Music Appreciation - Introduction to the Orchestra (Understanding Music)

hello and welcome to the introductory video on the instruments of the orchestra uh this pertains to chapter 2 and part one of your textbook uh so you can go ahead and turn there there is a section before that that deals with the vocal ranges um like soprano Alto metso soprano stuff like that but you can uh

look at that on your own we're going to try to guide you through um a section that people are less familiar with and that's the instruments of the orchestra so first of all we're going to talk about the orchestra itself we're going to talk a little bit about uh the guy standing up in front of the orchestra

waving his arms and uh what his role is we're going to learn he's called the conductor and then we're going to talk about the role of orchestras in the past versus their role in today's um music world so first of all let's look at um a picture of the orchestra here and this

is a a mediumsized Orchestra there's no set number of instruments in an orchestra some are um small some are these Behemoth you know 100 plus orchestras it really depends on what kind of music um they're going to be playing uh earlier music like from the 1600s and stuff dealt with much smaller orchestras that like that really didn't

have a lot of brass and percussion in them and of course as you approach the 20th century and into the 20th century the orchestra has got bigger and bigger and bigger and by the time you get to the late 1800s um like I said they got to be uh some of them these huge

behemoth orchestras that are much larger than this one pictured so first of all we're going to divide the orchestra into four different families you do have a chart in your textbook that shows you those four families and the only problem I have with that chart is that it puts the piano in the String