Tungehorn

Last updated

The tungehorn (Norwegian : tongue horn) is a woodwind instrument used in traditional Norwegian music, which has a single-reed attached to a conical cow or goat horn. [1]

The instrument is single-reeded, with a separate reed body inserted into the instrument ( heteroglot aerophone). The reed, or tunge is generally made of juniper, but spruce, maple, and birch bark have been used, as well as metal.

The instrument is minimally documented, and nearly became extinct, and thus is little known in modern Norwegian folk music. The instrument appears to have been mainly prevalent in Norway, where at least 160 instrument have been attested, 100 of them photographically. The core areas are Hedmark, eastern Trøndelag and Oppland, and Agder. The instrument is not known outside of Scandinavia, though within that region several variants of the instrument are found.

There are two different theories as to the origin of the tungehorn. One is that the instrument was inspired by the European clarinet that came to the region in the 1700s and was widely used in folk music in the 1800s. This theory finds support in the facts that the areas of greatest prevalence of clarinets coincides with the areas of the tungehorn, and that almost all the documented tungehorn date from the 19th and 20th centuries, with no known tradition prior to the early 1800s. A second theory argues that the folk reed instruments existed in Scandinavia prior to the arrival of the European clarinet, noting that a few known instruments pre-date the arrival of the European clarinet, and that the tungehorn's playing style is more similar to medieval instruments like the bagpipe rather than the orchestral clarinet.

Related Research Articles

The clarinet is a single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oboe</span> Double-reed woodwind instrument

The oboe is a type of double-reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aerophone</span> Musical instruments that are played by vibration of air

An aerophone is a musical instrument that produces sound primarily by causing a body of air to vibrate, without the use of strings or membranes, and without the vibration of the instrument itself adding considerably to the sound.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trøndelag</span> County in Norway

Trøndelag (Urban East Norwegian:[ˈtrœ̂ndəˌlɑːɡ]; or Trööndelage  is a county and coextensive with the Trøndelag region in the central part of Norway. It was created in 1687, then named Trondhjem County ; in 1804 the county was split into Nord-Trøndelag and Sør-Trøndelag by the King of Denmark-Norway, and the counties were reunited in 2018 after a vote of the two counties in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chalumeau</span> Woodwind instrument; predecessor of modern clarinet

The chalumeau is a single-reed woodwind instrument of the late baroque and early classical eras. The chalumeau is a folk instrument that is the predecessor to the modern-day clarinet. It has a cylindrical bore with eight tone holes and a broad mouthpiece with a single heteroglot reed made of cane. Similar to the clarinet, the chalumeau overblows a twelfth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basset horn</span> Wind instrument of the clarinet family

The basset horn is a member of the clarinet family of musical instruments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tárogató</span> Woodwind instrument

The tárogató is a woodwind instrument commonly used in Hungarian folk music. The modern tárogató was intended to be a recreation of the original tárogató, but the two instruments are thought to have little in common.

Northwest Iberian folk music is a traditional highly distinctive folk style, located along Spain's north-west Atlantic coast, mostly Galicia and Asturias, that has some similarities with the neighbouring area of Cantabria. The music is characterized by the use of bagpipes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Launeddas</span> Sardinian woodwind instrument made of three pipes

The launeddas are a traditional Sardinian woodwind instrument made of three pipes, each of which has an idioglot single reed. They are a polyphonic instrument, with one of the pipes functioning as a drone and the other two playing the melody in thirds and sixths.

Botswana is an African country made up of different ethnic groups, although Batswana are the majority of the population. Music is a large part of Botswana culture, and includes popular and folk forms. Botswana church choirs are common nationwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhaleika</span> Slavic wind instrument

The zhaleika, also known as bryolka (брёлка), is a Slavic wind instrument, most used in Belarusian, Russian and sometimes Ukrainian ethnic music. Also known as a "folk clarinet" or hornpipe. The zhaleika was eventually incorporated into the balalaika band, the Hungarian tarogato, and may have contributed to the development of the chalumeau, a predecessor of the clarinet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pit orchestra</span> Musical ensemble accompanying a theater performance

A pit orchestra is a type of orchestra that accompanies performers in musicals, operas, ballets, and other shows involving music. The term was also used for orchestras accompanying silent movies when more than a piano was used. In performances of operas and ballets, the pit orchestra is typically similar in size to a symphony orchestra, though it may contain smaller string and brass sections, depending upon the piece. Such orchestras may vary in size from approximately 30 musicians to as many as 90–100 musicians. However, because of financial, spatial, and volume concerns, current musical theatre pit orchestras are considerably smaller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Traditional Nordic dance music</span>

