The celesta is a type of keyboard glockenspiel, with a range of four octaves upwards from middle C, and a damping pedal like a piano. Inside the body of the instrument is a series of chromatically tuned metal bars, which are struck with felt hammers when the performer plays the keyboard. Creation of the Celesta The celesta was ...
the full the virtuoso qualities of the French horn, with two horn concertos and spectacular orchestral horn parts. A wider range of percussion instruments was also being used. The celesta became an occasional orchestral member after Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s (1840–93) use of it in the Nutcracker and Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) introduced the xylophone in the 1870s. The lyra-glockenspiel was becoming ...
became an orchestral instrument in the nineteenth century, but was used as a solo instrument in the twentieth-century orchestra – as in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and in the music of Stockhausen, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Pierre Boulez (b. 1925). Marimba The marimba appears to have been largely unknown in Europe ...
Percussion instruments are a diverse and interesting family. Every human culture plays them, and they are among the oldest instruments known to man. Percussion instruments are indispensable to practically every genre and style of music. In many cultures, the leader of a musical ensemble plays a percussion instrument to give signals to the other performers, such as when ...
No. 3 (1945); Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938); Viola Concerto (1945) Orchestral works: Suite No. 1 (1905); Suite No. 2 (1907); Dance Suite (1923); Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936); Divertimento for Strings (1939); Concerto for Orchestra (1943) Chamber music: String Quartet No. 1 (1908); String Quartet No. 2 (1917); String Quartet No. 3 (1927); String Quartet No. 4 ...
the form of a funeral march with dark orchestral colours and threatening trombones, the pattern of loneliness followed by spiritual release is repeated, with the extra colours of celesta and harp suggesting infinity while the soloist’s exclamations of ‘ewig, ewig’ (‘eternally, eternally’) fade beyond the threshold of audibility. Exotic Influences The element of oriental quaintness which Mahler ...
as transferring the gamelan’s gong strokes to a conventional orchestral gong (with double-bass doubling), Britten used staccato notes played with hard sticks on a piccolo timpani. Xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, cymbals, tam tams and a rack of gong chimes all help Britten recreate something of the effect of gamelan. Recreating the Gamelan in Western Music Prominent among composers ...
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