The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

For many years those who learnt about music, whether at school or simply out of amateur enthusiasm, were confronted with a standard chart: the Instruments of the Orchestra, with a few solo instruments (piano, harp, organ) thrown in for good measure. The strings, woodwind, brass, timpani and a fairly narrow selection of percussion (bass drum, side drum, cymbals, triangle, glockenspiel): these were the instruments you Had To Know if you wanted to know about music, and that still form the backbone of the modern symphony orchestra. A useful if fairly unimaginative and standardised selection, which barely scratches the surface of the huge variety of shapes and sounds that have been available to musicians across the centuries – and that’s only in western art music, never mind the even greater array of ancient, folk, classical and modern instruments from every corner of the globe. The symphony orchestra on those old wall charts, imprinted on the minds of schoolchildren of a certain vintage, was typical of the mid-nineteenth century, but even for that period there were omissions, such as the ophicleide (a bass instrument of the brass family supplanted by the more reliable tuba) that makes such a memorable appearance in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. Go a few decades earlier and Turkish percussion instruments were de rigueur in certain works by Haydn, Mozart and even Beethoven; a few decades later, not just the contrabassoon but the heckelphone, saxophone and Wagner tuba were increasingly widely used.

Casting the net wider still, early music (from the middle ages to the late Baroque) contains a kaleidoscopic array of instruments, many of which were revealed for the first time to more adventurous listeners on David Munrow’s ground-breaking 1976 set of LPs Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, reissued on CD a few years ago by Virgin Veritas (albeit without the extensive original accompanying booklet). Here Munrow and his colleagues revel in the sounds of everything from simple panpipes to such rare plucked instruments as the mandora, cittern, citole, bandora and orpharion, as well as reed instruments including the gemshorn, curtal, cornamuse and kortholt, not forgetting the splendid-looking and -sounding rackett (whose alternative name, ‘sausage bassoon’, gives some idea of its bizarre appearance). Knowledge of and playing experience on these instruments may have developed in the decades since, and some of the combinations are fanciful or downright anachronistic, but Munrow’s lively musicianship and high playing standards ensure that this is still essential listening for anyone wanting to dip their toes into the weird and wonderful world of early musical instruments of the European traditions.

Recent decades have seen a huge growth in the variety and quality of early keyboard instruments represented on disc, both restored originals and reproductions, ranging from vast Baroque organs with their seemingly infinite variety of characterful stops to exquisite chamber instruments like the spinet, virginals, muselar and clavichord. There’s a very special thrill to hearing Bach’s organ works played on instruments from his native Saxony and Thuringia, or hearing Mozart’s Rondo ‘alla turca’ played on a fortepiano fitted with a ‘janissary’ pedal, just as there is to hearing Brahms’s piano works played on a JB Streicher piano, or Franck, Widor and Vierne on a Cavaillé-Coll organ. A particularly intriguing keyboard instrument featured on a few recent recordings is the claviorganum, which combines features of a spinet or harpsichord (i.e. plucked strings) with those of a regal or small pipe organ, all played by the same musician at a single or double manual. Claviorgans were popular at the luxury end of the musical market from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, making their recent reappearances on disc all the more fascinating.

The advent of music printing in the sixteenth century went hand-in-hand with the steady expansion of a dedicated instrumental repertoire, which led to further developments in the manufacture of musical instruments themselves. By the early nineteenth century, the increasing mobility and connectedness of individual virtuosi and ensembles led to a period of relative consolidation and standardisation (particular in matters of pitch), yet this wasn’t the whole story. Advances in instrument building (typified by the age of the big piano manufacturers, as well as the addition of keys and valves to wind instruments by Theobald Boehm, Heinrich Stölzel and others) themselves fostered further experimentation, particularly at the larger end of the scale. The keyboard compass on concert pianos grew, while such imposing woodwind instruments as the bass flute, lupophone (essentially an extra-large bass oboe), contrabass clarinet, contraforte (a form of contrabassoon) and the mighty bass saxophone were all introduced to the world, with varying degrees of success and limited affordability. Recent years have seen a growth of interest in such relative rarities, particularly from contemporary composers eager to explore the often unique palettes of sound on offer. Dominique Schafer’s INFR-A-KTION (2018), for example, unforgettably combines the lupophone and contraforte with an ensemble of six more conventional instruments in music that is both challenging and strangely hypnotic. Sometimes, however, less is more, and composers from John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen to Walter Zimmermann and Evan Johnson have made imaginative, probing use of the sonorities of the toy piano in a range of works.