Music Composition DUMmIES

graduated glass bowls and champagne glasses that one would rub a wet

finger along the rim of to produce a clear, ringing tone. Franklin’s harmonica

was a series of shallow glass basins of different sizes fixed onto a spindle that

would continuously rotate. To produce music, one would simply wet one’s

finger and touch the basin that matched the pitch you wanted to hear.

The harmonica that we all know and love today is not this bulky and possibly

dangerous instrument. The free reed harmonica was originally invented in

Germany and England almost simultaneously in the 1820s. Successively

higher tones of the scale are produced by alternately blowing or sucking air

through the mouthpiece.

A harmonica’s range is limited according to its size (from little tiny 6-note

instruments to orchestral harmonicas, which can be made to the musician’s

specification), simply because the instrument is very small. Generally, though,

most harmonicas are designed to play 19 consecutive scale notes, with each

kind of harmonica tuned to a specific scale.

The accordion .....................................................................................

The first version of the accordion was an 1820 model called the Handäoline,

invented in Germany. Nine years later, the first real accordion, with ten

melody buttons and two bass buttons, was patented by Cyril Demian in

Vienna. Later versions added more buttons, enabling players to produce a

wider range of notes and chords. The piano accordion, called so because it

has a piano keyboard along one side, and a series of buttons on the other,

was developed in the 1850s.

The piano accordion is almost universally acknowledged to have one of the

best education systems on any instrument. The stradella bass system(the but-

tons), when combined with the piano keyboard, requires players to develop a

knowledge of both the chromatic sequence of pitch as on the piano keyboard

and also the chord relationships and chord types as arranged in fifths on the

buttons. This makes it unique among all musical instruments, having both

single notes and preformed chords available at one time.

The instrument is played, of course, by drawing (stretching) and pushing

(compressing) the bellows, causing air to pass over the metal reeds. This

airflow makes the reeds vibrate, which produces different pitches.

The concertina....................................................................................

The concertina was officially developed in 1830 by Sir Charles Wheatstone

after several years of building prototypes, a few of which still exist, such as

the symphonium. Its fully chromatic range was suited to, and for a while

194 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement