It surely stands to reason that there must be an intermediate instrument which is played on the lap or between the knees." This was the violello, which produced a most beautiful tone somewhat like, in Bernard Shaw's words, "an Irish tenor performing to an all-female audience". If clavicorn pieces are ever played these days, the part is usually taken by a dozen clarinettists.76. What he hadn't realised was that unless you only played one note at a time, it would take three or four people blowing it simultaneously to get a noise out of it. The Clavicorn.A brave but doomed attempt to combine the pianoforte family and the reed family, this is not unlike a very large clarinet with a keyboard. "A piano that may be blown through will have the ultimate advantage of portability," said the inventor, Zwemmling, in 1820.

In contrast, we remain insufficiently porous to the outside world, resistant to change and weighed down by a past which consistently thwarts efforts to redefine ourselves. If we could learn to be a little more like them, it would be greatly to our advantage.. OBSCURE INSTRUMENTS OF THE ORCHESTRA. A continuation by Dr Arnold Weiskopf of his occasional survey of the less well-known corners of the symphony orchestra. 75.

And the key to their success has been a willingness to learn from the rest of the world, a thirst for innovation, and a strong sense of national priorities.They are immensely dynamic societies, addicted to change and prepared constantly to reinvent themselves. Without much doubt they have been the most successful economies in the world over the last few decades. We know it is difficult enough to copy from the United States or Germany; learning from Taiwan or South Korea is a far trickier process. What may work in one culture may prove quite alien in another.On the other hand, there is no question that studying how countries quite different from our own do things can help to expand the imagination, especially in our search for new political parameters.Yet there is one general lesson, however, that Britain could learn lock, stock and barrel from the Asian tigers. The Asian tradition of government is simply different: generally, it is less ideological, more pragmatic, more interventionist and more authoritarian.

And the reasons are twofold: firstly, their economic transformation has been achieved under very different conditions and secondly, the state bears a different cultural relationship to society.A Taiwanese academic, for example, recently suggested to me that the relationship between the state and the people was akin to the relationships in a Chinese family: it is inconceivable that Westerners would speak in such terms.It is foolish to think there are any simple lessons to be learnt from Asia. On the contrary, government is generally far more pro-active than in Europe. It is certainly true that government in all the Asian tigers spends far less than is the case in Europe. And the main reason is that it does not assume anything like the same kind of responsibility for welfare.