

At what stage was music deliberately performed to a public? Dance again, of course, and in religious ceremonies. The Christian church could be considered to be the first concert hall, with all free to enter and to hear the chant and, as time went on, listening to the deliberately composed music for the Mass.

The medieval mystery plays were enacted in front of or within the church, and these always included music and were designed deliberately to draw in the public and to show them aspects of their religion. When did people pay to hear music? Surely, this is part of our definition of public performance. Bards were certainly paid, domestic ones with board and lodging and presumably some cash, and itinerant ones certainly with cash or its portable equivalent, and shamans and medicine-men or -women always with cash or its equivalent, for that was the only way to be sure of a cure rather than a curse.

Aristocratic courts had their own orchestras, often merely for prestige, but sometimes, because the prince was himself a composer and musician. All these were private occasions, with admission confined to their members, their friends, and their guests. Public concerts, with people paying for admission, began first in England perhaps as extensions of the Elizabethan theaters, where again people paid for admission, and which had often included musical performances along with the plays.

England had no princely courts such as were common in continental Europe, and it was the first country to grow a middle class educated enough at the many grammar schools to appreciate musical culture and wealthy enough to pay for its pleasures. Very shortly afterward, the first hall designed for musical performance was opened in London.

It seems that in other countries such public performances did not take place until into the eighteenth century, and then in theaters and other improvised places, or out of doors.

It was not until that the Leipzig Gewandhaus was built, the first public concert hall on the Continent. A more elaborate form of music, the opera, began also as a court entertainment, but it rapidly became a public entertainment for which people paid for admission, probably because the costs of mounting an opera are far greater than chamber or orchestral concerts, and the first public opera house opened in Venice in This is as far as we need to go for Europe, but what of the rest of the world?

We have historical records and encyclopedias of music for the high cultures of China and India. All this tells us nothing further of how music began, but it does tell us that music progressed and developed, analogously with our own, in the high cultures of the world.

But, we have little knowledge of how, or even whether, music developed and changed in the rest of the world. We have glimpses, patchily, through the ages due to the iconographical records of some areas that we have mentioned above. We know much that goes on today, thanks to those ethnomusicologists who have been working around the world since the latter part of the nineteenth century, and we are dependent on their work for evidence of any possible sort simply because much of the music and the performances they recorded or described has vanished within our own lifetimes due to the globalized transmission of music.

People also played a reed instrument called a shawm. They also played the recorder. In the Middle Ages, people also played a string instrument called a rebec with a bow. Originally an Arab instrument the rebec reached Europe in the 11th century. However, the rebec went out of fashion in the Renaissance.

The violin was developed in the first half of the 16th century. In the Middle Ages, the lute was also a popular stringed instrument. The lute was originally an Arab instrument called al ud, which means the wood. There was also a small lute called a mandora. Furthermore, it is believed the Arabs introduced the guitar into Europe. It probably came to Spain first. Also in Tudor Times, the cello appeared. So did the viola and the double bass. In the Middle Ages organs were commonly used for church music and, of course, they have been ever since.

Furthermore, from the 12th century, people in Europe played the bagpipes. They also played the hurdy-gurdy from that time.

The oboe is a double-reeded wood instrument. It was the main melody instrument in early military bands until succeeded by the clarinet. The oboe evolved from the shawm, a double-reed instrument most likely originated from the eastern Mediterranean region. The ceramic ocarina is a musical wind instrument that is a type of vessel flute, derived from ancient wind instruments.

Italian inventor Giuseppe Donati developed the modern hole ocarina in Variations exist, but a typical ocarina is an enclosed space with four to 12 finger holes and a mouthpiece that projects from the instrument's body. Ocarinas are traditionally made from clay or ceramic, but other materials are also used—such as plastic, wood, glass, metal or bone. The piano is an acoustic stringed instrument invented around the year , most likely by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy. It is played by using fingers on a keyboard, causing hammers within the piano body to strike the strings.

The Italian word piano is a shortened form of the Italian word pianoforte, which means both "soft" and "loud," respectively.

Its predecessor was the harpsichord. Hugh Le Caine, Canadian physicist, composer, and instrument builder, built the world's first voltage-controlled music synthesizer in , called the Electronic Sackbut. The player used the left hand to modify the sound while the right hand was used to play the keyboard. Over his lifetime, Le Caine designed 22 musical instruments, including a touch-sensitive keyboard and variable-speed multitrack tape recorder.

The saxophone, also called a sax, belongs to the woodwind family of instruments. It is usually made of brass and is played with a single, wood reed mouthpiece, similar to a clarinet. Like the clarinet, saxophones have holes in the instrument that the player operates using a system of key levers. When the musician presses a key, a pad either covers or lifts off a hole, thus lowering or raising the pitch.

The saxophone was invented by Belgian Adolphe Sax and exhibited to the world for the first time at the Brussels Exhibition. The trombone belongs to the brass family of instruments.

Like all brass instruments, the sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Trombones use a telescoping slide mechanism that varies the length of the instrument to change the pitch. The word "trombone" comes from the Italian tromba , meaning "trumpet," and the Italian suffix -one , meaning "large. Trumpet-like instruments have historically been used as signaling devices in battle or hunting, with examples dating back to at least BCE, using animal horns or conch shells.

The modern valve trumpet has evolved more than any other instrument still in use. Trumpets are brass instruments that were recognized as musical instruments only in the late 14th or early 15th century.

Mozart's father, Leopold, and Haydn's brother Michael wrote concertos exclusively for the trumpet in the second half of the 18th century. The tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched musical instrument in the brass family.