All music enthusiasts know that at a basic level, you can divide most wind instruments into woodwind and brass. However, this is shaky ground. Even the expression “wind instruments” is a bit suspect. Wind instruments (well, most of them anyway) don’t produce their sound by using the wind, but by using human breath. Flutes, despite being classed as woodwind instruments are nearly always made of metal. Of course, at one time flutes were nearly all made of wood. The gradual change to metal flutes was brought about by larger orchestras and the need for a more penetrative tone quality. Even though they have always been made of metal, saxophones are classed as woodwind because their sound is produced in the same way as most other woodwind instruments: with a reed. Some obsolete brass instruments are made of wood. The cornett (not to be confused with the modern cornet), and the serpent are both made of wood and the long-defunct olifant is made from ivory. They are classed as brass because the sound is produced by the vibration of the player’s lips.
The issue has always been a bit of a tangle and in 1914, in an attempt to tidy things up, a system of instrument classification was developed by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. Not surprisingly, it’s known as the Hornbostel – Sachs Classification and remains the most widely used method for classifying instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists. And in case you’re wondering, organologists are people who study the origins and history of musical instruments, not just organs. The system is loosely modeled on the Dewey Decimal Classification for libraries. It’s incredibly complex because it’s not intended merely to classify Western orchestral instruments but every musical instrument known to humankind, back to the beginnings of the Stone Age.
Moritz and Sachs divide all musical instruments, regardless of cultural or historical background into four broad categories, based on the way the instruments produce their sound. Each of these broad classifications is further divided into a large number of sub-divisions. The four basic groups are idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, electrophones and aerophones. Aerophones are what everyone else calls “wind instruments”. They’re divided into displacement, interruptive, idiophonic, non-idiophonic and so on. There are about eighteen of these sub-divisions. It’s all a bit daunting, especially for a musician. This is probably why musicians never use this terminology. Nevertheless, here’s some music for miscellaneous aerophones and two composite chordophones.
Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904): Serenade for Wind Instruments in D minor, Op 44. Players of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, cond. Andrés Orozco-Estrada. (Duration: 27:38; Video: 1080p HD)
In the small grey town where I lived as a boy, there was a shop selling household electrical gadgets but also offered a modest, if eccentric selection of classical gramophone records. They seemed to have been selected completely at random. On one occasion, I found a record of Dvorák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments, a work which I’d never heard before. But having previously discovered The New World Symphony, the Cello Concerto and the so-called American String Quartet, I was already a devoted fan of Dvorák (d’VAW-r shahk).
Oddly enough, we must thank Mozart for this work, even though it was written eighty years after his death. You see, late in 1877 during a trip to Vienna, Dvorák attended a concert given by the Vienna Philharmonic. The programme included Mozart’s Serenade in B flat for Wind Instruments. Dvorák was so impressed with the work that when he arrived back home in Prague in early 1878, he began writing his own serenade and completed it a fortnight later. The work consists of four movements and it’s scored for two clarinets, two bassoons and three horns. The composer later added parts for cello and double bass to reinforce the bass line.
The work opens with a traditional-sounding march with an Eastern-European flavour, and the lyrical second movement (04:37), marked in the score as a minuet, contains lovely hints of Slavonic folk dances. The third movement (11:30) contains some delightful clarinet and oboe solos and takes some thematic ideas from the Mozart work that inspired it. The Finale (20:40) resembles a lively dance which, in typical Dvorák fashion, ventures through several contrasting keys before restating the first movement theme and then coming to a joyful and heroic conclusion. Although much of the music evokes folk songs and dances of Old Bohemia, the music is entirely the composer’s own. And there’s so much to enjoy in this music that a few repeated hearings won’t do any harm.
This work is often performed without a conductor, but perhaps because these players are spread out across the stage in pandemic style, a conductor becomes necessary. The distinguished Andrés Orozco-Estrada brings some unexpected and charming insights into the music. Brahms enjoyed this work too. On first hearing it, he wrote to his friend the violinist Joseph Joachim, “Take a look at Dvorák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do…it would be difficult to discover a finer, more refreshing impression of really abundant and charming creative talent. Have it played to you; I feel sure the players will enjoy doing it!”
