The bowed dulcimer is a musical instrument. Designed in the style of the Appalachian dulcimer (a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings), it is either a standard instrument played with a violin bow, or a purpose-built dulcimer designed around bow playing. The purpose-designed instrument is described as resembling a hybrid between a dulcimer and a cello or viola da gamba. [1]
Bowing as a technique of playing the standard dulcimer has some historical roots; [2] L. Allen Smith feature several examples in his historical survey A Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers (1983).
The more modern purpose-built version of the instrument was developed by Kenneth Bloom of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina in the late 1990s. [1]
The word dulcimer refers to two families of musical string instruments.
A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres, including classical music. Although in many cases violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a "brighter" tone than the deep tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional (folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught "by ear" rather than via written music.
The violin, sometimes known as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular use. The violin typically has four strings, usually tuned in perfect fifths with notes G3, D4, A4, E5, and is most commonly played by drawing a bow across its strings. It can also be played by plucking the strings with the fingers (pizzicato) and, in specialized cases, by striking the strings with the wooden side of the bow.
String instruments, stringed instruments, or chordophones are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner.
Zithers are a class of stringed instruments. Historically, the name has been applied to any instrument of the psaltery family, or to an instrument consisting of many strings stretched across a thin, flat body. This article describes the latter variety.
In music, a bow is a tensioned stick which has hair coated in rosin affixed to it. It is moved across some part of a musical instrument to cause vibration, which the instrument emits as sound. The vast majority of bows are used with string instruments, such as the violin, viola, cello, and bass, although some bows are used with musical saws and other bowed idiophones.
A bass (/beɪs/) musical instrument produces tones in the low-pitched range C4- C2. Basses belong to different families of instruments and can cover a wide range of musical roles. Since producing low pitches usually requires a long air column or string, the string and wind bass instruments are usually the largest instruments in their families or instrument classes.
The erhu is a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, which may also be called a Southern Fiddle, and is sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.
In music, extended technique is unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional methods of singing or of playing musical instruments employed to obtain unusual sounds or timbres.
Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, clogging, and buck dancing. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments, most often the banjo, guitar, and mandolin. The genre is considered a precursor to modern country music.
The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.
Bowed string instruments are a subcategory of string instruments that are played by a bow rubbing the strings. The bow rubbing the string causes vibration which the instrument emits as sound.
Articulation is a musical parameter that determines how a single note or other discrete event is sounded. Articulations primarily structure an event's start and end, determining the length of its sound and the shape of its attack and decay. They can also modify an event's timbre, dynamics, and pitch. Musical articulation is analogous to the articulation of speech, and during the Baroque and Classical periods it was taught by comparison to oratory.
The bowed psaltery is a type of psaltery or zither that is played with a bow. In contrast with the centuries-old plucked psaltery, the bowed psaltery appears to be a 20th-century invention.
The psalmodicon is a stringed musical instrument; the most common variants have a single string. It was developed in Scandinavia for simplifying music in churches and schools, and as an alternative to the fiddle for sacred music. The instrument could be plucked or bowed. Beginning in the early 19th century, it was adopted by many rural churches in Scandinavia; later, immigrants brought the instrument to the United States.
Violin acoustics is an area of study within musical acoustics concerned with how the sound of a violin is created as the result of interactions between its many parts. These acoustic qualities are similar to those of other members of the violin family, such as the viola.
The Hyperbow is an electronic violin bow interface that was developed as a result of an in-depth research project by students at MIT. The instrument is intended for use only by accomplished players and was designed to amplify their gestures, which lead to supplementary sound or musical control possibilities. It offers the violin player a range of expressive possibilities in its form as an augmented bow controller that lends itself to the control of bowed string physical models.
The épinette des Vosges is a traditional plucked-string instrument of the zither family, whose use was confined to two areas in the Vosges mountains of France approximately 50 km apart: around Val-d'Ajol and around Gérardmer.
String instruments are capable of producing a variety of extended technique sounds. These alternative playing techniques have been used extensively since the 20th century. Particularly famous examples of string instrument extended technique can be found in the music of Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, George Crumb, and Helmut Lachenmann.
On a bowed string instrument, a bow stroke is the movement of the bow back and forth perpendicularly across the string, from the frog to the tip and from the tip to the frog, producing sound. Multiple notes in one bow stroke are indicated by the use of slurs.