No one can say exactly when the music was born, but it is known that it accompanied humanity from ancient times. Even at the dawn of civilization, three methods of musical sound extraction stood out: a blow to a sounding object, an oscillation of a stretched string, and blowing air into a hollow tube. Thus was laid the foundation for three varieties of musical instruments - percussion, string and wind.
The very first wind instruments were the hollow bones of various animals. For example, the oldest musical instrument known to scientists - the Neanderthal pipe - is made from the bone of a cave bear. In their development, wind instruments took different forms, but different peoples observed common patterns in this process.
Flute pan
Having learned how to extract sound from a tube (first a bone, then a wooden one), a man wanted to diversify this sound. He noticed that the pipes of different lengths make sounds of different heights. The simplest (and therefore most ancient) solution was to tie together several different tubes and move this structure along the mouth.
So the instrument was born, best known under the Greek name Syrinx, or Pan's flute (according to Greek myth, it was created by the god Pan). But you should not think that such a flute was only among the Greeks - among other nations it existed under other names: booze in Lithuania, nai in Moldova, kugikly in Russia.
A distant descendant of this flute is such a complex and magnificent instrument as an organ.
Flute and Flute
To extract sounds of different heights, it is not necessary to take several tubes, you can change the length of one by making holes on it and blocking them with your fingers in certain combinations. So the instrument was born, which the Russians called the pipe, the Bashkirs - the kurai, the Belarusians - the pipe, the Ukrainians - the nozzle, the Georgians - the salamuri, the Moldovans - the fluer.
All these instruments are held across the face, this is called a “longitudinal flute”, but there was another design: the hole into which air was blown was in the same plane as the holes for the fingers. Such a flute - transverse - was developed in academic music, a modern flute dates back to it. And the "descendant" of the flute - the recorder - is not part of the symphony orchestra, although it is used in academic music.
Pity
The instruments mentioned above belong to the number of whistlers, but there is also a more complicated design: the instrument is equipped with a bell in which a tongue is inserted - a thin plate (originally made of birch bark), the vibration of which makes the sound louder and changes its timbre.
This design is characteristic of the Russian pity, the Chinese sheng. There were similar instruments in Western Europe too; modern classical oboes and clarinets go back to them.
