An instrument is a tool, something used to construct. It's often a tool for making music. A musical saw happens to be a carpenter's tool that can be played with a violin bow (though you probably wouldn't want to play a wrench or a pair of pliers). The musical meanings of instrumental, as in "It starts with an instrumental piece" or "a jazz instrumental", are common. But the meanings "helpful", "useful", and "essential", as in "He was instrumental in getting my book published", are just as common.
An instrumental or instrumental song is music normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instrumentals.[1][2][3] The music is primarily or exclusively produced using musical instruments. An instrumental can exist in music notation, after it is written by a composer; in the mind of the composer (especially in cases where the composer themselves will perform the piece, as in the case of a blues solo guitarist or a folk music fiddle player); as a piece that is performed live by a single instrumentalist or a musical ensemble, which could range in components from a duo or trio to a large big band, concert band or orchestra.
In a song that is otherwise sung, a section that is not sung but which is played by instruments can be called an instrumental interlude, or, if it occurs at the beginning of the song, before the singer starts to sing, an instrumental introduction. If the instrumental section highlights the skill, musicality, and often the virtuosity of a particular performer (or group of performers), the section may be called a "solo" (e.g., the guitar solo that is a key section of heavy metal music and hard rock songs). If the instruments are percussion instruments, the interlude can be called a percussion interlude or "percussion break". These interludes are a form of break in the song.
In commercial popular music, instrumental tracks are sometimes renderings, remixes of a corresponding release that features vocals, but they may also be compositions originally conceived without vocals. One example of a genre in which both vocal/instrumental and solely instrumental songs are produced is blues. A blues band often uses mostly songs that have lyrics that are sung, but during the band's show, they may also perform instrumental songs which only include electric guitar, harmonica, upright bass/electric bass and drum kit.
In grammar, the instrumental case (abbreviated INS or INSTR) is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept.
The instrumental case appears in Old English, Old Saxon, Georgian, Armenian, Basque, Sanskrit, and the Balto-Slavic languages. An instrumental/comitative case is arguably present in Turkish as well as in Tamil. Also, Uralic languages reuse the adessive case where available, locative case if not, to mark the same category, or comitative case (Estonian). For example, the Finnish kirjoitan kynll does not mean "I write on a pen", but "I write using a pen", even if the adessive -ll is used. In Ob-Ugric languages, the same category may also mark agents with verbs that use an ergative alignment, for instance, "I give you, using a pen".
Just as in English the preposition "with" can express instrumental ("using, by means of"), comitative ("in the company of"), and a number of other semantic relations, the instrumental case in Russian is not limited to its instrumental thematic role. It is also used to denote:
The functions of the Proto-Indo-European instrumental case were taken over by the dative, so that the Greek dative has functions belonging to the Proto-Indo-European dative, instrumental, and locative.[4] This is the case with the bare dative, and the dative with the preposition σύν sn "with". It is possible, however, that Mycenean Greek had the instrumental case, which was later replaced by dative in all the Greek dialects.[5]
Instrumental can also denote company, in which case "s(a)" is mandatory, e.g. "Pričali smo sa svima" - "We talked with everyone", "Došao je s roditeljima" - "He came with his parents", "Šetala se sa psom" - "She was taking a walk with her dog". Dropping "s(a)" in this case would either make the sentences incorrect, or change their meaning entirely because dative, locative and instrumental share the same form in the plural, so the examples "Pričali smo svima" i "Došao je roditeljima" would come to mean "We told everyone" and "He came to his parents".
The instrumental case is present in the Hungarian language, where it serves several purposes. The main purpose is the same as the above, i.e. the means with which an action occurs. It has a role in the -(t)at- causative form of verbs, that is, the form of a verb that shows the subject caused someone else to action the verb. In this sense, the instrumental case is used to mark the person that was caused to execute the action expressed by the verb. It is also used to quantify or qualify words such as 'better' or 'ago', such as sokkal jobban 'much better' (literally 'with-much better'); ht vvel ezelőtt 'seven years ago' (literally 'seven with-years before this').
The instrumental in the Vainakh languages of the North Caucasus, comprising Chechen and Ingush, is denoted by the -ца / -аца / -ица (-tsa / -atsa / -itsa) suffix to describe an action which is done with an object:
The division offers Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, and Doctor of Musical Arts performance degrees with specialization in: violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, harp, guitar, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, trumpet, French horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba, percussion, and multiple woodwinds. Current and former students have won prizes in major instrumental competitions of every genre, and are appointed to professional positions in orchestras, wind symphonies, and universities/conservatories spanning the world.
But literary descriptions of these photographs fail to explain how their meaning relates to the ways they have been used, or how meaning and use have shifted together over time. To what discourse, or discourses, can these nearly mute pictures be attached?1
AFTER THE WAR, reconnaissance photographs ended up in scrap heaps, in military archives, in personal collections of war memorabilia, in institutional collections of military and technological artifacts, and so on. Aside from the scrap heaps, each of these could be thought of as a discourse situation in which the photograph takes on a certain synecdochal or metonymic significance, standing for some larger and inclusive or contextually related object or event. The photograph becomes a truth-conferring relic in a range of narratives, some of which possess an institutional authority and some of which carry only the authority of anecdotally rendered personal experience. Anything from the opinions of experts, the history of a battle, the history of photographic techniques, the history of flight, dissertations on the role of air power in the First World War, to digressions on the French countryside and tales from the trenches might be expected. The fact that these are photographs is, in a sense, trivial; their artifactual presence is such that they share a generic space with old uniforms, insignia, rebuilt airplanes, and convincing replicas of the original atom bombs. On the other hand, the folklore of photography also grants a pseudoartifactual existence to the thing depicted. One consumes both the picture and its object, the tarnished medium and the historical instant. To the extent that the particular arena has little or nothing to do with photography in itself, the historical instant takes precedence over the medium.
The art-marketing system provides these aerial photographs with a new order of instrumentality, with a straightforward economic value that can be mobilized to secure more value. For the dealer, the prints represent movable stock; for the buyer, they stand for invested capital. To call attention to these meanings, which may or may not be significant in any given situation, is to risk being considered vulgar. After all, these are rather low-priced items by art-world standards. Nevertheless, the logic of the commodity constitutes a framing condition for all material transactions conducted within the market arena. So much for the obvious.
Suppose that, quite hypothetically, I attempt to promote a number of aerial photographs as esthetic objects. But, by constructing a range of valorizing readings of these prints, I will be engaging in a kind of metapromotion, supplying an abundance of possibilities. Although only a single photograph may be at issue, I might want to mobilize the entire ensemble of available images, thereby subduing the arbitrary appearance of the solitary picture with a sense of an oeuvre, with a cryptic narrative of a purposeful esthetic journey through the skies with a camera. The tendency of a given image toward a certain arena of meaning can be balanced, redirected, or reinforced through reference to other images. The promoter engages in improvisational montage. Therefore, the immediate range of visual or formal possibilities offered by these particular aerial photographs should be acknowledged. Separated in terms of camera position, or point of view, the available pictures tend toward two extremes: high verticals and low obliques. High verticals were taken with the camera perpendicular to the surface of the earth at altitudes of several thousand feet or more; low obliques were taken with an off-axis camera at altitudes as low as several hundred feet. Each of the two types gravitates toward a different kind of estheticized reading; one tends to deny the other to acknowledge the referential properties of the image.
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