Types of instruments

Lutes

Probably the most widely distributed type of stringed instrument in the world is the lute (the word is used here to designate the family and not solely the lute of Renaissance Europe). The characteristic structure consists of an enclosed sound chamber, or resonator, with strings passing over all or part of it, and a neck along which the strings are stretched. Players move their fingers up and down the neck, thus shortening the vibrating portion of the strings and producing various pitches.

In the lute the part of the resonating chamber over which the strings pass is called the belly, and the other side of the resonator is called the back. The portion between the back and belly is the side, or rib. A lute may be plucked with the fingers or a plectrum or may be bowed, but the means of sound production do not affect the essential morphological identity of plucked, struck, and bowed lutes.

Historically, lutes may be subdivided into those with skin and those with wood bellies; in most Eurasian cultures examples of both types exist side by side. In Iran, for instance, the wood-bellied lute is the ʿūd and the skin-bellied is the tar; in the United States it is the guitar and the banjo, respectively. In Japan the wood-bellied lute is the biwa, and the samisen has a skin belly and back. Chinese fiddles (bowed lutes) tend to have a skin belly and, like the banjo, an open back. The two different varieties of lute are distinct in sound and structure, and methods of construction, timbre, history, and symbolic associations differ markedly. A second subdivision concerns the shape of the instrument; for instance, the lute proper has a round back, the guitar a flat one.

The string vibrations of the lute are transferred to the resonating chamber by the bridge, which holds the strings above the lute’s belly; the resonator magnifies the vibrations and transmits them to the air. Makers lavish great attention on the choice and fashioning of material for the belly: if it is of wood, it must be selected and aged with much care and planed to a prescribed thickness; if it is of skin, it must be made from only certain materials. (The belly of the Japanese samisen is preferably made from the skin of a female cat; the wooden belly of the Puerto Rican cuatro is best constructed from wood from a female jagrumo tree that has been well seasoned and, if possible, taken from an old house.) Since the late 20th century, synthetic materials have largely replaced skin bellies.

Most lute strings have traditionally been made of animal intestines (gut), metal, or silk, though nylon has become a common replacement for gut. Whatever the material, each string must be of equal thickness throughout its length. Some lutes have only a single string, but the great majority have three, four, or more. Very often there are sets, or courses, of two strings to a pitch, so that an instrument that produces four pitches with open strings actually has eight strings arranged in pairs.

In the tunings of lutes, though fourths and fifths (intervals the size of four and five tones of a Western seven-note scale, as C to F and C to G) predominate in many places, any given instrument is likely to be tuned differently from one location, piece, or player to another. Functionally more important is the question of whether a lute is fretted or unfretted. It is clearly easy to change from one pitch to another on an unfretted instrument by sliding the finger along the string, but it is also possible to do this on an instrument with extremely high frets (Japanese biwa, Indian vina) by pressing—hence stretching—the string into the cavity between two frets. Instruments with low frets (the guitar, the banjo, the European lute, and the viol) are found mainly in the West, where a limited and clearly defined tonal system is in use and where significant microtonal changes in pitch are not necessary. Even here, however, players manage to produce microtonal inflections, slides, and vibrations on fretted instruments. Many Central Asian lutes, such as the dutār, use movable gut or nylon string frets, tied on so they can be adjusted to the mode of the music. The metal frets of the Indian sitar are tied on with strings for the same reason.

The fiddle can be distinguished from other lutes only by the manner in which it is played—usually with a horsehair bow. The practice of rubbing the strings with this implement is of uncertain age and origin, but it seems to have appeared almost simultaneously (9th–10th century ce) in China, Java, the Arab world, Byzantium, and Europe. As with the other lutes, there is a fundamental division between skin- and wood-bellied instruments. (The former are far more common on the fiddle than the latter, which occur mainly in Europe.) Musically more significant, however, is the division between the stick fiddle, in which the player’s finger does not actually press the string to a fingerboard (but rather slides up and down the string itself), and the fiddle with a fingerboard (for example, the violin). The Mongolian morin huur (also spelled khuur) is unique in that the two strings are far enough above the fingerboard that most of the pitches are fingered with the face of the nail rather than the end as is common elsewhere in the world. On fiddles without fingerboards (including the Chinese erhu, the Arab rabāb and its Asian relatives, various African fiddles, and the South Asian sarangi), the player’s left hand is able to move with extreme flexibility up and down the string, thus making the subtlest kind of inflection possible.

