We are going to explore the similarities of timbre which will provide a guide to the vibraphone's use in textural blending and adding that 'glow' to music.
No matter what quality of another instrument that a vibraphone may appear to emulate, in the end, it is still a vibraphone, and that will be inescapable to the listener due to the nature and material that the instrument.
The vibraphone is very well known for its use in the jazz idiom and has a unique sensibility towards that genre of music, but the vibraphone can be used in prominent roles within small or even larger ensembles. Although the vibraphone was invented in the mid 1920s and used quickly by American Jazz musicians such as Lionel Hampton (seen in video performing 'Flying Home' in 1957), it wasn't until the 1930s that composers incorporated the vibraphone in an orchestral setting. The special feature of the vibraphone, the one that gives the instrument its name, is a set of small, electrically operated fans above the resonators (and below the bars) that cause a vibrato effect by rapidly closing and opening the resonators. This creates the 'glow' effect in the sound and can sound very un-worldly if used in textural blending.
In essence, the vibraphone has a much warmer, more radiant edge to the timbre than other mallet instruments in the percussion family due to the nature of hitting the instrument with various mallets. A vibraphone many registers may resemble a piano, yet still possess an aggressive, direct quality when muted. These slight differences that can help guide the orchestrator into assigning a passage to a particular doubling or textural blending within an ensemble setting.

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