Musical Instrument Classification - Strings, Percussion, and Wind

Strings, Percussion, and Wind

The system used in the west today, dividing instruments into wind, strings, and percussion, is of Greek origin (in the Hellenistic period, prominent proponents being Nicomachus and Porphyry). The scheme was later expanded by Martin Agricola, who distinguished plucked string instruments, such as guitars, from bowed string instruments, such as violins. Classical musicians today do not always maintain this division (although plucked strings are grouped separately from bowed strings in sheet music), but there is a distinction made between wind instruments with a reed (woodwind instruments) and wind instruments where the air is set in motion directly by the lips (brass instruments).

There are, however, problems with this system. Some rarely seen and non-western instruments do not fit very neatly into it. The serpent, for example, an old instrument rarely seen nowadays, ought to be classified as a brass instrument, as a column of air is set in motion by the lips. However, it looks more like a woodwind instrument, and is closer to one in many ways, having finger-holes to control pitch, rather than valves. There are also problems with classifying certain keyboard instruments. For example, the piano has strings, but they are struck by hammers, so it is not clear whether it should be classified as a string instrument or a percussion instrument. For this reason, keyboard instruments are often regarded as inhabiting a category of their own, including all instruments played by a keyboard, whether they have struck strings (like the piano), plucked strings (like the harpsichord) or no strings at all (like the celesta). It might be said that with these extra categories, the classical system of instrument classification focuses less on the fundamental way in which instruments produce sound, and more on the technique required to play them.

Various names have been assigned to these 3 traditional Western groupings (On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, Margaret Kartomi, 1990, U. of Chicago Press, pp. 136–138, 157, and notes for Chp. 10):

Boethius (5th and 6th centuries AD) labelled them intensione ut nervis, spiritu ut tibiis ("breath in the tube"), and percussione;

Cassiodorus, a younger contemporary of the above, used the names tensibilia, percussionalia, and inflatilia;

Roger Bacon (13th century) dubbed them tensilia, inflativa, and percussionalia;

Ugolino da Orvieto (14th and 15th centuries) called them intensione ut nervis, spiritu ut tibiis, and percussione;

Sebastien de Brossard (1703) referred to them as enchorda or entata (but only for instruments with several strings), pneumatica or empneousta, and krusta (from the Greek for hit or strike) or pulsatilia (for percussives);

Filippo Bonanni (1722) used vernacular names: sonori per il fiato, sonori per la tensione, and sonori per la percussione;

Joseph Majer (1732) called them pneumatica, pulsatilia (percussives including plucked instruments), and fidicina (from fidula, fiddle) (for bowed instruments);

Johann Eisel (1738) dubbed them pneumatica, pulsatilia, and fidicina;

Johannes de Muris (1784) used the terms chordalia, foraminalia (from foramina, "bore" in reference to the bored tubes), and vasalia (for "vessels");

Regino of Prum (1784) called them tensibile, inflatile, and percussionabile.

Turkish encyclopedist Hadji Khalifa (1600s) also recognized the same 3 classes in his Kashf al-zunun an asami al-kutub wa-funun ("clarification and conjecture about the names of books and sciences"), a treatise on the origin and construction of musical instruments. but this was exceptional for Near Eastern writers as they mostly ignored the percussion group as did early Hellenistic Greeks, the Near Eastern culture traditionally and that period of Greek history having low regard for that group (Kartomi, 1990).

The T'boli of Mindanao use the same 3 categories as well, but group the strings (t'duk) with the winds (nawa) together based on a gentleness (lemnoy) -strength (megel) dichotomy, regarding the percussion group (tembol) as strong and the winds-strings group as gentle. The division pervades T'boli thought about cosmology, social characters of men and women, and artistic styles (Kartomi, 1990).