Most of the woodwind instruments are part of a whole family of instruments that together cover a large range of pitches. The flute family has the piccolo and goes down to bass and even contrabass flutes. The clarinets, recorders, and saxophones likewise have everything from sopranino down to contrabass.
(Of course, the saxophones were specifically designed that way, but the other families seem to have grown more organically over time.)
But the double reeds are different. There we have oboe, English horn, and the bassoon and contrabassoon. While they are all double reeds and have similar timbres, they are actually three different ‘families’ of instrument.
My question is this: why did the flute, recorder, and clarinet develop into families of closely related instruments, but not the oboe? Why didn’t, for instance, a tenor oboe supplant the English horn?
Powers &8^]
I can’t say I know enough about double-reeded woodwind instruments to answer your question, but I’d always considered the oboe, English horn, bassoon and contrabassoon to form their own family of instruemnts much like the various saxophones do. Are they that different? I mean a soprano saxophone looks more like a clarinet in it’s shape than it’s deeper cousins.
I too question your statement that oboes, english horns and bassoons are different “families” of instruments. If you showed those instruments to someone who knows nothing of the names he or she could easily assume that they are all size variations on the same instrument.
I would consider the double reed, cyclindrical wooden bore instruments all of the same family. contrast that to the single reed cylindrical bore clarinet and bass clarinet and the single reed conical bore saxophones.
May I ask why you separated the oboe, english horn and bassoons ?
The reason instruments are commonly referred to as being the same “family*” is because they are transposing instruments - the fingering is the same on all of them. It isn’t related to how they look. A soprano sax might look more like a clarinet than an alto sax, but I can pick up any sax and read/play music. I wouldn’t be able to play a clarinet.
According to Wiki, an English Horn is a transposing instrument in the same family as the oboe. It also lists several other oboe family members. A bassoon has different fingering and isn’t part of the oboe family.
*Of course, family means whatever you want it to mean - you can refer to the woodwind family, double-reed family, or oboe family. It’s a matter of how specific you want to be.
You’re looking at the wrong part of the shape. The curves of the instrument have very little to do with how it sounds – you can find soprano saxes that are shaped much like an alto, for instance. Much more important is the shape of the bore of the instrument. Saxophones are much much wider at the bell than they are at the mouthpiece, while clarinets are the same diameter all the way down (except for a flared bell).
Powers &8^]
Too be honest I forgot about transposing instruments, but is it so hard and fast? The trumpet for example is a transposing isntrument with nearly all modern brass valve instruments would they all be considered part of the same family?
I’ve never really seen one up close, which is odd really as my cousin plays the alto sax in a reasonably famous band. Infact my main idea for what an alto sax looks like comes from watching my cousin on TV!
I don’t think there really is a firm definition for “family” when it comes to instruments. On the woodwind side, there are so many different kinds of fingerings, considering transposing instruments as part of a family is an easy way to classify. With more similar fingerings on the brass side, maybe that term isn’t as useful.
Good question, I can’t answer that one. Supposedly the fingering of the bassoon was originally closer to the oboe than it is now. I would guess the two instruments came about somewhat independently (or have a common ancestor), but one wasn’t developed based on the other.
Minor contribution to the discussion: the oboe was originally the hautbois (the words sound much more similar than the spellings imply) – which literally means “high [i.e., trebale] wood”.
Exactly. The sax family is one of the few that was designed from scratch as a closely-related family. Even the transposing keys were designed and designated at regular intervals. (Except for the bastard C Melody, all saxes are either in B flat or E flat.) Other instruments in a “family” converged on similarity, but had independent originations.
You could design a “trumpet” family from piccolo trumpet to tuba if you wanted and make them look and play more alike, but that’s not how they first came to be. They have more of a hodge-podge original design. French horns use a rotary valve instead of a piston. No reason why they have to, but they do. If you designed a french horn as a larger, lower part of the trumpet family, you would probably use a piston.
Actually, ancient french horns didn’t have valves at first. You inserted a crook to tune it to a different range of overtones, and not all tones of a chromatic scale could be played with one crook. Adding rotary valves changed all that.
A bugle becomes a trumpet with the addition of valves, but a different person added them, so that person chose pistons.
Just in case you are wondering why I am using brass instruments as examples instead of woodwinds like the OP, it’s because I know more about brass than woodwinds.
With brass it’s even worse, you can get two instruments the same pitch, the same fingering and only slightly different construction and they can be classified as different instruments.
The saxhorn family was designed so that the bartione horn is the deeper relative of the alto horn (known as the tenor horn in the UK), but the euphonium (often classified as part of the tuba family) is exactly the same pitch and fingering as the baritone horn and to be honest in many ways could equally be seen as the deeper version of the alto horn.
A bugle is not much like a valve trumpet though - see the comment upthread about the difference in bore between clarinet and soprano sax. There are three instruments all in the same register and with the same fingering, namely trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn, but they’re all different in construction and tone, and a bugle is closer to the flugelhorn than the trumpet. The valveless counterpart to the trumpet is the “natural” trumpet, to which it much more closely corresponds in tone (and which has a harmonic series different to the bugle’s).
Dead right about the French horn though - and composers used to put in directions like “Change crook to G before your next entry” and give the horn-blower several bars rest to execute the change.
Nitpick: the C-melody is not a bastard, but an orphan. Adolphe Sax designed two parallel branches in the saxophone family: one in the keys of C and F, for orchestral/classical use, and one in B-flat and E-flat, to be matched with brass instruments in marching bands and such. The sax never caught on as an orchestral instrument, so the C/F instruments quickly faded away, except for the C tenor, which became enormously popular in the early 20th century as a home instrument. That’s the instrument we now call the C-melody.
There is a bass oboe (or baritone oboe), as well as a similar instrument called a Heckelphone (I believe the difference is in bore diameter; the ranges are quite similar). They’re both pretty rare. I’ve heard Heckelphones, but never bass oboes.
I suspect their rarity is driven by the fact that the bassoon has a similar enough tone that there is little need for them in that register.
I. Did. Not. Know. That. (But I only play the flute family, so what do I know?)
I always assumed the C-Melody sax was created for those who didn’t want to (or found it too hard to) transpose and just wanted to play melodies, perhaps in an amateur environment, not a serious band.
All double-reeded instruments are not from the same family. As we oboists like to tell it, one of the most ancient instruments (depicted on pottery from ancient Greece) is the aulos. There are other, similar, instruments from other really old civilizations. Obviously, the oboe is one of the most ancient, and therefore most venerated and lovely of instruments.
Anyway, the oboe as I recognize it showed up in the 1400’s, and developed from there with new keys added as needed to make certain note changes easier and to make the thing play more in tune. I could probably pick one up and make some music come out of it. Modern oboes have lots of extra keys, and the instrument now is played with the left hand playing the upper set of keys and the right hand playing the lower (early oboes were made so that your hands could play in either position).
There is a family of oboes, but we don’t call them “soprano” “alto” “tenor” and “bass”. Well, ok, there is a bass oboe, but I have never actually seen one. The oboe d’amore sounds a third lower than an oboe. But these all look like oboes.
The English horn (which I also play) is, depending on who you talk to, a member of the oboe family or a member of its own family. It uses a bocal. It has a different bell shape. The pitch sounds a fifth lower than written. But the fingering is the same, so I consider them to be the same family.
But I just play them; I am not an expert in their histories.
The bassoon, on the other hand, comes from a different mind-set altogether! It is a member of the double-reed family, but it is not a member of the oboe family. You have to be a little crazy to play the oboe, but you have to be REALLY nuts to play the bassoon!!