AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

The cittern was a plucked stringed instrument of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was strung with wire and played not with the right fingers but by using a quill plectrum, rather like the cittole and gittern of the medieval era. The body was flat both back and front, with a pear-shaped face. The fingerboard lay on the front ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

instrument such as a bass viol or baroque cello) accompanies two melodic instruments such as Baroque violins or flutes. Instruments as diverse as the shawm, tabor, fiddle, cittern, crumhorn, serpent and hurdy-gurdy have been very successfully resurrected. Current performing ensembles include the Baroque brass group, His Majestys Sagbuts and Cornetts, and the viol consort ...

• Instruments
• Stringed

The word ‘lute’ is the collective term for a category of instruments defined as ‘any chordophone having a neck that serves as string bearer, with the plane of the strings running parallel to that of the soundboard’. In other words, the lute is a soundbox with a neck sticking out. The strings of some are plucked, some are ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

angle. The theorbo was an important continuo instrument, playing with the bass viol, cello or keyboard player’s left hand. Styles & Forms | Renaissance | Classical Instruments | Cittern | Renaissance | Classical ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

ancient Greek kithara. The biggest question, however, is whether it was adopted from Arabic musicians or was already native to western Europe by the Middle Ages. Like the cittern, the Renaissance guitar had a flat back and front body, with a gentle waist. Held across the body of the player at a rising angle, with the ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Renaissance

ornaments and divisions (rapid embellishments on a melodic line). Viols were also used to accompany voices, and treble and bass viols were played in mixed consorts with lute, cittern, bandora and flute. Instrumental Forms The fantasia, often known as the ‘fancy’ in England, was a form in which composers were free to exercise their imagination, ...