Traditional Nordic dance music is a type of traditional music or folk music that once was common in the mainland part of the Nordic countries — Scandinavia plus Finland. The person who plays this kind of music might be called speleman (Swedish/Norwegian), spelman (Swedish), spel(l)emann (Norwegian), pelimanni (Finnish) or spillemand (Danish). Finnish traditional dance music is often called pelimanni music in English, while there does not seem to exist a similar, widespread term for the corresponding music from the other countries. It is often more meaningful to distinguish between the traditional dance music from different regions than between music from the countries as such. Some concepts in the field can be defined as Norwegian or Finnish, but most are either common to all four countries or local. Besides the dance music tradition, all countries also have other traditions of folk music that are not shared to a similar extent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Single-reed instrument</span> Class of woodwind instruments

A single-reed instrument is a woodwind instrument that uses only one reed to produce sound. The very earliest single-reed instruments were documented in ancient Egypt, as well as the Middle East, Greece, and the Roman Empire. The earliest types of single-reed instruments used idioglottal reeds, where the vibrating reed is a tongue cut and shaped on the tube of cane. Much later, single-reed instruments started using heteroglottal reeds, where a reed is cut and separated from the tube of cane and attached to a mouthpiece of some sort. By contrast, in a double reed instrument, there is no mouthpiece; the two parts of the reed vibrate against one another. Reeds are traditionally made of cane and produce sound when air is blown across or through them. The type of instruments that use a single reed are clarinets and saxophone. The timbre of a single and double reed instrument is related to the harmonic series caused by the shape of the corpus. E.g. the clarinet is only including the odd harmonics due to air column modes canceling out the even harmonics. This may be compared to the timbre of a square wave.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turkish folk dance</span> Ethnic folk dance tradition

Turkish folk dances are the folk dances of Turkey. Facing three seas, straddling important trade routes, Turkey has a complex, sophisticated culture, reflected in the variety of its dances. The dominant dance forms are types of line dance. There are many different types of folk dances performed in various ways in Turkey. Zeybek, Teke Zortlatması in Aegean region, Bar in Erzurum province, Halay in the central, southern, eastern, and southeastern parts of the country, Hora in Thrace, Horon in the eastern Black Sea region, Spoon dances in and around Konya, and Lezginka in Kars and Ardahan are some of the best known examples of these.

The sipsi is a clarinet-like, single-reed instrument used mainly in folk music and native to the Aegean region of Greece and Turkey. The word sipsi is possibly onomatopoeic. In ancient Greece, it was known as kalamavlos (καλάμαυλος), meaning cane-flute. The sipsi can be made of bone, wood, or reed, though the reed variant is most common. Its size varies from region to region, but it generally contains five finger holes in the front, and one finger hole in the back.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pibgorn (instrument)</span>

The pibgorn is a Welsh species of idioglot reed aerophone. The name translates literally as "pipe-horn". It is also historically known as cornicyll and pib-corn. It utilises a single reed, cut from elder or reed, like that found in the drone of a bagpipe, which is an early form of the modern clarinet reed. The single chambered body of the elder pipe has a naturally occurring parallel bore, into which are drilled six small finger-holes and a thumb-hole giving a diatonic compass of an octave. The body of the instrument is traditionally carved from a single piece of wood or bone. Playable, extant historical examples in the Museum of Welsh Life have bodies cut and shaped of elder. Another, unplayable instrument at the Museum, possibly of a later date, is made from the leg bone of an unspecified ungulate. Contemporary instruments are turned and bored from a variety of fruitwoods, or exotic hardwoods; or turned from, or moulded in plastics. The reed is protected by a reed-cap or stock of cow-horn. The bell is shaped from a section of cow-horn which serves to amplify the sound. The pibgorn may be attached to a bag, with the additional possibility of a drone, which is then called pibau cwd; or played directly with the mouth via the reed-cap.

The sornā or sornāy is an ancient Iranian woodwind instrument.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birch trumpet</span> Natural trumpet made of spruce covered with birch bark

The birch trumpet is a type of natural trumpet made of spruce covered with birch bark, known in Norway, Sweden, Finland, England, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Estonia. Even cruder and less durable versions were made of plain birch bark. They are associated with the early European Chalet culture, where it was presumably used to intimidate predators, frighten supernatural enemies, and convene council meetings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musical instrument</span> Device for making musical sounds

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.

References

  1. Rebecca Berkley (1 December 2006). The illustrated complete musical instruments handbook. Flame tree. p. 155. ISBN   978-1-84451-520-2 . Retrieved 9 March 2013.

Further reading