The percussion family is probably the largest instrument family, as it can contain almost anything that can be struck or scraped to produce an audible sound. Also included here are rattles, ratchets, bells and chimes, the triangle, cymbals, all the members of the xylophone group, hammered dulcimers, as well as a number of keyboards including the piano, celeste, and electric piano. The most obvious examples of this are the various types of drum being struck by the hand or a beater (drumstick). The Percussion: A percussion instrument is any instrument in which sound is produced by striking or scraping one thing against another. This family can also be found depicted in art from the Ancient World, and its presence in the form of the conch shell and various animal horn based instruments found in pre-industrial indigenous cultures may indicate a much earlier origin.
Sound is produced when the player places their lips against a mouthpiece, or simply a hole in the instrument, and produces a buzzing sound. The Brass: Trumpets, cornets, bugles, trombones, French horns, euphoniums, tubas, a number of other less well known horns, as well as folk and ritual instruments like the shofar, the kudu horn, hunting horns, post horns, and even conch shells, comprise the Brass family. Reed instruments can be traced back at least to the Ancient World. The remains of a small bone flute found in Paleolithic cave dwelling deposits date the woodwind family back some 40,000 years.
Instruments in this family include flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, saxophones, pipe and reed organs, recorders, bagpipes, the calliope, harmonicas, whistles, etc. The Woodwinds: Woodwinds produce sound by either passing air over a hole in the body of the instrument, a “fipple” (a beveled hole), or a reed. Bowed strings can be traced back to the Medieval period when, along with the lute, they were brought back to Europe by crusaders. The string family can be traced back to ancient times with depictions of harps and lyres in Ancient Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian art, and extant examples from Ancient Egypt. This family includes, but is not limited to the orchestral strings (violin, viola, cello, string bass), the guitars and lutes, harps, zithers, dulcimers, and the harpsichord (which plucks its strings via a mechanical action operated from a keyboard). The Strings: These are instruments which produce their sound by bowing or plucking a string that has been stretched over a resonating chamber. This is because classifying instruments as “keyboards” does not adhere to the traditional method of classification by sound production, and, as we will see, any keyboard instrument can be neatly fit into the other five categories. For the sake of this series, we will use five families: Stings, Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, and Electronic Instruments. More recently however this has been expanded to include Keyboards and /or Electronic instruments. Traditionally, there are four families of instruments Strings, Woodwinds, Brass (sometimes “Brasswind”), and Percussion. However, the families are actually based on how the instruments produce sound. This stems from the family names like “Woodwind” and “Brass”.
It is a common misconception that these groups are based on the materials from which an instrument is made. Musical instruments are categorized by families.
The Instruments of the Orchestra I: Families
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