Vibe and xylo

On the ride to work today I heard music of Thelonious Monk on WKCR. Specifically, a three song set (perhaps this one) that includes Milt Jackson set me to thinking: what is the difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone.

First, the vibraphone (also known as the vibraharp or simply the vibes) is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family. So even claves are an idiophone.

An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument's vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes.

The vibraphone is similar in appearance to the xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel. Each bar is paired with a resonator tube having a motor-driven butterfly valve at its upper end, mounted on a common shaft, which produces a tremolo or vibrato effect while spinning. The vibraphone also has a sustain pedal similar to that used on a piano; when the pedal is up, the bars are all damped and the sound of each bar is shortened; with the pedal down, they will sound for several seconds.

A xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden (not steel) bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term may be used generally, to include all such instruments, such as the marimba and balafon or, more specifically, to refer to an orchestral instrument of somewhat higher pitch range than the chromatic marimba. It is sometimes mistakenly used of similar lithophones and metallophone instruments of the glockenspiel type such as the pixiphone.

A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave in contrast to a heptatonic (seven note) scale such as the major scale and minor scale.

Stradivarius violin raises £9.8m

Today's concert at HWPL is by the Long Island Brass Guild.

The Long Island Brass Guild began in the 1970s, adding members and instruments along the way - In the 1990s, a tuba was added and a final trumpet was added in 2005 - today the group boasts 7 members: 3 trumpets, French horn, tenor trombone, bass trombone, and tuba - Their repertoire includes classical brass compositions - from Renaissance to Ragtime - and compositions written for the group.

Tenor trombone? Never heard of it (only of the 'regular' and the valve trombones). So I looked it up. The trombone itself derives from Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name literally means "large trumpet". Trombones and trumpets share the important characteristic of having predominantly cylindrical bores. Therefore, the most frequently encountered trombones—the tenor and bass trombone—are the tenor and bass counterparts of the trumpet.

Instruments related to the trombone include:

• Sackbut -  medieval precursors to trombones

• Buccin - a visually distinctive trombone popularized in military bands in France between 1810–1845 which subsequently faded into obscurity.

• Trumpet - has the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE.

• Bass Trumpet - a type of low trumpet which was first developed during the 1820s in Germany.

• Euphonium - tenor-voiced

• Tuba - largest and lowest pitched brass
• 
  

Clapton’s Magic, for Sale

Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency - Some of the guitars owned by musician Eric Clapton that are part of an auction to be held at Bonham’s in New York


Why would someone create a replica of Eric Clapton's beloved Fender Stratocaster, named Blackie, complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton's belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes? And why is that replica expected to fetch at least $20,000 at auction, probably much more?

Coz they got no life? And money to burn?

Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers. After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.” 

If Clapton touched it, the guitar has magic. If it resembles what Clapton touched, it also has a certain sort of magic.

Some bidders might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or as objects that are worth having just because they provide pleasant memories and mental associations of someone they admire. But those do not seem to be the chief reasons for buying celebrity memorabilia, according to a team of psychologists at Yale.

"Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Ben Lando for The Wall Street Journal - Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner rehearses with his Iraqi hosts on the Rasheed Hotel's baby grand.

BAGHDAD—Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.

 Mr. Wasfi's orchestra has faced many such obstacles. Its predecessor, the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra, started in 1944 and was shut down again and again over the decades by the strains of war, economics or politics. After Saddam Hussein was deposed, in the postinvasion chaos, Mr. Wasfi recalls, instruments were broken, music sheets ripped, a concert hall burned. "It was a grotesque scene," he says.

In the following years, the orchestra often waited until the last minute to reveal concert times to avoid an attack on such a large, high-profile gathering. Mr. Wasfi says he once took to carrying a sidearm for protection. "Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Mr. Sanchez-Werner, the young pianist, is also a musician with a mission: "to fulfill my passion of doing things for the world…at a humanitarian level." A Juilliard student, he plans to play in Rwanda this summer, for the second time, and says he will perform at the Kennedy Center next year for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Farm Workers. He performed at the White House in December.

 Thirteen years old? Quite impressive.

Mr. Wasfi wore coattails for the concert. After closing with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," he and Mr. Sanchez-Werner embraced on stage.

Iraq is "a nation that is so wonderful," the pianist says, "but struggled so much it needs to have something like that in which they can participate."

Songs for Kellys and Cohens

Aside from the teaming-up of Jews and Irish to write music, in this article in today's Journal I learned about musical instrument.

Last Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show, guest Mick Moloney sat calm, cool and collected. The pre-eminent authority on Irish music in America was there to amplify the correct answers to a "How 'Irish' Are You?" trivia contest conducted by co-hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. "I was quite impressed at the integrity of their little pop quiz," the professor of Irish studies and music at New York University told me later on the phone. "Besides, why pass up the chance to inform and entertain at the same time?"

Informing and entertaining are the hallmarks of Mr. Moloney's teaching, writing and music-making. His introductory course in Celtic music is consistently oversubscribed by NYU undergraduates; he wrote the widely praised book "Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song"; and he appears on more than 60 albums that showcase his compelling singing and virtuosity on guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo and octave mandolin.

Tenor banjo? Didn't know there  is such an instrument. This is an Antoria SB54 4 sting tenor banjo sold by an UK company I found on the web.

from Wiki: The banjo is a stringed instrument developed by enslavedAfricans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments. The name banjo is commonly thought to be derived from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists derive it from a dialectal pronunciation of "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word "bandurria", though other research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck. The article continues to differentiate the tenor from the plectrum banjo, it being shorter than the latter. There are alsofive and six string instruments (the plectrum and tenor have four), among others.

The octave mandolin is one of the mandolin instrument family.


But on two recent albums, "McNally's Row of Flats" and "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" (both on Compass Records), Mr. Moloney took a diverting detour. "I first became aware of the late-19th-century songs of Ned Harrigan, whose grandfather was from Cork, in the home library of Kenny Goldstein," he said, referring to his late dissertation adviser at Penn. "As I learned more about those songs, I had a feeling similar to the one I had when I first encountered Irish traditional music. It was an emotional attachment that became part of me, and it became only stronger after I moved full time in 2004 from Philadelphia to Manhattan, where Harrigan and other songwriters did most of their work."

The title song of "McNally's Row of Flats," an album comprising 14 compositions by the theatrical songwriting team of Irish-American Harrigan and Jewish-American David Braham (his ancestral surname was Abraham), describes densely multiethnic tenement life on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "And it's Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, / Chinese and Africans and a paradise for rats. / All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather / They constitute the tenants in McNally's row of flats." Written in 1882, the song uses lyricist Harrigan's gimlet-eyed, comic sensibility and Braham's catchy melody to give a sobering glimpse into a struggling stratum of New York at that time.

A name mentioned is Billy McComiskey. I know the name Comiskey, the Chicago White Sox player and owner, but had never heard the name with the Mc prefix.

Other terms that caught my eye were Uilleann pipes, and euphony ("Composers and performers often changed their names for euphony, to fit the musical fashion, or to avoid stereotyping.").