The origin of the cello-The bass viola da braccio

No one knows for sure when exactly the first cello was created. However, based on the instrument's first mention in writing, we know that it was being used at the beginning of the 16th century.  At first it appears that the instrument was called the bass viola da braccio ("viola for the arm"). As the name suggests, this was a viola da braccio (one of the ancestors of the violin) that was capable of playing in a lower register.

Invest Your Coffee Money Into Music for Your Kid...

  ...The intangible gain of your child learning to play an instrument comparable to the cost of buying one cup of coffee a week is a no brainer in favor of MUSIC!    Think about how much you spend on a cup of coffee out once a week, $6?  That is enough to give your family a lifetime of music and sound.

 Golden Music offers a rent-to-own program where you are able to rent-to-own (or just rent) a high-quality instrument for about just $30 a month for most instruments.  You will eventually own the instrument but are never required to keep it. 

ORIGINS OF CLARINET 

While the similarity in sound between the earliest clarinets and the trumpet may hold a clue to its name, other factors may have been involved. During the Late Baroque era, composers such as Bach and Handel were making new demands on the skills of their trumpeters, who were often required to play difficult melodic passages in the high, or as it came to be called, clarion register.

The B-flat clarinet is an orchestral instrument going back to the time of Mozart and beyond.  It is a transposing instrument, which means that the note heard is a major second below the note written on the page. 

Music Education and Brain Development

Over the past two decades, music training has been associated with better than average language and mathematical skills and higher IQ, while differences between musicians and nonmusicians have been found in brain areas related to hearing and movement, among others. What is the mechanism behind such differences? One important goal of our program is to understand the effects of music training on brain development, investigated in terms of psychological (emotional, cognitive, social) and actual neural functions.

Music and colors have few, if any, sensory properties in common: Music is auditory and has properties such as tempo, pitch, timbre, and rhythm. Color is visual and has the properties of lightness, vividness, and hue. But both music and color map aspects of emotion.

Listen to these three clips and pick two colors for each. 

As the "keeper of the rhythm," the drum provides the foundation for the overall sound of music.

The many instruments included in the percussion family include any instrument that is struck, shaken or scraped in order to produce the sound. Advanced percussion instruments include the timpani drums or kettle drums, the xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, chimes and many, many others. Most of the larger instruments are not used in young bands but all of these instruments are practiced by advanced players.

Music Playing Makes our Families and Communities Stronger

David Leeuw with his Family, Abraham van den Tempel, by 1671, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. The wealthy merchant David Leeuw and his family making music as an expression of harmonious family life.