So far we've talked about church music and some more church music that was a little
more... a little different from the first part. Now let's talk about instrumental music from
this early period of time.
Chances are if you hear this kind of music performed anywhere you're more
likely to hear instrumental music than the vocal music. I don't know quite why
that is but maybe it's because those instruments are such fun for musicians to
play.
So, when you go see a group like this and even the videos that we're going to watch now,
they're probably not playing instruments that were really built in the year one
thousand (1000).
I mean, that's more than a thousand years ago.
Technology was not that good at the time.
So chances are that the instruments that were actually built then did not survive.
But what we do have is a lot of visual representation of those instruments
because we have paintings galore
of early musicians.
We probably have some sort of fragmentary instruments. We may even have
some in museums but, you know, nobody is letting you play those because they are
artifacts.
So today's modern musicians will play instruments that are built based on the model of
those. So they probably have a slightly different sound because our
technology's just better, the strings are going to be better for the string instruments
and such.
But it gives you a sense of what that kind of music sounds like.
So what kind of instruments are we talking about here?
An amazingly diverse array actually. You'd be surprised. There are things
you actually here all the time.
Drums, obviously. One of the pieces that we're going to look at actually has a
man playing a hand drum which is
like just a skin on a frame and you hold it up and play it with your hands.
Bagpipes
go way back.
So there are lots of different kinds of bagpipes; the little one that you just
put here and
kind of play like that instead of the great big Scottish pipes that we think of.
The recorder;
that lovely little instrument you played in the third grade
goes way back. Obviously it was not made of plastic back then, it was made of wood.
We're actually going to look at a video of a man playing a double
recorder so he has one mouthpiece and two sets of fingers to do.
Which, I haven't tried. I might have to give that a whirl, see if I can handle it.
Tambourine's very popular.
Trumpets!
Trumpets
without valves, obviously, we don't get those until much later, which had multiple functions.
A trumpet might be used as a way to call the army in much the same way that
buglers did during the Civil War. You know you put them on a horse and they can
you sound the... whatever thing you want people to do retreat, advance,
with different calls.
They might also be used as a signal that an important person is coming. That's very
typical especially with royal
processions.
The trumpet players announced that the king is coming.
The shawm which I mentioned a minute ago is an early version of the oboe.
So it's a reed instrument,
has a kind of a nasal quality usually.
It is also commonly used.
We have
things that are like flutes.
They didn't have keys on them like the modern flute. They would just be open
holed like a recorder but they would be played
this way like a flute is.
The harp
is around... especially like... in Ireland,
the harp goes back ages.
So, it's used
in popular music for the most part back then. It would have been a smaller instrument than a
concert harp like you would see today.
The string instruments we have. You don't see violins and violas yet.
We sort of see their ancestors,
things like the viol,
the rebec,
the theremin I think it's called. No, that's not it, can't remember
it was a really big one, I just saw one a couple weeks ago.
I'll try to remember the name of that and get it to you later.
There are lots of different string instruments.
They have a basic string sound you'd be familiar with; the lute, very
popular.
So string instruments,
wind instruments, brass instruments, percussion. We've got all the families going here. Don't have any
keyboard instruments going here but they really aren't being used very much yet.
Horns are also being used, mostly for hunting calls. If you imagine fox
hunting in England
in the merry old days, that's what the horn players did, they played the call.
Same function goes way back.
So we're going to have a couple of examples
of instrumental music for you to listen to.
The first one is by a French group
and it's... this is a piece from a set of pieces
that has to do
with the
king coming, so it has that sort of royal flair to it. So, I want you to take a look at
that one, and then the second one that you have to watch
is for the double recorder
with a hand drum. So, it's a very different kind of sound that will give you an idea
about what kinds of music people were listening to out on the streets. You know
if you went to a festival this is the kind of music you might have heard
in that early music period.
So, listen to those.
Enjoy the artistry of these really interesting musicians.