(Ger. Rohrblattinstrumente).
A term commonly used for musical instruments in which an airstream is directed against a lamella which is thereby set into periodic vibration and interrupts the stream intermittently (see Reed). In classifying musical instruments, Hornbostel and Sachs (1914) divided aerophones into two subclasses: free aerophones (freie Aerophone) and wind instruments proper (eigentliche Blasinstrumente). Reeds appear in both categories, and although the classification may be based on controversial acoustic premises it provides a valuable compendium for surveying various kinds of reed instrument. It is listed in full under Aerophone (classes 41 and 42).
In this scheme the word ‘clarinets’ is used as a generic term for all reedpipes with a single reed ‘consisting of a percussion lamella’ – regardless of the shape of the bore and regardless of whether there is an air reservoir (as in a bagpipe). Likewise ‘oboes’ is used as a generic term for all reedpipes with a double reed ‘of concussion lamellae’; some writers use the word ‘shawm’ instead, but others reserve ‘shawm’ for instruments with a wider bore than an oboe, or with a pirouette, or disc, against which the player’s lips may rest, or for Renaissance instruments, etc.
Traditionally, reed instruments often have a rustic or pastoral connotation. Milton evoked ‘the sound of pastoral reeds with oaten stops’ and Shakespeare referred to those occasions ‘when shepherds pipe on oaten strawes’. Children in the country still make their own reed instruments from the stalk of an oat or some other kind of straw by detaching a long, narrow tongue from the wall of the stalk (leaving it rooted to the body).
Reed instruments are often deemed to have common characteristics in timbre. Current sentiment among Western musicians about reed players was summed up by Baines (Woodwind Instruments and their History, 1957): they ‘are entirely dependent upon a short-lived vegetable matter of merciless capriciousness, with which, however, when it behaves, are wrought perhaps the most tender and expressive sounds in all wind music’. This is certainly true of the modern Western oboe and english horn. Bartók gave a different account, however, when he heard a reed instrument in Algiers: ‘its tone is much stronger than that of the lowest notes of the oboe; throughout its registers the tone remains equally piercing and shrill, and indoors it almost bursts one’s eardrums’. A Swahili name for double-reed instruments is parapanda, an onomatopoeic word that conveys the piercing shrillness described by Bartók. Ethnomusicologists sometimes use the word ‘reed’ in unfortunate juxtaposition with ‘flute’, in the term ‘reed-flute ensemble’ (see Stopped flute ensemble). This term refers to the sets of singly-blown, stopped tubes without finger-holes, cut from vegetable stalks. Although made of reed, the instruments are not reed instruments in the sense defined above, but rather flutes, i.e. edge-blown.
For discussion of reed pipes, free reeds and valvular reeds in organs, see Organ, §III, 2–4; see also Free reed.
KLAUS WACHSMANN