Organology in the context of "Percussion"

The lyre (/ˈlaɪər/) (from Greek λύρα and Latin lyra) is a stringed musical instrument that is classified by Hornbostel–Sachs as a member of the lute family of instruments. In organology, a lyre is considered a yoke lute, since it is a lute in which the strings are attached to a yoke that lies in the same plane as the sound table, and consists of two arms and a crossbar.

The lyre has its origins in ancient history. Lyres were used in several ancient cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The earliest known examples of the lyre have been recovered at archeological sites that date to c. 2700 BCE in Mesopotamia. The oldest lyres from the Fertile Crescent are known as the eastern lyres and are distinguished from other ancient lyres by their flat base. They have been found at archaeological sites in Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and the Levant. In a discussion of the Nubian lyre, Carl Engel notes that modern Egyptians call it qytarah barbarîyeh, reflecting its association with the Barbaras (Berbers)—linked to the brbrta of ancient Egyptian references to Punt, a region identified with present-day Somalia, where the shareero lyre remains in use.

Hornbostel–Sachs or Sachs–Hornbostel is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. This system was first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914. An English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961, which is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists (people who study musical instruments). The system was updated in 2011 as part of the work of the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) Project.

Hornbostel and Sachs based their ideas on a system devised in the late 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon, the curator of musical instruments at Brussels Conservatory. Mahillon divided instruments into four broad categories according to the nature of the sound-producing material: an air column; string; membrane; and body of the instrument. From this basis, Hornbostel and Sachs expanded Mahillon's system to make it possible to classify any instrument from any culture.

Musicology is the academic, research-based study of music, as opposed to musical composition or performance. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.

Musicology is traditionally divided into three branches: music history, systematic musicology, and ethnomusicology. Historical musicologists study the history of musical traditions, the origins of works, and the biographies of composers. Ethnomusicologists draw from anthropology (particularly field research) to understand how and why people make music. Systematic musicology includes music theory, aesthetics, pedagogy, musical acoustics, the science and technology of musical instruments, and the musical implications of physiology, psychology, sociology, philosophy and computing. Cognitive musicology is the set of phenomena surrounding the cognitive modeling of music. When musicologists carry out research using computers, their research often falls under the field of computational musicology. Music therapy is a specialized form of applied musicology which is sometimes considered more closely affiliated with health fields, and other times regarded as part of musicology proper.

In organology, the study of musical instruments, many methods of classifying instruments exist. Most methods are specific to a particular cultural group and were developed to serve the musical needs of that culture. Culture-based classification methods sometimes break down when applied outside that culture. For example, a classification based on instrument use may fail when applied to another culture that uses the same instrument differently.

In the study of Western music, the most common classification method divides instruments into the following groups:

Curt Sachs (German: [zaks]; 29 June 1881 – 5 February 1959) was a German musicologist. He was one of the founders of modern organology (the study of musical instruments). Among his contributions was the Hornbostel–Sachs system, which he created with Erich von Hornbostel.

The Galpin Society was formed in October 1946 to further research into the branch of musicology known as organology, that is the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Based in the United Kingdom, it is named after the British organologist and musical instrument collector, Canon Francis William Galpin (1858–1945), who had a lifelong interest in studying, collecting, playing, making and writing about musical instruments. The membership in 1999 was around a thousand.

The society's founder members were keen to form a society to promote the historical study of all kinds of musical instruments. The founding members included academics, professional and amateur performers, and private collectors, including Anthony Baines, Robert Donington, Hugh Gough, Eric Halfpenny, Edgar Hunt, Eric Marshall Johnson, Lyndesay Langwill, Reginald Morley-Pegge, F. Geoffrey Rendall and Maurice Vincent. Philip Bate was the inaugural chairman of the society and Professor Jack Westrup, Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, served as its first president. One of the inaugural vice-presidents was the widow of Arnold Dolmetsch, and the others included Walter F. H. Blandford, Adam Carse and Rosamond E. M. Harding. Bate later served as president (1977–99).

In organology, a course is either one string or two or more adjacent strings that are closely spaced relative to the other strings, and typically played as a single string. The strings in each multiple-string course are typically tuned in unison or an octave.

Normally, the term course is used to refer to a single string only on an instrument that also has multi-string courses. For example, a nine-string baroque guitar has five courses: most are two-string courses but sometimes the lowest or the highest consists of a single string.

A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and chordophone.

The percussion section of an orchestra most commonly contains instruments such as the timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine, belonging to the membranophones, and cymbals and triangle, which are idiophones. However, the section can also contain aerophones, such as whistles and sirens, or a blown conch shell. Percussive techniques can even be applied to the human body itself, as in body percussion. On the other hand, keyboard instruments, such as the celesta, are not normally part of the percussion section, but keyboard percussion instruments such as the glockenspiel and xylophone (which do not have piano keyboards) are included.