A lithophone is a musical instrument consisting of a rock or pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes. [1] Notes may be sounded in combination (producing harmony) or in succession (melody). It is an idiophone comparable to instruments such as the glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone and marimba.
In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, lithophones are designated as '111.22' – directly-struck percussion plaques.
A rudimentary form of lithophone is the "rock gong", usually a natural rock formation opportunistically adapted to produce musical tones, such as that on Mfangano Island, in Lake Victoria, Kenya. The Great Stalacpipe Organ of Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA uses 37 stalactites to produce the Western scale. Other stalactite lithophones are at Tenkasi in South India, and at Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania. An example that is no longer used is at Cave of the Winds, in Colorado Springs.
The Txalaparta (or Chalaparta), a traditional Basque instrument, can be made of wood or stone, but is traditionally wood.
More sophisticated lithophones utilize trimmed and individually mounted stones to achieve full-scale instruments:
Ancient Indians were perhaps the first to use man-made lithophones as architectural elements. Temples like Nellaiyappar temple (8th century) in Tirunelveli, Vijaya Vitthala temple (15th century) in Hampi, Madurai Meenakshi temple (16th century) and Suchindram Thanumalayan temple (17th century) have musical pillars. [9]
A stone marimba is configured in the same manner as the more typical wooden bar marimba. The bars are usually wide like a wooden marimba, but are thinner, which helps increase resonance. The stone marimba may or may not have resonators.
In 1949 an ancient stone marimba was discovered in modern-day Vietnam near a village called Ndut Lieng Krak. The 11 stone plates, made of schist, were chipped into the tuning of a pentatonic scale. They are currently housed at the Musée de l'Homme and may be the oldest known musical instrument. [10]
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and cordophone.
The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel, the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.
An idiophone is any musical instrument that creates sound primarily by the vibration of the instrument itself, without the use of air flow, strings (chordophones), membranes (membranophones) or electricity (electrophones). It is the first of the four main divisions in the original Hornbostel–Sachs system of musical instrument classification. The early classification of Victor-Charles Mahillon called this group of instruments autophones. The most common are struck idiophones, or concussion idiophones, which are made to vibrate by being struck, either directly with a stick or hand or indirectly, with scraping or shaking motions. Various types of bells fall into both categories. A common plucked idiophone is the Jew's harp.
Sigur Rós is an Icelandic post-rock band that formed in 1994 in Reykjavík. It comprises lead vocalist and guitarist Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson, bassist Georg Hólm and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson. Known for their ethereal sound, frontman Jónsi's falsetto vocals, and their use of bowed guitar, Sigur Rós incorporate classical and minimal aesthetic elements. Jónsi's vocals are sung in Icelandic and non-linguistic vocalisations the band terms Vonlenska. They have released eight studio albums, and attracted critical and commercial attention with their second album Ágætis byrjun.
Phonolite is an uncommon shallow intrusive or extrusive rock, of intermediate chemical composition between felsic and mafic, with texture ranging from aphanitic (fine-grained) to porphyritic (mixed fine- and coarse-grained). Phonolite is a variation of the igneous rock trachyte that contains nepheline or leucite rather than quartz. It has an unusually high (12% or more) Na2O + K2O content, defining its position in the TAS classification of igneous rocks. Its coarse grained (phaneritic) intrusive equivalent is nepheline syenite. Phonolite is typically fine grained and compact. The name phonolite comes from the Ancient Greek meaning "sounding stone" due to the metallic sound it produces if an unfractured plate is hit; hence, the English name clinkstone is given as a synonym.
Skiddaw is a mountain in the Lake District National Park in England. Its 931-metre (3,054 ft) summit is the sixth-highest in England. It lies just north of the town of Keswick, Cumbria, and dominates the skyline in this part of the northern lakes. It is the simplest of the Lake District mountains of this height to ascend and, as such, many walking guides recommend it to the occasional walker wishing to climb a mountain. This is the first summit of the fell running challenge known as the Bob Graham Round when undertaken in a clockwise direction.