As with other lutes, fiddles may have only one string (the Tuareg imzhad) or nearly 40 (the sarangi); on the latter, most of the strings are not directly touched or sounded by the player but vibrate sympathetically when other strings are set into motion, thus giving a fuller resonance. Examples, in addition to the sarangi, include the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, the Swedish nyckelharpa, and the viola d’amore.

The fiddle bow itself generally is constructed so that the player can tighten or loosen the hair at will; on most stringed instruments the player is able to make immediate changes by manipulating the bow hair with the hand while playing, thus producing various tone qualities. The bow of the violin, perfected in the early 19th century by Franƈois Tourte, has a screw mechanism that cannot be changed while playing. Most bows are actually bow-shaped, but the Tourte bow is made in a compound curve to which considerable tension can be applied, making it possible to apply much pressure to the strings. The bows of the two-stringed fiddles of China (such as the erhu and the jinghu) and Korea (haegŭm) pass between the strings so that both sides of the hair may be used.

The bowing principle has been applied to nonlutes from time to time: the ancient Icelandic fidla is a bowed zither, as is the Korean ajaeng; the Scandinavian talharpa is a bowed lyre. The musical saw is classified as a bowed idiophone.

Zithers

Instruments of the zither family, in which the strings lie parallel to and are of the same length as the string bearer (often also the resonator), are especially widely distributed in Eurasia, the Americas, and Africa. The least-complex zither type of instrument is the musical bow, shaped very much like a hunter’s bow. (The musical bow is sometimes classified as a harp.) The bow’s single string is tapped or struck, and the pitch can be varied by varying the tension of the string or by using the player’s mouth as a resonator and varying its size and shape, thus emphasizing different harmonics. It is a favourite instrument in equatorial Africa and Brazil, and it is also common in New Guinea.

Aside from the musical bows, there are two important subdivisions of this category. The so-called long-zither family is found only in East Asia; because its characteristic resonating chamber is slightly convex, instruments of this type are sometimes called half-tube zithers. Larger models may be nearly 1 foot (30 cm) wide and more than 6 feet (180 cm) long; there are a varying number of strings frequently provided with movable bridges. These instruments, of which the best-known example is the Japanese koto, seem to derive ultimately from tube zithers made directly from lengths of bamboo. The bamboo prototypes are said to be idiochordic because their strings, part of the bamboo itself, are worked loose from the tough surface of the tube, to which they remain attached at either end. The maker then inserts small bridges at the extremes of the strings. (Various modifications and transformations of this principle exist, such as the bamboo-tube valiha of Madagascar and the sasandu of Roti, Indonesia, in which wire strings replace the idiochordic ones.) All long-bodied, curved-surfaced Asian zithers of the koto type may owe something to this idiochordic principle. In East Asian tradition the most ancient zither is the seven-stringed qin, which seems to have originated in the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce). The Japanese wagon and koto, the Korean kayagŭm, and the Chinese zheng fit into this general category.

The other important subdivision of the zither family is the flat zither; in Africa it is usually made either from a hollowed plank over which strings are fastened (board zither) or from individual narrow canes lashed together, each having one idiochordic string (raft zither). The typical box zither is a rectangular or, more often, trapezoid-shaped hollow box, with strings that are either struck with light hammers or plucked. Examples of the former are the Persian sanṭūr and its Chinese derivative, the yangqin (“foreign zither”); the cimbalom of east-central Europe; and the piano (which is a sort of cimbalom with keyboard). The most prominent plucked box zither is the Arab qānūn and its various derivatives, including the harpsichord (a plucked zither controlled by a keyboard). In Europe a variety of plucked zithers developed having a fretted fingerboard under one or a few of the strings. In the United States popular box zithers include the hammered dulcimer, notable for its prominence in folk music of the early 20th century, and the autoharp, which is equipped with damper bars that prevent unwanted strings from sounding, making it relatively easy to play chords.

