Renaissance music is traditionally understood to cover European music of the 15th and 16th centuries, later than the Renaissance era as it is understood in other disciplines. Rather than starting from the early 14th-century ars nova, the Trecento music was treated by musicology as a coda to Medieval music and the new era dated from the rise of triadic harmony and the spread of the contenance angloise style from Britain to the Burgundian School. A convenient watershed for its end is the adoption of basso continuo at the beginning of the Baroque period.
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts.
The cornett, cornetto, or zink is a wind instrument that dates from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, popular from 1500 to 1650.
The musical bow is a simple string instrument used by a number of African peoples, which is also found in the Americas via the slave trade. It consists of a flexible, usually wooden, stick 1.5 to 10 feet long, and strung end to end with a taut cord, usually metal. It can be played with the hands or a wooden stick or branch. It is uncertain if the musical bow developed from the hunting bow, though the San or Bushmen people of the Kalahari Desert do convert their hunting bows to musical use.
The crwth, also called a crowd or rote or crotta, is a bowed lyre, a type of stringed instrument, associated particularly with Welsh music, now archaic but once widely played in Europe. Four historical examples have survived and are to be found in St Fagans National Museum of History (Cardiff); National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Warrington Museum & Art Gallery; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (US).
The shawm is a conical bore, double-reed woodwind instrument made in Europe from the 12th century to the present day. It achieved its peak of popularity during the medieval and Renaissance periods, after which it was gradually eclipsed by the oboe family of descendant instruments in classical music. It is likely to have come to Western Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean around the time of the Crusades. Double-reed instruments similar to the shawm were long present in Southern Europe and the East, for instance the ancient Greek, and later Byzantine aulos, the closely related sorna and zurna, and the Armenian duduk.
A natural trumpet is a valveless brass instrument that is able to play the notes of the harmonic series.
The A-flat (A♭) clarinet is the highest-pitched instrument of the clarinet family still manufactured. It is just over half the length of the common B♭ clarinet and pitched a minor seventh higher, a perfect fourth higher than the E♭ clarinet. As a transposing instrument it sounds a minor sixth higher than written, thus the lowest written note E3 sounds as concert C4 (middle C). Around the beginning of the 19th century, several small clarinets in different pitches appeared. The A♭ clarinet was adopted in European wind bands, particularly in Italy where it has appeared in Verdi's opera banda parts and survived to the present day in military bands. It is sometimes called for in contemporary classical music, in works by composers Béla Bartók and John Tavener, and in large clarinet choir works. It is manufactured by Italian makers Ripamonti and Orsi, and Foag Klarinetten and Schwenk & Seggelke in Germany.
The Galpin Society was formed in October 1946 to further research into the branch of musicology known as organology, i.e. the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Based in the United Kingdom, it is named after the eminent British organologist and musical instrument collector, Canon Francis William Galpin (1858–1945), who had a lifelong interest in studying, collecting, playing, making and writing about musical instruments.
The Musical Instruments Museum (MIM) is a music museum in central Brussels, Belgium. It is part of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH) and is internationally renowned for its collection of over 8,000 instruments.
Philip Argall Turner Bate (1909–1999) was a musicologist, broadcaster and collector of musical instruments.
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who plays a musical instrument is known as an instrumentalist. The history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have been used for rituals, such as a horn to signal success on the hunt, or a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications and technologies.
Anthony Cuthbert Baines (1912–1997) was an English organologist who produced a wide variety of works on the history of musical instruments, and was a founding member of the Galpin Society.
Tutankhamun's trumpets are a pair of trumpets found in the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The trumpets, one of sterling silver and one of bronze or copper, are considered to be the oldest operational trumpets in the world, and the only known surviving examples from ancient Egypt.
Ruth Barnes is an art historian in the field of South and Southeast Asian textiles. She served as textile curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford before taking up her current position as Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at Yale University. She is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The voice flute (also the Italian flauto di voce and the French flûte de voix are found in English-language sources) is a recorder with the lowest note of D4, and is therefore intermediate in size between the alto and tenor recorders.
Edgar Hubert Hunt was a British musician and musicologist. He was a key figure in the early music revival in Britain in general, and in the revival of the recorder in particular. He was a founding member of the Society of Recorder Players, of which he was musical director for more than fifty years, and of the Galpin Society, of which he was later president. He was head of the early music department at Trinity College of Music, which was the first conservatory in the world to introduce a diploma in recorder.
A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
Peter Bressan was a noted woodwind instrument maker of whose work several examples exist in museums and private collections.
