Melodic Percussion Instrument

Percussion Instruments
Percussion instruments are those that can be played by striking, shaking, or by
rubbing them. This family of instruments provides various rhythms, accents and
sound effects in pieces of music. Some percussion instruments merely provide a
nontuned sound that serves as a rhythmic background, whereas others are tuned to
specific pitches. Membraphones are percussion instruments that have a vibrating
membrane whose tension usually can be adjusted, such as a drum head. Ideophones
are percussion instruments that produce sound through the vibration of solid material,
which may or may not be tuned.
Melodic Percussion Instruments
Melodic percussion instruments usually fall into the ideophone category, with the
exception of the kettledrum, or "timpani." Musicians can change the pitch of a
kettledrum as they play through the use of a foot pedal. Therefore, timpani drums can
be somewhat melodic. Ideophonic percussion instruments that are melodic include the
xylophone, hand bells, marimba, glockenspiel, chimes and vibraphone. The
xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel and vibraphone instruments are similar in that you
use a mallet or multiple mallets to play a range of bars. The differences among these
four instruments are there sizes and the materials used to make the bars, which
accounts for differing sounds. Another special type of melodic ideophonic percussion
instrument is the piano. The piano belongs to both the percussion and string families
of instruments.

Melodic percussion Instruments is under tuned instruments.

Xylophone

The xylophone (from the Greek words xylon, "wood" + phn,

"sound, voice", meaning "wooden sound") is a musical instrument in the percussion
family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets.
Each bar is an idiophone tuned
to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or
heptatonic in the case of many
African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western
children's instruments, or
chromatic for orchestral use...
The term xylophone may be used generally, to include all such instruments, such as
the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term
xylophone refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch
range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be
confused.
The term is also popularly used to refer to similar instruments of the lithophone and
metallophone types. For example, the Pixiphone and many similar toys described by
the makers as xylophones have bars of metal rather than of wood, and so are in
organology regarded as a glockenspiels rather than as xylophones. This misnomer
was also popularised by the Sooty show, in which the metal-barred instrument he
plays is always described as a xylophone.
History
The instrument has obscure, ancient origins. According to Nettl, it originated in southeast
Asia and came to Africa c. 500 AD when a group of Malayo-Polynesian speaking peoples
migrated to Africa. One piece of evidence for this is the similarity between East African
xylophone orchestras and Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestras. This, however has
been questioned by ethnomusicologist and linguist Roger Blench who posits an independent
origin in Africa.

Handbell
A handbell is a bell designed to be rung by hand. To ring a handbell, a ringer grasps the bell
by its slightly flexible handle - traditionally made of leather, but often now made of plastic and moves the wrist to make the hinged clapper inside the bell strike. An individual handbell
can be used simply as a signal to catch people's attention or summon them together, but
handbells are generally heard in tuned sets.

History
The first tuned handbells were developed by brothers Robert and William Cor
in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England, between 1696 and 1724.]The Cor brothers originally
made latten bells for hame boxes, but for reasons unknown, they began tuning their bells
more finely to have an accurate fundamental tone, and fitted them with hinged clappers that
moved only in one plane.
Originally, tuned sets of handbells, such as the ones made by the Cor brothers, were used
by change ringers to rehearse outside their towers. Tower bell ringers' enthusiasm for
practicing the complicated algorithms of change ringing can easily exceed the neighbours'
patience, so in the days before modern sound control handbells offered them a way to
continue ringing without the aural assault. The handbell sets used by change ringers had the
same number of bells as in the towers - generally six or 12 tuned to a diatonic scale.
Handbells were first brought to the United States from England by Margaret Shurcliff in 1902.
She was presented with a set of 10 handbells in London by Arthur Hughes, the general
manager of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry after completing two separate two-and-a-half-hour
change ringing peals in one day.

Marimba

The marimba (/mrmb/) is a percussion instrument consisting of a set of wooden bars

struck with mallets to produce musical tones. Resonators attached to the bars amplify their
sound. The bars are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and
overlapping the natural bars (similar to a piano) to aid the performer both visually and
physically. This instrument is a type of idiophone, but with a more resonant and lowerpitched tessitura than the xylophone.
The chromatic marimba was developed in Veracruz, Mexico from the local diatonic marimba,
an instrument whose ancestor was a type ofbalafon that African slaves built in Central
America.
Modern uses of the marimba include solo performances, woodwind andbrass ensembles,
marimba concertos, jazz ensembles, marching band(front ensembles), drum and bugle
corps, and orchestral compositions. Contemporary composers have used the unique sound
of the marimba more and more in recent years.

Playing Range

History
Xylophones are widely used in music of west and central Africa. The name marimbastems
from Bantu marimba or malimba, 'xylophone'. The word itself is formed fromma 'many'
and rimba 'single-bar xylophone'.
Diatonic xylophones were introduced to Central America in the 16th or 17th century. First
historical record of Mayan musicians using gourd resonator marimbas inGuatemala was
made in 1680, by the historian Domingo Juarros. It became more widespread during the
18th and 19th centuries, as Mayan and Ladino ensembles started using it on festivals. In
1821, marimba was proclaimed the national instrument of Guatemala on its independence
proclamation.
The gourd resonators were later replaced by harmonic wooden boxes, and the keyboard
was expanded to about five diatonic octaves. Variants with slats made of steel, glass or
bamboo instead of wood appeared during the 19th century.
In 1892, Corazn de Jess Borras Moreno, a musician from Chiapas, expanded marimba to
include the chromatic scale by adding an additional row of sound bars, akin to black keys on
the piano.
The name marimba was later applied to the orchestra instrument inspired by the Latin
American model. In the United States, companies like Deagan and Leedy company adapted
the Latino American instruments for use in western music. Metal tubes were used as
resonators, fine-tuned by rotating metal discs at the bottom; lowest note tubes were Ushaped. The marimbas were first used for light music and dance, such as Vaudeville theater
and comedy shows. Clair Omar Musser was a chief proponent of marimba in the United
States at the time.
French composer Darius Milhaud made the ground-breaking introduction of marimbas
into Western classical music in his 1947 Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone. Newly
invented four-mallet grip enabled playing chords, and the innovation enhanced the interest
for the instrument. In the late 20th century, modernist and contemporary composers found

new ways to use marimba: notable examples include Leo Janek (Jenufa), Carl
Orff (Antigonae), Karl Amadeus Hartmann,Hans Werner Henze (Elegy for Young
Lovers), Pierre Boulez (Le marteau sans matre) and Steve Reich.

References:
http://www.ehow.com/info_8186513_melodic-percussion-instruments.html
http://www.shopercussion.ca/store/Tuned-Percussion
http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/education/learning-materials/music/music140.html