The clarinet is a woodwind instrument, and produces sound like all woodwind instruments, by the player blowing through a reed and controlling the sound by opening and closing valves with his or her fingers. Every other instrument listed in some way uses a keyboard, or in the case of the organ, multiple keyboards.

In the 1913 Paris Ballet season, the Russian artists Igor Stravinsky, a composer, and Vaslav Nijinsky, a choreographer, debuted the ballet The Rite of Spring. The extremely avant-garde nature of the piece nearly caused the audience to riot. Stravinsky's score played with every convention in music at the time, including rhythm, melody, and dissonance.

Bluegrass is a form of folk music developed in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily in Appalachia. The musical form developed around string instruments, which were available and primarily used in square and barn dances in the region. The clarinet, a wind instrument, is the only instrument listed that is not a key element of bluegrass ensembles.

Jazz was born in nightclubs in cities throughout the south in the early twentieth century. A common problem for early jazz groups was an inability to be heard, and many advancements in amplifying sound were made because of jazz. As such, quieter acoustic string instruments like the mandolin never made a dent in jazz.