The King's School Chester Music Blog

General: BBC GCSE Bitesize site

Music Theory: Three excellent websites are Musictheory.net, Teoria and the Dolmetsch site.

World Music Instruments

These are instruments that you will need to know for Section B of the listening paper:

Indonesian Music

Gamelan – the name for the collection of instruments used to play gamelan music. Also called a gamelan orchestra. If instruments tuned to both sets of scales are present it is a double gamelan. The gamelan is made up of gongs, bells and metallophones.

African Music

Rabab – a single-stringed instrument played with a bow.

Kora – a string instrument with a gourd resonator. The gourd is cut in half and covered with string with a hole cut in it. There are 21 strings which are plucked with thumbs and forefingers. Usually only played by men and skills passed from father to son.

Xylophone – wooden note bars rest on gourd resonators. Main type of xylophone is called a balofon.

Arab Music

‘ud – ancestor of the European lute. It may have four, five or six pairs of strings and is played with a plectrum.

Indian Music

Sitar – main melodic stringed instrument which is plucked. The ‘twangy’ sound comes from the sympathetic strings which lie underneath the ones that are actually played and vibrate as well.

Sarangi – a bowed string instrument said to be able to most closely resemble the human voice.

Tabla – a pair of hand drums. The larger drum is the baya and the smaller is the daya. They both have a dark spot in the centre made of an iron filing paste called the duggi.

Chinese Music

Ch’in – a type of stringed zither in use for over 5000 years. It originally had five strings, but now has seven – tuned to a pentatonic scale (G, A, C, D, E, G, A).

Erh-hu – a two-string fiddle played with a bow. The bow goes between the two strings and the sound is amplified with a snakeskin covered drum/soundbox at the bottom of the instrument.

Japanese Music

Shakuhachi – an end-blown bamboo flute

Koto – a long zither with 13 strings, developed from the Chinese ch’in. It plays the melody and sometimes adds short repeated melodic patterns.

Latin American Music

Bandoneon – Latin American concertina, popular in Argentina and Uruguay and used in tango orchestras.

Quena – flute from the Andes. Made of wood or bamboo with six finger-holes.

Pan-pipes – very ancient instrument with closed pipes of different lengths that are blown across to produce notes of different pitches.

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