[MUSIC] Western classical orchestra is made up of four primary families or groups of instruments. The strings, woodwinds, brasses, and percussions. Let's start with the string family. In it we have the violin, the slightly larger viola, which sounds lower than the violin, the cello and the double bass. The double bass is called the because early on in the 17th and 18th centuries, that's essential what it did, it doubled the bass line down an octave below what the cellos were playing. Strictly speaking, the double bass is the descendant of the old Viol family of stringed instruments. Which had a slightly different tuning of the instrument. And we'll come back to the Viol family when we get to the music of the Renaissance. But the double bass is still very much a stringed instrument. The cello is in baritone range of the strings, in the mid base. It can play high or low. It's my favorite stringed instrument. When I die, and get reborn, reincarnated, I'm coming back as a cello. No, just kidding of course, but I do like that sound. The sound of a well played cello In its mid to upper range is indescribably beautiful. Well here in a moment a clip of Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello. And here's a photograph of him that I took at a concert in New Haven some years ago. Later I met him at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the summer. He's very smart and very funny. Anyway, here's Yo-Yo Ma playing a bit of the Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals. The video part here isn't very good but it's been viewed by more than two million people on YouTube so the sound, at least, must be awfully darn good. [MUSIC] Notice that as Mister Ma was playing, his left hand was shaking constantly. Was he nervous? [LAUGH] No, with that kind of talent, there's no reason to be nervous. He was of course, using a playing technique called vibrato. It makes the pitch oscillate ever so slightly actually, a pure anything in music is not as exciting as something that is slightly off and slightly on, off an on, and off and on. It yields a richer emotional experience. Let's listen now to a second video clip of the same piece. Notice here how Yo Yo Ma ever so slightly slides into the pitch, again giving us the sense of a little emotional tug, and how the tempo slows down and then speeds back up here and there. And again, notice how these slight imperfections, quote, unquote, create expression in music. This is how a great performer communicates emotion to us. [MUSIC] Gosh so beautiful. Would that we could all do that. Well we've heard a cello playing a beautiful melody with vibrato, now we turn to another class demonstration, using not a violin, but the slightly larger and slightly lower sounding viola. Here we learn about other string techniques in addition to vibrato namely pizzicato and tremolo. [MUSIC] >> Well, you did something there at the end, did you have too much coffee this morning? You started shaking >> Probably, my hands. >> So tell us about what you were doing there at the end. >> So there are all sorts of different little technique things you can do to create different colors and sounds on all string instruments so this applies to any of them. One of them is the technique you saw me do with my left hand where I wiggled it a little bit, it's called vibrato. You hear it in human voice as well and you can do it on other instruments as well. But on the string instrument it is the difference. I'll play a melody without vibrato and then with vibrato so you can see the difference. [MUSIC] So that's without vibrato. Not that interesting in my opinion. So with vibrato. [MUSIC] And you can vary the width and the speed and the length. There's a lot of variety with which. >> Okay, and then just quickly play a pizzicato for us. >> Sure. [MUSIC] >> Okay, and then finally, tremolo. >> Yes. [MUSIC] >> Adds a little excitement or a little filler to the music sometimes. >> All right, so let's move on now to the woodwind family. Here's a picture that gives you a sense of the relative size of the, you can see left to right, what do we have? Bassoon, clarinet, saxophone, which really isn't part of the symphony orchestra. But there it is anyway. It most often plays in a band of one sort or another. Then, the English horn, a lower oboe, and then the oboe itself. And then finally, the flute. You'll notice a couple of things here. The flute is made of metal, but originally it was made of wood. Also, you'll see that the flute, like its relative, the recorder has no reed. You actually blow in the top of the instrument, a hole on the top. The other instruments have reeds. So let's see some of these reeds as we look at our next slide. The clarinet is a single reed instrument, while the bassoon, English horn and oboe are double reed instruments. The nature of the reed affects the vibration of air within the column or the tube of the instrument and sets up the difference in overtones that we discussed previously in today's session. Generally speaking, or in point of fact, the violin and the oboe and the flute, they all play more or less in the same range. The flute is slightly higher, its bottom note is middle C, about a fourth higher than the other instruments. Okay, so let's go on now to watch a demonstration of a woodwind instrument. Specifically, the bassoon. This is Linda Paul, who will be one of our principle TAs here. She is a PhD candidate in the department of music, just passed her qualifying exam with flying colors. So here she is to demonstrate the bassoon for us, lowest member of the woodwind family. >> All right, so you probably read in the book that the bassoon is a double reed instrument and so just to show you what that looks like. You've probably seen it but if you haven't, two pieces of wood vibrate together when I blow threw them. [SOUND] Always check it out before I play any notes and as you will probably suspect by the length of the bassoon, it can play very low notes. [MUSIC] And if I put a little rag in the top I can get it even a little bit lower. And that, I didn't bring one. But actually, amazingly, it's a very versatile instrument. It can also play very high notes, as you can see, there are a lot of keys on it. There are nine keys for my left thumb alone. So I'm switching between these on the back here and many others, and because of that, I can go very high I'll just demonstrate that. [MUSIC] So that's just to give you a sense