The music is written like piano music for two hands in the Treble and Bass Clefs; but sounds an octave higher than it is written.
The celesta is a new instrument. Tschaikowsky and Richard Strauss gave it popularity.
The celesta’s silvery and resonant voice owes its charm to the fact that under each note, a little bar of steel, a resonator of wood is fastened.
The celesta never gets out of tune. It is sweet, clear, fairy-like, fanciful, light and graceful. It is something like the little glass harmonica, which children play with.
THE XYLOPHONE
The xylophone (coming from two Greek words, wood and sound) is made on the principle of the toy harmonica. It is an old instrument still used by primitive and half-civilized tribes. A series of slabs of wood, graduated in size, are fastened to two “guides,” or supports, also of wood. The xylophone is played by two wooden “beaters,” which the performer holds in each hand. The way of playing it is much like the Hungarian cimbalon. It has a dry, hollow sound; and is only suited to grotesque music such as Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, in which it represents the clattering of the bones of the dancing skeletons.
THE WIND-MACHINE
The wind-machine is very seldom used. Strauss calls for it in the Windmill adventure in the Don Quixote Variations. It is a curious contrivance rather than a musical instrument. It is a sort of barrel with some of the staves missing and the empty spaces covered with black silk. The barrel is laid on its side in a “bearing,” supported by an open “cradle.” It is then turned round with a handle, so that the silk comes in contact with a “face” of wood, or cardboard, and makes a rushing noise like the sound of wind, blowing violently.
THE RATTLE
Occasionally the rattle is used,—the old Watchman’s Rattle, a wooden cogwheel, which is revolved against a hard, but flexible, spring of wood, or metal. Strauss employs it in Till Eulenspiegel.