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• Instruments
• Classical
• Medieval Era

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 ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

The bagpipe principle is simple: instead of the player blowing directly on a reed pipe, the air is supplied from a reservoir, usually made of animal skin, which is inflated either by mouth or by bellows. The result is the ability to produce a continuous tone, and the possibility of adding extra reed-pipes to enable a single ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

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 Fretwork. Other Classical Chamber-Music Groups Over ...

• Instruments
• Stringed

strings, one drone and 12 sympathetic strings. Some of today’s players are developing new forms and exploring the possibilities of older, slightly simpler forms such as the silverbasharpa. Hurdy-Gurdy The hurdy-gurdy, or vielle à roue, reached its most highly developed form (until today) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and it is France – and to some ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

A notable entry into the field of electronic music was made by Luigi Russolo and Ugo Piatti. Members of the Futurist movement, they developed a family of machines called ‘noise-intoners’. One of these contained a wheel with a rosined or toothed circumference, which could be brought into contact with a string, whose tension could be varied and which ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Medieval Era

It could be deliberately opened or closed by a mechanism of rods which were directed by the keyboard or ‘manual’. Styles & Forms | Medieval Era | Classical Instruments | Hurdy-Gurdy, Organistrum, Sinfonye & Geigenwerk | Medieval Era | Classical ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

In the twentieth century, some musicians became interested in inventing new acoustic instruments that could take music beyond the tuning systems, scales and harmonic language inherent in the instruments commonly played in western classical music. Creating new instruments created a revolutionary new sound world. New instruments were often promoted outside the normal scope of the bourgeois concert audience, ...