What if the only music available was techno and dubstep. Imagine walking into a classy restaurant for a romantic dinner and trying to profess your love to your significant other over a loud, obnoxious, computerized beat. Dreamy, right? Not really. But replace that "beat" with a smooth violin or a gentle acoustic guitar. Now that will get you both in the mood... for dinner, that is.
There are few things that have more control over my emotions than musical instruments. For instance, a muted trumpet played with attitude in attempt to mock personalities (like in Frank Sinatra's rendition Blues in the Night) can make me laugh harder than Ellen Degeneres, and I frickin love her. But it's not just their sounds that are so amazing. The engineering that goes into the creation of instruments is astounding. The complexity and precision of it all is absolutely mind-blowing. Take the French horn, for example. (For those of you who don't know what a French horn is, it somewhat resembles a trumpet, but it's larger and the tubing creates a circle. It's usually associated with Christmas time.) If you were to unravel all of the horn's tubing, it would be roughly twenty feet long. So somehow someone was able to figure out how to roll up twenty feet of brass tubing to make it produce a gorgeous sound. However, it didn't happen over night. Like many instruments, the horn derived from an ancestor called the natural horn, and had quite a long evolution process. There were many French horn designs before the conception of the perfected horn we know today.
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| French horn |
It's the histories such as this that I will be exploring in my blog. I will dedicate each weekly entry to a different instrument in order to explore its invention and evolution along with its popularity and sound.
