On Apr 25, 2010, at 9:37 PM, Aaron Rabushka wrote:
Is anyone acquainted with the musical use of anvils, and their possible dynamic range? Every instance I can thing of is loud, and I noticed that Wagner does not give any dynamic's for Mime's hammering in Siegfried. Is anyone here familiar with any quiet uses of them?
I can't believe so many responses can be so wrong and/or beside the point!
Wagner and Verdi had in mind real anvils (jeweller size!) but nowadays the anvil is a real percussion instrument made by percussion manufacturers for purely musical use. Think of it as a sort of metal clave: It's a solid metal bar, cylinder or tube, playable at any dynamic you please depending on the mallets you use.
Like the slapstick, thundersheet, lion's roar, etc., there is absolutely no requirement that the anvil be restricted to smithy imitations. An excellent abstract example of itsr use is in Varèse's *Ionisation* (player 12), where two of them are called for (high and low), and asked to play as softly as pp.
For more (much more!), see my *Handbook of Instrumentation* pp. 194-195. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
