Crossword clues for xylophone
xylophone
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Xylophone \Xy"lo*phone\, n. [Xylo- + Gr. fwnh` sound.]
(Mus.) An instrument common among the Russians, Poles, and Tartars, consisting of a series of strips of wood or glass graduated in length to the musical scale, resting on belts of straw, and struck with two small hammers. Called in Germany strohfiedel, or straw fiddle.
An instrument to determine the vibrative properties of different kinds of wood.
--Knight.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. a musical instrument made of wooden slats graduated so as to make the sounds of the scale when struck with a small drumstick-like hammer.
WordNet
n. a percussion instrument with wooden bars tuned to produce a chromatic scale and with resonators; played with small mallets [syn: marimba]
Wikipedia
The xylophone (from the Greek words —xylon, "wood" + —phōnē, "sound, voice", meaning "wooden sound") is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.
The term Xylophone may be used generally, to include all such instruments such as the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term xylophone refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be confused.
The term is also popularly used to refer to similar instruments of the lithophone and metallophone types. For example, the Pixiphone and many similar toys described by the makers as xylophones have bars of metal rather than of wood, and so are in organology regarded as glockenspiels rather than as xylophones. The bars of metal sound more high pitched then the wooden ones
Usage examples of "xylophone".
High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes.
The free-form jazz of the Communist coffeehouse band was getting on his nerves-the fucking xylophone player was chopping away as if he were making sukiyaki at Benihana of Tokyo-and the smell of sauerkraut would float over from the hotdog stand every now and then to torment him.
Carrying the guitar she did not feel out of place, for many others carried pipes, fiddles, concertinas, xylophones, and drums.
A loudspeaker down the hall gave those xylophone dings that meant God knows what all the time.
The housekeeper's little skivvy, that she keeps to fetch, carry and lick boot, just topping the tea-cup up with old Jamaica, all hell breaks loose below stairs as if a Chinese orchestra started up its woodblocks and xylophones, crash, wallop.
We found some drums, which Quincy claimed to be able to beat on, and one of those vertical xylophone things, which Eva said was close enough to a hammer dulcimer for her to fake it.
It had a lot of harps and harpsichords and carillons and xylophones in it.
Stadler leaped to stop him—but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.
Music for the dances came from tambourines and crude xylophones, the rhythm being maintained by the monotonic beat of the tom-tom.
Awe-inspiring in their chasubles of Anglo-Nubian fur, in their tiaras of gilded horns, Patriarchs and Archimandrites, Presbyters and Postulants stand in two groups at the head of the altar steps, chanting anti-phonally in a high treble to the music of bone recorders and a battery of xylophones.