Keyboard Instruments and electrophones?

Question

What are the similaraties and differences between accordion, carillon, celesta, clavichord, concertina, harmonium, harpsichord, keyboard, melodeon accordion, organ, and piano? In your opinio, which of these instruments is the most versatile and can play the widest range of music?

Answer 1

Without a doubt, the accordion is the most flexible, particularly if equipped with midi. As such it will do anything that the others will do plus more. There are many varieties of accordion and the freebass is preferred in some cases to the stradella bass which is what is commonly found in the US on piano accordions. The accordion, concertina and harmonium are free reed instruments. The others are not. Of note is that Roland is now making a completely electronic accordion, either chromatic or piano that will do almost anything that a keyboard can do, only better. Also it can switch key configurations electronically and can use its midi output to control external sound modules, drum machines, etc. A midi equipped accordion can play any style of music.

Answer 2

It depends on whose system you use to classify instruments. I own 3 orchestration books that all say different things. I own 5 music dictionaries that contradict each other. We have several very knowledgable people on Y/A answering this question who disagree. Before you can make a case for Chordophone, Idiophone, Keyboard, Percussion or String instrument or anything else for that matter, you need to take a step back and look at the merits of your classification system. Sachs-Hornbostel categorizes instruments primarily by the type of material that vibrates and the method in which the vibration was created (kind of). According this system a piano fits the definition of both and idiophone and a chordophone, however despite meeting all the criteria to be an indirectly struck idiophone Hornbostel's system only classifies the piano as a chordophone which for all practical purposes is a subcategory of string instrument. One of the major problems with this system is it's basis on classification emphasizes visual elements of an instrument over it's acoustic properties. Sachs-Hornbostel is not really a classification system so much as it is a categorized list of the music instruments at the time it was created, and consequently new additions sometimes have to be shoved into a category that doesn't make much sense, or create a new category with 1 entry. It's the difference between just naming all the species on Earth vesus explaining how they're related. Andre Schaeffner had a slightly different system which is based on the physical properties of how an instrument produces sound and the medium that produces and transmits sound. This is an improvement because we now have specific criteria for what belongs where. There have been other musicologists and composers that have proposed various systems that never caught on. The next question we might ask is "So what?" Do composers care? Do orchestras care? Do academics care? Academics I think are unfortunately stuck with the system because it has become too ingrained in musicology to go back and change the system. I don't see orchestras changing their seating pattern based on classification systems, so performing musicians apparently don't care. To composers the classification is irrelevant because a composer exists in acoustic space, not visual space. So to get back to your question it depends on who you ask.

Answer 3

Electrophones