of the range, because of the sort of particular character of the bassoon's sound, it's often used to play sort of funny little low note characters in the orchestra. For example, if you're familiar with Peter and the Wolf, different instruments play different characters, the bassoon is the grandfather. [MUSIC] >> You heard some of the strings and some of the woodwinds. Now we're gonna turn to the brass instruments, and here again we have instruments of various sizes, various members of the brass family. On this particular side we can see from top to bottom. Trumpet over there in the top left, french horn in the middle, and trombone below. And then two tubas to the right, one large and one small. The principle involved with the brass instrument is simple. Each has in one way or another a tube or pipe that ultimately connects to a bell. And that helps to disperse the sound. To prove the point, I and my trusty media coordinator Guy Ontivella constructed a brass instrument. Well, sort of. We took a mouthpiece, this is actually the mouthpiece from his daughter's trombone, and a funnel that I use in my garage to funnel gasoline. And we connected them through a tube that we will pretend is made of metal. Specifically of brass. One a french horn, this tube of metal or brass could be as long as 12 feet. So you're about to hear and I'll have to stand up for this world premier. You're about to hear Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra played on a brand new instrument, the trombone funnel [SOUND] Oddly enough, it was playing the first overtone, [LAUGH] the second overtone and the third overtone, and we could fill in with. [MUSIC] Obviously, Yale University is at the cutting edge of science and technology. [LAUGH] And equally obvious, as we look at this slide once again, the longer the piece of pipe, the lower the sound. The player pulls in or out a slide, makes the tubing longer or shorter, raises or lowers the pitch. Or he opens and closes valves on a trumpet or a French horn, thereby making the length of pipe longer or shorter. And the pitch is thereby adjusted. To each of the brass instruments is attached a mouthpiece. Let's see if I can detach this. I have no idea what's gonna happen, yep, there it goes. So here's the mouthpiece for a trombone. And they come in various sizes according to the instrument in question. Lets watch a demonstration of a real brass instrument here, the french horn, from a class session. This is my friend long time colleague music library extraordinaire and professional french horn player Ava Heder, who will demonstrate here. Come on over here right in the center. Jean Kimball is in the basement somewhere recording all of this. >> Oh my. >> Oh yes, very exciting here. >> [LAUGH] >> What a time to be alive, huh? >> Yeah. >> So, Eva's just going to demonstrate the physical process of playing the french horn. >> The horn, obviously, is a brass instrument, and what makes the sound is a vibrating column of air. In this case, the basic column of air is twelve and a half feet long and there's something called partials or the harmonic series that happens in anything with a string instrument or whatever. But, on the horn, it's very distinct and that's what makes the different note. Let me demonstrate to you the harmonic series. [MUSIC] No, I didn't use, no hands. That was just the notes that are naturally on the 12 and a half foot length of a vibrating air. That's the harmonic series. That's on that And what the valves do is they shorten and lengthen that vibrating column of air, very much like a cello string on a finger board. You know a cellist is always shortening and lengthening the strings. I'm doing the same thing. I'm just doing it with a series of switches. This instead of a fingerboard, which we obviously don't have. >> Okay. That's fun. That's great. That's the principle. And when she says she'd overblow it, what that means is, and we'll keep emphasizing this point today, that. And these partials that when I sounds is made you have not just one sound but that tube is divide it up into sections and all kinds of little sections of that one tube are sounding. Not just the big sound but the partials, or the overtones. The intervals of the harmonic series. Finally the percussion family. But I'm not gonna say too much about them. Course we have the bass drum. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. And the snare drum. Ratta-tat. Ratta-tat. Ratta-tat. And the ding, the triangle. These instruments for the most part don't change pitch. For the symphony orchestra, however, the principal percussion instrument is the timpani or kettle drums, called kettle drums of course, because they look like large kettles or pots. They can sound different pitches. They do change pitch. On the screen here you see four kettle drums. Usually at the time of Mozart and Haydn, in the period of classical music, there would be only two on the stage. They were tuned to play the tonic and the dominant notes. And to get them in tune you could push the pedals that you see on the slide here. That's what the pedals are for. They make it possible to change the pitch. The skin head or the plastic head on the drum. So back in the time of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven you really only used two of these and they were tuned to the tonic and dominant and they could emphasize the authentic cadences at critical points in the music. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. That's what they would play. But generally, what the percussions instruments do is identity and intensity and articulation to the music. Yes, the bass drum and snare drum, they can help keep a strong beat in the music. And so can the cymbal, crash, crash, cash, crash, crash, cash, crash, crash, cash. But the cymbal crashing music most particularly in romantic music often comes at the top of a musical line and the end of a long crescendo, end of a big increase in volume. This is what I mean by saying that the percussion instrument gives definition to the music and helps tell us where we are. >> In romantic music, when you hear a long crescendo by the full orchestra, and then [SOUND], cymbal crash, that crash is signifying to the listener that we are at the peak. This is the top, this is the high point. This is the emotional high point of the piece. When the cymbal player crashes the two together, he might just as well be saying, this is the climax.
