Flutes go back to ancient Egyptian times and beyond. Variants of the instrument are also present in areas of world music, but here we are concentrating on flutes used in the Western classical music tradition.
Despite being part of the woodwind family, the flute is now rarely made of wood, instead being manufactured from metal. The instrument was originally known as the ‘transverse flute’ or the ‘German flute’. It was given the first name because it was designed to be played sideways, unlike, say, a recorder (which was sometimes known as the ‘English flute’). The second epithet came about because the instrument seems to have hailed from Germany in the distant past.
Flutes are distinct from other woodwind instruments because they have no reed. The player simply blows into the metal tube and creates the notes via the finger holes positioned along the length of the instrument. The flute’s range runs over three octaves upwards from middle C, hitting the high notes with ease.
Famous flautists (the correct name for a flute player) include Sir James Galway, who was a massive hit in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘the man with the golden flute’ and Emmanuel Pahud, currently the principal flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
A quick word here for the piccolo, which is a half-size flute. It operates in the same way as its bigger cousin, but it makes a sound an octave higher than written – so it’s just like a flute, but it can hit stratospherically high notes, adding a lovely sparkling sound at the top of the woodwind section.
This member of the woodwind family is the instrument to which all others in the orchestra tune. This is because it can be heard easily above the rest and also because it holds its note very well. It gets its name from the French words haut (high) and bois (wood).
It is a ‘double-reed’ instrument, which means that the oboist makes a sound by blowing across two reeds stuck together (rather than just one on its own), at the same time uncovering or covering the holes on the instrument’s body with his or her fingers. The metal attachments (which look a little like jewellery) allow the player to open and close the holes with ease. The oboe’s interior chamber is conical, rather than cylindrical like that of flutes and clarinets, and this gives it its unique sound.
The instrument has been a popular choice for concerto composers: Albinoni, Vivaldi and Mozart all wrote particularly fine examples. In more modern times, Ravel wrote a starring role for the oboe in his celebrated Boléro, while Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto was one of his last masterpieces.
Although its name translates literally as ‘English horn’, this member of the woodwind family of instruments is neither English nor a horn. Many people mistakenly think that it must be part of the brass section, but it resides firmly in the woodwind section of the orchestra. It is actually a tenor version of the oboe.
According to one theory, it got its rather strange name because early tenor-oboe audiences thought that it sounded like angels. The German word for ‘angel’ is Engel, but somehow the true meaning was lost in translation and it ended up being called ‘English horn’. Funnily enough, we always refer to it in French, just to confuse matters further. It looks like an oboe, except that it is slightly bigger with a bulbous bell. It has a particularly alluring sound, which is shown off well in Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (‘From the New World’).
Unlike the oboe, which has a double reed, the clarinet is a single-reed instrument. It originated around 1690, but the version we know today came into being only towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Mozart was the first composer to use the clarinet in a symphony. Clarinets come in a whole host of different varieties, so it is important to know which one is which.
The clarinet that appears in most orchestral settings is usually pitched in the key of B flat – which means that when it plays a written C in the music, it actually sounds as a B flat, one note lower. There is also a range of other clarinets in, variously, A, E flat, D and F – as well as a bass clarinet – each of which plays their sounded notes at a different pitch from their written notes.
Then there is the pedal clarinet, also known as the contrabass clarinet or the double-bass clarinet, which tends to be played only in military bands. The clarina, heckelclarina, heckelclarinette and holztrompete are musical curiosities. They are clarinet-related instruments, but only very rarely make an appearance.
This rather large, elongated wooden instrument is the second-lowest of all the woodwind instruments; the lowest being its close relation, the double-bassoon, which is also known as the contra-bassoon. The bassoon is another ‘double-reed’ instrument. Its body is basically two conical pieces of wood (usually maple or Brazilian rosewood), with a ‘hairpin’ design allowing the tube through which the sound travels to double back on itself. One of the instrument’s many claims to fame is that it stars as the musical voice of the grandfather in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.
Born and raised in Belgium, Adolphe Sax was in his late twenties and living in Paris when he invented his saxophone in the 1840s. Like a clarinet, it is a wind instrument with a single-reed mouthpiece. However, unlike a clarinet, it has a fairly simple fingering system. It has a ‘conical bore’ (i.e. it is wider at the bottom than it is at the top) and is very popular in military bands, not to mention jazz groups.
The Russian composer Alexander Glazunov loved the sound the saxophone produced and wrote his Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings in 1934 after repeated requests from Sigurd Raschèr, a legendary German-born saxophonist, who later had a successful career in the US with over 200 concert works for the saxophone dedicated to him.
In more modern times, the combination of medieval plainchant and improvised jazz brought together by the saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, a noted early music vocal group, for the album Officium in 1993 has proved to be an enduring Classic FM listeners’ favourite.