The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was written specially to introduce you and other young people to the instruments of the orchestra, and it takes the form of variations and fugue on a theme of Purcell. Now, with the orchestra, there are four sections or teams of players: the strings, the woodwind, the brass, and the percussion. Each of these sections uses instruments which have a family likeness. They make more or less the same kind of sound in the same way. First, then, the whole orchestra, and then afterwards each section in turn will play the theme written 250 years ago by the great English composer Henry Purcell

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The first section is woodwind, where the players blow and the instruments are made mostly of wood

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In the brass section, the players also blow, but the instruments are made of metal

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The stringed instruments, large and small, are played with a bow or plucked with the fingers, though the harp is always plucked

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The percussion group includes anything which is struck. When they have played the theme, you will hear it again on the full orchestra

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Now each instrument will play a variation of its own. The highest of the woodwind section is the flute and its little brother, the piccolo

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Oboes have a gentle, plaintive quality, but they can be penetrating enough when the composer asks them to be

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Clarinets are very agile. Their sound is smooth and mellow

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Bassoons are the largest of the woodwind team. They have the deepest voices

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The highest voices in the string section are the violins. They play in two groups, firsts and seconds

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Violas are somewhat larger than violins, and so have a deeper tone

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Still larger and deeper are the cellos. Their voices are warm

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The double basses are the grandfathers of the string family, heavy, grumbling voices

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The harp has 47 strings and several foot pedals to alter the pitch of the strings

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The brass family begins with the horns. These are made from brass tubing, coiled into a circle

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Perhaps the most familiar of all the instruments are the trumpets

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The trombones have heavy, brassy voices, and the bass tuba is heavier still

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There's a large number of percussion instruments. We can't play them all, but here are the most familiar ones. First, the kettle drums, often called timpani

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The bass drum and cymbals

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Tambourine and triangle

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The side drum and Chinese block

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The xylophone

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The castanets and gong

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And before they all play together, the whip

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In these variations, we have taken the whole orchestra to pieces. Now we are going to put it together again with a fugue. The instruments come in one after another in the same order as before, beginning with the piccolo, and at the end, while the others go on playing the fugue, the brass will play for the last time, Henry Purcell's great theme