In the Staff Report Is there a guy in the orchestra whose only job is playing the triangle, wood block, and wind chimes?, Ian writes:
What instrument is “cannon”? Does it use gunpowder? Are people regularly hurt? Does it bring down the house?
From my experience watching the Atlanta Symphony, the Percusion (SP) guy is behind all the other insturments (from the audience). I would think it would a simple matter of pointing the cannon away (facing the same direction as the audience faces) to avoid damages. Using a Cannon only comes to mind for 1812 overture, and I would assume even then, a choice is made as to using a “real” or modified cannon, or even a recording overall.
Since the organ is classified as a pipe/woodwind insturment because of the pipes… I guess the cannon barrel length would change the sound… not to mention if a trumpet mute, or a cannon silencer (if there is one) could be used.
I guess we can all assume it isnt a string insturment, and that seems to be the only safe bet.
I would have to concede that the Percusion “guy” gets the honors simply because his other insturments dont get that much play. that “places” the cannon in actual location, but not in classification.
Yet, I am wrestling with your OP as well. I would place it in the woodwind section,
using an Organ and Trumpet/ Slide Trombone as my reference frame.
I was joking. It’s an actual cannon? What do you use for ammo?
They fired a carronade when I sailed on the Lady Washington. They loaded it with a ball of blackpowder wrapped up in aluminum foil. I would assume the orchestral cannon would be similarly loaded. Incidentally, there are a lot of muzzle loading cannons in private hands. Most are used by re-enactors. You can find them at Dixie Gun Works (not a very well designed website, I’m afraid) from full-size field artillery and carronades to ¼-scale and smaller versions.
What happens when you fire a ball of blackpowder wrapped up in aluminium foil, apart from the sound and some smoke? Does anything substantial leave the cannon, and if so, where would you have it land during an orchestral performance?
Blanks, mostly.
Seriously, there are works that call for firearms as musical instruments, the most famous being Tsaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (which was actually written for Maezel’s Panharmonicon, a monster music box). The usual practice is to make an arrangement with a local military unit. But the orchestra’s percussion section is responsible for “playing” them, though he will normally do it by signaling others to do the actual firing.
I saw the NSO do this on The Mall in DC. The cannons were 105mm howitzers “played” by Marines in full-dress uniforms. Very cool, but I don’t know which “section” of the orchestra they belonged to.
You get a lot of hot gas and aluminum foil shreds, along with some small particles of unburned gunpowder grains. And lots of noise. Nothing that’s actually dangerous from more than a dozen or so feet from the muzzle, but you’d be ill-advised to stand directly in front of it, however.
So that would put it in the brasswind section?
I’m pretty much of the mindset that “if it goes boom, it belongs in the percussion section”.
And evidently dictionary.com agrees with me. 
What about harps, pianos, and organs? (They got lumped into the percussion/miscellany section in an old book about an orchestra. What are we teaching our children?)
That was a bad book. A harp is a string instrument, plain and simple. Pianos and organs are keyboard instruments - although a piano function by a percussive action, and an organ by wind.
I thought pianos were considered to be strings since they use strings. After all, playing a violin pizzicato doesn’t make it a percussion instrument.
A piano uses strings via a percussive action, but neither of them are as significant as it having a keyboard. (In the same way, the saxophone is woodwind)
Concerning cannons. Back in school, UNM, late 60’s, the University Symphony played the 1812 Overture, indoors, with a couple of guys with shotguns (with blanks) firing into a garbage can. Really! I was ushering the concert hall at that time, and I thought it was a pretty good performance. But as the crowd filtered out, I overheard a little old lady with a deep eastern European accent saying to her companion: This man, Tchaikovsky, he must be rolling over in his grave like this…(appropriate rolling hand motions). What did I know?
The ending to Act I of Tosca can also be performed with real cannon, rather than tympani.
I wonder though: in the ‘Anvil Chorus’, from Il Trovature by Verdi, do they have topless guys sweating over anvils as they sing the chorus?
A real cannon wouldn’t be a percussion instrument, it would be a flintlock instrument…
The modern percussion section can indeed include all sorts of odd instruments; I’ve seen tuned anvils, cake pans, church bells…in fact, pretty much anything you can hit and make a noise with can and probably has been used at some point.
I’ve never seen an indoor performance of the 1812 Overture, but certainly I’ve seen outdoor performances with an assortment of cannons, activated by a push-button system operated by a percussionist.
And if you want to get technical, the traditional strings/winds/brass/percussion division of instruments is a convenient system but is less precise than the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, which is more clear on what goes where.
Yes, they usually do, unless there’s a union problem; the music is very simple. Same thing for the other “Anvil Chorus” in Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron. Mime and Siegfried often play their own anvils in Siegfried, since even if they didn’t they would have to mime all the strikes anyway, but the anvil music in Das Reingold is normally played by professional percussionists, as the passage is relatively difficult.