Struck zithers are occasionally termed dulcimers, and unfretted plucked ones psalteries, after European instruments using those names. The Aeolian harps of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, moreover, were not harps at all; rather, they were blown box zithers.

Lyres

The lyre family, though it was of great importance in the ancient centres of Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece, is now found only in a few areas of East Africa. A lyre is made from an oval, round, or rectangular sound chamber (usually skin-bellied); from this resonator two arms protrude; they are joined at the top by a crosspiece; the strings extend from this crosspiece over the belly, with which they are connected by a bridge. These strings are not normally stopped but are allowed to vibrate throughout their entire length when plucked by the performer.

In Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the lyre remains in extensive use, there are two distinctive types, as there were in ancient Greece. The 10-string beganna (which corresponds to the ancient Greek kithara) is a large, heavy, rectangular instrument that is considered by the Christian Ethiopians to be a God-given instrument that came to them from King David; it is used, of course, for sacred music. The smaller lyre, krar (the ancient Greek lyra), has a bowl-shaped resonator and is emphatically secular in its use and connotations; indeed, Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition casts it as the instrument of Satan. The construction of this six-stringed instrument illustrates the sort of change that is of wide occurrence in contemporary instrument making everywhere, for though the traditional krar was made from wood, the resonator of the present-day instrument is made of an easily available metal pan. The krar can be played in two ways: in the first (called muting) the left hand mutes the unwanted strings while the right hand strums with a plectrum; in the second, the fingers of the left hand pluck while the right hand plucks a drone on tonic strings (i.e., tuned to the tonic, or focal note, of the melody).

The lyres of medieval western Europe (4th–12th century) had from five to seven strings and, to judge from iconographic evidence, were played in a way that closely resembled the muting technique of Ethiopia. Later northern European lyres were sometimes played with a bow; their shapes are considerably varied, but both the rectangular kithara-like shape and the rounded lyra shape apparently existed.

Harps

With three fundamental components—a number of strings of uneven length, a resonator, and a neck—instruments of the harp family exhibit an extraordinary variety of constructions. The strings of a so-called open harp are attached at one end to the soundboard of the resonator; at the other end, they are attached to the instrument’s neck, which extends away from the resonator, either in an arch or at a sharp angle. If the instrument has an additional pillar that joins the distal end of the neck with the resonator, it is called a “frame harp.” Regardless of the shape of the resonator, the trajectory of the neck, or open or closed structure, the plane of the harp’s strings lies perpendicular—as opposed to parallel—to the plane of the soundboard. It is primarily this string-soundboard orientation that distinguishes harps from other chordophones.

The arched, or bow-shaped, harp, was known in Egypt as early as 3000–4000 bce; its player kneels or stands, supporting the harp on the shoulder. Harps of this type may be found in West and Central Africa, where they are often provided with elaborate anthropomorphic carvings and skin-covered resonators. The bow harp, then, is a traditional African form that has been in use in that continent for at least 5,000 years.

On an angle harp the bowlike support is replaced with two crosspieces at right angles to one another; the strings are stretched between these at an angle of 45°. This type seems to have originated in Assyria, though occasionally it is found in Egypt and Greece. One model spread through Central Asia and to East Asia as far as Japan.

The frame harp is characteristic of both medieval and modern Europe; the shape of its frame is more or less triangular, the frame being strengthened by the pillar that encloses the strings in a kind of tripartite structure. It is to this category that the modern orchestral harp of Europe and the old Irish and Scottish harps belong. In all of these instruments the crosspiece held nearest the player is a hollow resonating chamber. The so-called Brian Boru harp (14th century), now at Trinity College, Dublin, is about 32 inches (80 cm) high, with 36 brass strings; the sound box is carved from a single piece of willow, and the harp is plucked by the fingernails.