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Serpentine sound

If you haven’t been to Yale’s Collection of Musical Instruments on Hillhouse Avenue, make plans to stop by the next time you’re in town. It’s full of treasures: a room full of bells, an astounding collection of harpsichords, and this lovely ninetenth-century serpent—a wind instrument now mostly out of popular use. The composer Hector Berlioz would say good riddance: he wrote in 1844 that “the essentially barbaric tone of this instrument would be much better suited for the bloody cult of the Druids than for that of the Catholic church, where it is still in use.”

Filed under Collection of Musical Instruments, Music, serpent
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