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Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten Of Aldeburgh (that is his full name) was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913. He was the youngest of four children.
Britten showed musical talent at an early age. He began piano lessons at the age of 7. By the age of 10, he was learning to play the viola. When he was 13 years old, he was writing his own music. |
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Benjamin Britten was passionate about music. He was inspired to write his music from things that happened in his life. In fact, he went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors.What he saw there shocked Britten so much that he refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life. He told his friend Peter that it had coloured everything he had written since. There is a definite difference in the light and airy pieces he wrote before those recitals, and the serious, almost somber, pieces he wrote afterwards.
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We have studied composers who composed music for movies (do you remember one of them? John Williams). In February of 1935, Britten was asked to compose a score for a documentary for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He wasn’t thrilled about the prospect, but he did it anyway. This lead to jobs working on 4 other movies during the course of his career.
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The strings are the largest family of instruments in the orchestra and they come in four sizes: the violin, which is the smallest, viola, cello, and the biggest, the double bass, sometimes called the contrabass. The smaller instruments, the violin and viola, make higher-pitched sounds, while the larger cello and double bass produce low rich sounds. They are all similarly shaped, with curvy wooden bodies and wooden necks. The strings stretch over the body and neck and attach to small decorative heads, where they are tuned with small tuning pegs.
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When you look at a string instrument, the first thing you'll probably notice is that it's made of wood, so why is it called a string instrument? The bodies of the string instruments, which are hollow inside to allow sound to vibrate within them, are made of different kinds of wood, but the part of the instrument that makes the sound is the strings, which are made of nylon, steel or sometimes gut. The strings are played most often by drawing a bow across them. The handle of the bow is made of wood and the strings of the bow are actually horsehair from horses' tails! Sometimes the musicians will use their fingers to pluck the strings, and occasionally they will turn the bow upside down and play the strings with the wooden handle.
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Like the woodwind family, brass players use their breath to produce sound, but instead of blowing into a reed, you vibrate your own lips by buzzing them against a metal cup-shaped mouthpiece. The mouthpiece helps to amplify the buzzing of the lips, which creates the sound. Most brass instruments have valves attached to their long pipes; the valves look like buttons. When you press down on the valves, they open and close different parts of the pipe. You change the pitch and sound by pressing different valves and buzzing your lips harder or softer. The brass family members that are most commonly used in the orchestra include the trumpet, French horn, trombone, and the tuba.
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As one of the greatest English composers of the 20th-century, Benjamin Britten received many awards during his lifetime. He was featured in TIME magazine and honored with a British centennial postage stamp and biography in 2013. A huge, sculptured scallop shell was erected on a beach in England in honor of one of his operas. Today we end our study of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra with the percussion section.
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The percussion family is the largest in the orchestra. Percussion instruments include any instrument that makes a sound when it is hit, shaken, or scraped. It's not easy to be a percussionist because it takes a lot of practice to hit an instrument with the right amount of strength, in the right place and at the right time. Some percussion instruments are tuned and can sound different notes, like the xylophone, timpani or piano, and some are untuned with no definite pitch, like the bass drum, cymbals or castanets.
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