It’s easy to play any musical instrument. All you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
The oldest brass instruments are found preserved in bogs all over Scandinavia and date back to c500BC. Known as lurs, they are long, elegantly curved brass trumpets, usually recovered in pairs. You’ve probably seen them without noticing – they adorn the crest of Lurpak butter.
Lur survives in Swedish as something that broadcasts sound – hörlurar means “headphones” and a mobile phone is often called a lur.
The precise use of the ancient bronze lur is unknown, but according to the Icelandic sagas their later wooden relatives (also called lurar) were used to gather troops and intimidate the enemy. The Saxons didn’t even need to make an instrument – they used a large stone.
At Kingston Lisle, below the downs in southern Oxfordshire, the Blowing Stone is a large sarsen boulder with a number of holes in it. Blow in the correct hole and a surprisingly loud and penetrating note rings out. Alfred the Great used the stone to rouse his troops before the bloody battle of Ashdown, where the Saxons narrowly defeated the Danish army under King Bagsecg.
The universe itself is a musical instrument. In 2004, astronomers at the University of Virginia measured background radiation from 400,000 years after the Big Bang and described the “music” that the universe made as it was being created.
“For the first 400,000 years it sounds like a scream declining to a dull roar,” said Professor Mark Whittle. “And over the first million years the music of the cosmos changed from a bright major chord to a sombre minor one.”
Sand dunes play tunes, or at least a loud, resonant note that lasts up to 15 minutes and can be heard up to six miles away. Studies in the Sahara show that the booms are caused by avalanches on the dunes, often occurring after rain, when the lower layers of a dune are still moist (and clumpy) and the top layers are completely dry (and separated). The cascading sand creates vibrations in the same way as the membrane of a loudspeaker.
Violin strings are not made of catgut, and never have been. This is a myth started by medieval Italian violin-makers who had discovered that sheep intestines made good strings for their instruments. Killing a cat brought terribly bad luck, so they protected their invention by telling everyone else their strings were made from the intestines of cats.
The Stradivari family of Cremona were the most famous stringed instrument makers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Much of their mystique (and high price) is due to the quality of their sound. However, in blind testing conducted regularly from 1817 to the present, it has proved impossible to identify a “Strad” as being superior to comparably aged or even good modern instruments.
The family didn’t only make violins: their output included mandolas, guitars and harps.
The word “cello” is actually an abbreviation of its proper name “violoncello”. This literally means “little big viola” because the instrument is a small “violone”, which itself is a type of large “viola”. For this reason the word “cello” used to be written with an apostrophe at the beginning. And as Victor Borge once reminded us: “The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.”
Gangsters in Chicago were very unlikely to carry around machine guns in violin cases. Even a small weapon was unlikely to fit. Instead they used a nondescript “hard case” which looked a bit like a musical instrument carrier. It was compartmentalised to hold the different bits of the gun more easily.
For Christmas 1936, Salvador Dalí sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed-wire strings. Harpo replied with a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.
Thomas Beecham once described the sound of a harpsichord as being like “two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm”.
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