Hornfels is the group name for a set of contact metamorphic rocks that have been baked and hardened by the heat of intrusive igneous masses and have been rendered massive, hard, splintery, and in some cases exceedingly tough and durable. These properties are caused by fine grained non-aligned crystals with platy or prismatic habits, characteristic of metamorphism at high temperature but without accompanying deformation. The term is derived from the German word Hornfels, meaning "hornstone", because of its exceptional toughness and texture both reminiscent of animal horns. These rocks were referred to by miners in northern England as whetstones.
A bell stone is a rock that produces a bell-like sound when struck. A type of lithophone, bell stones are significant in ethnography and are typically identified through local written history and folklore in combination with physical archeological details such as cup-shaped depressions.
Ringing rocks, also known as sonorous rocks or lithophonic rocks, are rocks that resonate like a bell when struck. Examples include the Musical Stones of Skiddaw in the English Lake District; the stones in Ringing Rocks Park, in Upper Black Eddy, Bucks County, Pennsylvania; the Ringing Rocks of Kiandra, New South Wales; and the Bell Rock Range of Western Australia. Ringing rocks are used in idiophonic musical instruments called lithophones.
A crystallophone is a musical instrument that produces sound from glass.
Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson is an Icelandic musician; he is the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist for the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. He is known for his use of a cello bow on guitar and his "angelic" falsetto or countertenor voice.
Struck idiophones is one of the categories of idiophones that are found in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification.
Keswick Museum is a local museum based in Keswick in the English Lake District, which exhibits aspects of the landscape, history and culture of the area.
The Silex Piano is a musical instrument of the Lithophone family. It was created by Honoré Baudre, circa 1885 and was described in several contemporary publications.
A rock gong is a slab of rock that is hit like a drum, and is an example of a lithophone. Examples have been found in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Regional names for the rock gong include kungering, kwerent dutse, gwangalan, kungereng, kongworian, and kuge. These names are all onomatopœic, except for "kuge" which is the Hausa word for a double iron bell and "dawal" which is the Ge`ez word for a church's stone gong.
How to Train Your Dragon: Music from the Motion Picture is a soundtrack album composed by John Powell for the film of the same name and released by Varèse Sarabande on March 23, 2010. The score earned Powell his first Academy Award nomination and his third BAFTA nomination, which he lost to The Social Network and The King's Speech, respectively. The score also won the International Film Music Critics Association 2011 Awards for Best Original Score for an Animated Feature and Film Score of the Year, and was nominated twice for Film Music Composition of the Year for the tracks "Forbidden Friendship" and "Test Drive". The soundtrack received wide acclaim from professional music critics.
A sounding stone or qing (磬) is an ancient Chinese musical instrument, usually L-shaped. The set of qing is called bianqing. The shape of such stones was often quoted as description for the reverent ritual pose.
The Musical Stones of Skiddaw are a number of lithophones built across two centuries around the town of Keswick, northern England, using hornfels, a stone from the nearby Skiddaw mountain, which is said to have a superior tone and longer ring than the more commonly used slate.[1]
Joseph Richardson was born approx 1792, in Cumberland, the eldest child of John Richardson and Dinah Williamson. John and Dinah had married at Great Crosthwaite on 5 September 1791. Joseph’s young years were spent at Keswick, where his father was a miller. The Richardsons owned the Low Corn Mill beside the River Greta. After John’s death in 1839, Dinah lived with her second eldest child, Jonathan, and his family at Applethwaite. When Jonathan remarried she moved to a cottage in the village just a few doors away from where Joseph was living with his wife and family.[1] She passed away on 29 February 1852. “On Sunday last, at Applethwaite, near Keswick, Mrs. Dinah Richardson, mother of the owner of the celebrated Rock Band, aged 83, much respected.”[2] “At Applethwaite, Underskiddaw, on the 29th ult., Dinah, relict of Mr. John Richardson, miller, aged 84 years.”[3]
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