The medieval plucked lyre had six strings which passed over a bridge resting on the front of a hollow resonant body. These strings were secured at the base of the instrument and were fixed to a yoke which was shaped like a crossbar between two arms projecting upwards from the sides of the body. In order to play the instrument, ...
The medieval harp was built on a roughly triangular frame, with the hollow soundbox held against the player’s body and the strings running from it to the top part of the triangle, positioned like the crossbar of a bicycle frame. The strings were made of various materials, including twisted sheep’s intestines, horsehair and metals such as brass ...
The medieval psaltery was a flat box with strings running across its top; it was plucked either by the fingers or by a quill held in each hand. The harp-psaltery, or rote, took the form of a right-angled triangle with the apex pointing into the musician’s lap. Although played like a harp, in construction it was more similar ...
The medieval pipe was played by blowing directly into a mouthpiece, like a recorder or penny whistle. Although it usually had only three holes to finger, by varying the force of blowing, players could achieve a working range of about one-and-a-half octaves. It was played with the right hand; the left hand held a thick, stubby beater ...
The medieval bagpipe consisted of an animal-skin bag and a series of wooden pipes. The player held the bag under the arm and inflated it by blowing down one of the pipes. A second pipe, the ‘chanter’, contained a series of holes on which to play a melody, while the remainder, the ‘drones’, maintained a continuous, unvarying ...
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the trumpet was a straight piece of cylindrical metal tubing, running from a mouthpiece to the wide ending known as a ‘bell’. A medieval instrument rescued from the mud of the River Thames in London in the 1980s was made of sections of metal sheet (brass or copper) which were rolled up ...
The larger positive organ was not intended to be moved. The biggest difference between medieval and modern organs is that the positive organ’s pipes were all of the same diameter; the pitch was defined by the length. This caused variation in tone quality across the range, making it ‘flutier’ as the pipes became shorter. Gradually organ-builders introduced ‘reed’ pipes, ...
Because the name ‘hurdy-gurdy’ was abducted by the nineteenth-century barrel organ, this instrument is rarely taken as seriously as it deserves. Known as the ‘organistrum’ from the tenth to twelfth centuries, it was a stringed instrument played by a cranked resined wheel, not a bow. It required two operators, one of whom would crank and one play ...
The bell may have been the instrument most widely and frequently heard in the European Middle Ages. Handbells had survived into the medieval period from antiquity; in addition, large bells were hung in church towers. Their loud sound was believed to keep away demons, so they may have offset the fear of churchyards. Bells were made of bronze; the ...
The early medieval bow looked not unlike the weapon: a convex, dramatically curved wooden structure with horsehair where the archer’s bowstring would have been. There was no attempt at standardization, and construction seems to have varied as different styles were tried out. Even by the late Middle Ages, the bow had only settled down in design terms to ...
It is still possible to find old books which explain cheerily that the viol was an early version of the violin, now superseded. It is worth saying straight away that this is not true. These two related but different families of instruments both evolved from the early sixteenth century in northern Italy, but made different sounds and were played ...
The Renaissance lute had a flat front and a rounded back made out of a series of curved strips of wood (usually yew or sycamore) fitted together. At the centre of the front was the soundhole, called the ‘rose’, which was round and intricately decorated. The instrument’s neck was glued and nailed to the top block of the body, ...
The archlute had two peg boxes, one at the end of the neck and one just under half way up. The strings to be stopped ran to the lower one and were plucked by the fingernails of the right hand. One-and-a-half times as long, the unstopped strings ran to the higher one and were not touched by the player ...
An alternative to the archlute was the theorbo. It had a set of unstopped bass strings called ‘diapasons’, which lay just to one side of the fingerboard and ran directly from where they were attached to the bridge to a peg box at the end of a long neck. The stopped strings ran to a second peg box placed, as ...
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 ...
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