Wind & Woodwind Instruments
Wind & Woodwind Instrument Fast Facts
The basic woodwind section of the modern orchestra consists of the following instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. To these are usually added the piccolo, cor anglais, and double bassoon, and sometimes also the alto flute and bass clarinet. All wind instruments produce their notes when a column of air enclosed inside a tube is made to vibrate. These vibrations are set up in the first instance by the player’s breath, which either agitates a reed-system (as in oboes, clarinets and bassoons) or impinges against the sharp edge of a mouthpiece (as in flutes). The longer the tube and its column of air the lower the note that is produced. The deep-sounding bassoon is thus a much larger instrument than the high-sounding flute. To produce different notes, holes are cut in the walls of the tube.
A Brief History of Wind & Woodwind Instruments
Wind instrument makers have been faced with three main problems in their search for perfection. First, how to provide a sufficient number of holes for all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and yet take account of the fact that a player will have only a limited number of fingers to cover them. Then how to arrange for the holes to be cut in the acoustically perfect place, and yet keep them within reach of the player’s fingers. And finally, how to make the holes large enough to produce a good quality of sound and intonation, and yet small enough to be sealed off by the average size of finger.
The answer to all of these problems came with the invention of ‘keys’. These are virtually artificial fingers. The earliest consisted of a small metal see-saw, fitted at one end with a leather-padded plate and at the other with a lever, and suitably pivoted in the middle. By pressing the lever the player could raise and lower the padded plate and thus open and close the hole beneath it. In other words, the key could reach where the fingers could not, and also, if necessary, deal effectively with holes of a larger size.
A further refinement came with the introduction of ‘ring keys’, invented in 1808 by an English clergyman, Frederick Nolan, and applied first to the flute in 1832 by Theobald Boehm (1794-1881), a German flute player. Boehm dispensed with the lever shaped like a metal tongue. Instead a metal ring was fitted round an existing finger hole which had been provided with a raised lip for the purpose. The ring was joined to a rod which ran lengthwise down the instrument and was in turn connected to the padded key. Thus by means of rods, springs and axles the player could open and close a hole some distance away and at the same time use his finger to open and close the hole around which the ring lay. This method, coupled with the new kinds of fingering it made possible, became known as the Boehm System. It is still used today.
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