Curated category
Concert band instruments
- TrumpetThe trumpet is a brass instrument with a history stretching back to at least 2000 BC, and yet it took more than three thousand years before anyone thought to…
- BassoonThe bassoon is among the most unusual objects in a concert hall. Nearly 1.34 meters tall but with a total sounding length of 2.54 meters, it folds back on…
- ClarinetThe clarinet's reed can stay clamped shut for as much as half of every second it plays, snapping open and closed to send tiny puffs of air down the tube.
- Bass drumThe bass drum, a large cylindrical instrument with heads at both ends, sits at the heart of nearly every musical tradition humanity has developed.
- TromboneThe trombone has been announcing the arrival of important people since the 16th century. In German city-states, trombonists were stationed in city towers to…
- CymbalCymbals are one of the oldest percussion instruments still in everyday use. A 7th-century BC relief carved in the Armenian Highlands shows a figure holding…
- TubaThe tuba takes its name from the Latin word for trumpet, yet it sits at the opposite end of the brass family, in the bass-to-contrabass range.
- OboeThe oboe is the instrument that tunes the world's great orchestras. Every night, in concert halls from Vienna to New York, the musicians fall silent and wait.
- XylophoneThe xylophone is a percussion instrument built on one of music's oldest premises: strike a piece of wood, and it sings. Bars of rosewood, padauk, or cocobolo…
- Double bassThe double bass is the largest and lowest-pitched chordophone in the modern symphony orchestra, and it has spent centuries occupying a peculiar, contested…