 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: johng ★2017
Date: 2014-01-21 16:37
Google has an interesting tool called Ngram that sifts through their 5 million digitized books and presents a graph over time for a set of search words or terms. Just playing around with it, I tried the group: flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, saxophone. These are only for books written in English from 1800 to 2000.
It may not give statistically relevant results, but I thought the results were interesting. If you click this link, you can see the graph (I hope):
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=clarinet%2C+flute%2C+oboe%2C+bassoon%2C+saxophone&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cclarinet%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cflute%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Coboe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbassoon%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csaxophone%3B%2Cc0
As a word, flute has had greater popularity overall and all of the instruments had big increases in the 1920's and 1930's, only to gradually fall off in use since then. This was not the case for saxophone, which has continued to increase. Since this pretty much fits my view of instrument popularity, I thought it worth sharing here.
John Gibson, Founder of JB Linear Music, www.music4woodwinds.com
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Author: Bennett ★2017
Date: 2014-01-23 10:52
It'd be nice to know how many of those 'flute' instances referred not to the musical instrument but to champagne glasses, the ribs of a column, the spiral channel in a drill, etc.
(s) The Pedant
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Author: Bruno
Date: 2014-01-24 00:26
There used to be a wonderful sheet music store in Manhattan across the street from the stage door of Carnegie Hall, called Patelson's. (now defunct to my dismay).
It was easy to determine which instruments are the most "popular" by the amount of music for them in the store's shelves. If memory serves, it went like this; piano, violin, flute, voice, . . . .
Here's an NPR article about this great store.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103728928
There are a couple of photos. You can see the extensive shelves chock-full of manuscripts.
B.
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Author: Bill Patry
Date: 2014-01-24 06:32
Hi John:
Its a great tool; I know some of the people who developed it. Here is a link to one for basset horn, showing and amazing peak in frequency in use in books in 1970:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=basset+horn&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbasset%20horn%3B%2Cc0
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