Word: tetrachords
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...limited instrument. The wood bars that generate the sound make subtle fluctuations of pitch (vibrato) impossible. The metal tubes under each bar--the resonators--provide only a few seconds worth of audible sustain. The use of four mallets, two to a hand, limits the simultaneous articulation of tones to tetrachord. The challenge then, in both performing and writing for this instrument, is making it sing: creating lines out of points of sound...
...very pleased to meet you, Mr. Sullivan," Gilbert went prattling off, with a mouth as long as a curate's. "My contention is that when a musician, who is master of many instruments, has a musical theme to express, he can express it as perfectly upon the simple tetrachord of Mercury (in which there are, as we all know, no diatonic intervals whatever) as upon the more elaborate disdiapason (with the familiar four tetrachords and the redundant note) which, I need not remind you, embraces in its simple consonance all the single, double and inverted chords...
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