Cirque Du Soleil ... Initially named Les Échassiers, they toured Quebec in 1980 as a performing troupe and encountered financial hardship that was relieved by a government grant in 1983 as part of the 450th anniversary celebrations of Jacques Cartier's discovery of Canada. Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil was a success in 1984, and after securing a second year of funding, Laliberté hired Guy Caron from the National Circus School to re-create it as a "proper circus"...
Rute (music) ... Commercially-made rutes are usually made of a bundle of thin birch dowels or thin canes attached to a drumstick handle. These often have a movable band to adjust how tightly the dowels are bound toward the tip...
Guitar ... Acoustic guitars (and similar instruments) with hollow bodies have been in use for over a thousand years. There are three main types of modern acoustic guitar: the classical guitar (nylon-string guitar), the steel-string acoustic guitar, and the archtop guitar...
Flamenco Guitar ... In contrast to the classical guitar, the flamenco is often equipped with a tap plate (a golpeador), commonly made of plastic, similar to a pick guard, whose function is to protect the body of the guitar from the rhythmic finger taps, or golpes. Even so, a well used Flamenco guitar only survives so long before the constant "golpes" wear through the top...
Ride Cymbal ... The ride can fulfill any function or rhythm the hi-hat does, with the exclusion of an open and closed sound. Terminology The term ride means to ride with the music, describing the cymbal's sustain after it is struck...
Guitar Tunings ... In some regions of Europe, especially Germany, Serbia and Poland, and in Russia and Ukraine, where classical musicians use the German system, the B natural is indicated with the letter H: in music notation, H is B♮ (B natural) and B is B♭ (B flat)...
Twelve-string Guitar ... The strings are generally arranged such that the first string of each pair to be struck on a downward strum is the higher octave string; however, this arrangement was reversed by Rickenbacker on their electric 360/12. The tension placed on the instrument by the strings is high, and because of this, 12 string guitars have a reputation for warping after a few years of use...
Musical Ensemble ... Other common groupings in classical music are the woodwind quintet, usually consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn and the brass quintet, consisting of two trumpets, one french horn, a trombone and a tuba... A pops orchestra is an orchestra that mainly performs light classical music (often in abbreviated, simplified arrangements) and orchestral arrangements and medleys of popular jazz, music theater, or pop music songs...
Percussion Notation ... Key or legend Each line and space of the staff is assigned a different part or "voice" of the drum kit and these are often laid out at the beginning of a piece of music in what is known as a key or legend or occasionally labeled when initially appear in the piece...
Extended-range Classical Guitar ... Vynograd writes his music on a grand staff in a different key and plays as if the guitar was tuned EBEADGBE... Brahms Guitar The Brahms guitar was developed by guitarist Paul Galbraith and luthier David Rubio to allow the music of Brahms to be played more comfortably on the guitar...
Russian Guitar ... The invention of the Russian guitar is attributed to Andrei Sychra, who also wrote a method for the instrument, as well as over one thousand compositions, seventy-five of which were republished in the 1840s by Stellovsky, and then again in the 1880s by Gutheil. Some of these were published yet again in the Soviet Union in 1926...
Snare Drum ... It is the centre of the drum kit, the most prominent drum in most marching and stage bands, and the drum that students of both orchestral and kit drumming learn to play first. The snare drum is almost always double-headed, with rattles {called snares) of gut, metal wire or synthetics stretched across one or both heads...
Steel-string Acoustic Guitar ... The most common type can be called a flat-top guitar to distinguish it from the more specialized archtop guitar and other variations. The standard tuning for an acoustic guitar is E-A-D-G-B-E (low to high), although many players, particularly fingerpickers, use alternate tunings (scordatura), such as "open G" (D-G-D-G-B-D), "open D" (D-A-D-F♯-A-D), or "drop D" (D-A-D-G-B-E)...
Electric Guitar ... It served as a major component in the development of rock and roll and countless other genres of music...
Chitarra Battente ... Locals refer to the instrument, simply, as the "guitar," using the term “French guitar” for what is general called elsewhere “guitar,” meaning the classical guitar. That designation of “French” is almost certainly wrong, since all reliable sources claim a Spanish origin for the modern six-string six-course classical guitar...
Acoustic Bass Guitar ... Traditional music of Mexico features several varieties of acoustic bass guitars, such as the bajo sexto, with six pairs of strings, and the guitarrón, a very large, deep-bodied Mexican 6-string acoustic bass guitar played in Mariachi bands...
Drum Kit ... More specifically, a modern drum kit (for a right handed player), as used in popular music, taught in many music schools, and for which qualifications are available from Trinity College London consists of: A snare drum, mounted on a specialised stand, placed between the player's knees and played with drum sticks (which may include rutes or brushes)... In some styles of music particular extensions are normal, for example double bass drums in heavy metal music... On the other extreme but more rarely, some performers omit elements from even the basic setup, again particularly for particular styles of music...
Marching Band ... As musicians became less important in directing the movement of troops on the battlefield, the bands moved into increasingly ceremonial roles - an intermediate stage which provided some of the instrumentation and music for marching bands was the modern brass band, which also evolved out of the military tradition...
School Band ... School bands tend to be more common in the United States than others due to a vast increase in funding to music education in recent years... Middle school bands Although some children learn an instrument prior to entering a middle school (or junior high), students in music education programs within the United States and Canada generally start daily band classes in the 6th or 7th Grade... These bands are given easy but challenging music to learn, often with many duplicate parts and simple rhythms...
History Of The Classical Guitar ... Alonso Mudarra's Tres Libros de Música en Cifra para Vihuela, (Sevilla, 1546) included music for both solo vihuela and solo four-course guitar...
3rd Bridge ... Third bridge instruments can be custom-made by experimental luthiers (as with guitars designed and played by Hans Reichel); modified from a non-third bridge instrument (as with conventional guitars modified with a pencil or screwdriver under the strings); or may take advantage of design quirks of factory-built instruments (as with the Fender Jazzmaster, which has strings that continue from the "standard" bridge to the tremolo piece). Perhaps the best-known examples of this technique come from No Wave artists like Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth...