Classification of Brass Instruments. Classification, the Systematic Grouping of Objects or Ideas To

facilitate their treatment, has been used by authors to arrange material in books, and by museums to arrange displays and catalogues. Within most general classifications of musical instruments, a class of 'brass instrument' accommodates all instruments in which sound is generated by the player applying their lips to the instrument and blowing in such a way that the lips vibrate and admit an intermittent or fluctuating stream of air into the instrument. Anthony Baines introduced the term 'Labrosone' which corresponds to this definition of a brass instrument (Baines 1976, p.40). The term 'lip reed instrument' is commonly used, though the action of the player's lip differs somewhat from that of the reeds in woodwind and free-reed instruments. Although brass is the most commonly used material, many labrosones are made of other materials. By analogy with woodwind instruments, the term 'brasswind' is often used for brass instruments used in the Western musical traditions. Brasswind instruments are designed to play a range of notes, typically over one to four octaves, and to allow notes to be played which are intended to be 'in tune' with the prevailing conventional framework of pitch standards and temperament. Brasswinds are normally assigned a nominal pitch, i.e., to be in a key such as B♭ (see Nominal pitch). Apart from simple classifications of convenience such as 'high brass' and 'low brass' or 'heavy brass', the most common division of brasswinds is into 'conical' and 'cylindrical'. This is unsatisfactory on several grounds: there is very little purely conical tubing actually used in instrument making, and instruments with sections of cylindrical tubing generally do not have so much that the natural notes approximate to the odd members of a harmonic series (see Harmonic series) as they do in the 'cylindrical' clarinet as opposed to the 'conical' saxophone; for brasswind there is no dividing line between the two. The terms 'conical' and 'cylindrical' have intuitive meaning but are not clearly defined.