Abrasive, intense and about to erupt at any moment. So begins Flow, a new piece by Nokuthula Ngwenyama for the Takács Quartet. Coaxing peculiar sounds out of centuries-old string instruments, the ...

Watch how the violin and string instruments make varieties of sound and music. Professor Richard Church, conductor of the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra, introduces the violin and other ...

At the heart of many of the world’s musical instruments is the same, simple component—a string stretched tight between two points. Plucked, bowed, or struck, each of an instrument’s strings creates ...

The purpose of a string in a string instrument is to vibrate and produce sounds. How it vibrates is decided by its mass per unit length, its stiffness, and how well it allows vibrations to flow ...

Crisp, warm, responsive. The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) is on a journey to meet these benchmarks under the baton of music director Gianandrea Noseda. One of the ways in which he's shaping a new ...

Composers have been writing music for the group of instruments we call an orchestra for the last four centuries. Endlessly adaptable and always evolving, an orchestra can be made up of 20 players or ...