Playing Quarter Tones On Musical Instruments
Because many musical instruments manufactured today are designed for the 12-tone scale, not all are usable for playing quarter tones. Sometimes special playing techniques must be used.
Conventional musical instruments that cannot play quarter tones (except by using special techniques—see below) include
- Normally fretted string instruments
- Pianos, normally tuned
- Organs, when conventionally tuned
- Synthesizers (when design does not permit)
- Accordions
- Pitched percussion instruments, when tuning does not permit and normal techniques are used
Conventional musical instruments that can play quarter tones include
- Synthesizers (if design permits)
- Fretless string instruments (on fretted string instruments it is possible with bending or special tuning)
- Quarter-tone fretted string instruments
- Slide brass instruments (trombone)
- Valved brass instruments (trumpet, horn, tuba)
- Woodwind instruments, using special fingering or bending.
- Flute
- Recorder
- Clarinet
- Oboe
- Saxophone
- Bassoon
- Harmonica
- Harp
- Pianos, if specially tuned
- Organs, when tuned for the purpose
- Pitched percussion instruments, when tuning permits, or using special techniques
Experimental instruments have been built to play in quarter tones, for example a quarter tone clarinet by Fritz Schüller (1883–1977) of Markneukirchen.
Other instruments can be used to play quarter tones when using audio signal processing effects such as pitch shifting.
Pairs of conventional instruments tuned a quarter tone apart can be used to play some quarter tone music. Indeed, quarter-tone pianos have been built, which consist essentially of two pianos stacked one above the other in a single case, one tuned a quarter tone higher than the other.
Read more about this topic: Quarter Tone
Famous quotes containing the words playing, quarter, tones, musical and/or instruments:
“Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the haunted house no quarter is given: in that respect
It’s very much business as usual. The reductive principle
Is no longer there, or isn’t enforced as much as before.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, as sand eddies in a whirlwind.”
—Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
“Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)