Instrument family
Instruments that shape a column of air with finger holes or keys, sounded by an edge or a reed.
Woodwind instruments produce sound from a vibrating column of air inside a tube. The player changes the pitch by opening and closing holes along the tube, directly with the fingers or through a system of keys, which effectively changes how long the vibrating column is.
What starts the vibration divides the family. In flutes, a stream of air is directed against a sharp edge. In clarinets and saxophones, a single reed vibrates against a mouthpiece; in oboes and bassoons, two reeds vibrate against each other. The name “woodwind” records history rather than present practice: many flutes are now made of metal and the saxophone has always had a brass body, yet they belong here because of how their sound begins.
The modern concert flute is a long, narrow metal tube played sideways, sounded by directing a stream of air across a hole near one end. It has no reed, which is why it is classed as an edge-blown flute and not a reed woodwind. Its form comes from Theobald Boehm’s designs of the 1830s and 1840s, which reorganised holes and keys for accuracy of pitch. Related side-blown flutes of bamboo, wood and bone appear in musical traditions across Asia, Europe and beyond.
The clarinet is a woodwind with a cylindrical bore, a flared bell and a single cane reed clamped to a mouthpiece. Its tube behaves acoustically like one closed at the reed end, so it overblows at the twelfth instead of the octave, giving the instrument its dark lower register, its bright upper one and a wide compass. Traditionally credited to Johann Christoph Denner of Nuremberg around 1700, it became established in the orchestra in the later eighteenth century and is now made in a large family of sizes.
The oboe is a slender, conical-bored woodwind sounded by a pair of cane blades bound together, a double reed. It emerged in France in the seventeenth century as a refined descendant of the shawm and has been a fixture of orchestras ever since. Its clear, penetrating tone is the pitch reference to which an orchestra tunes, and its mechanism exists in several regional systems.
The bassoon is the bass voice of the woodwind family: a long conical tube folded back on itself, played with a double reed on a curved metal crook. It developed from Renaissance double-reed instruments in the seventeenth century and was reshaped in the nineteenth by two makers’ traditions, the German Heckel system and the French Buffet system, which still differ in bore, keys and fingering.
The saxophone is a family of instruments with a single-reed mouthpiece like a clarinet’s and a conical body of brass, combining features of two instrument groups. Adolphe Sax, a Belgian-born maker working in Paris, patented the design in 1846. Sizes from soprano to baritone share one fingering system, which has allowed the instrument to move between military bands, concert halls and jazz clubs.