| Name | Image | Description | Video |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bass Violin |  | Bass violin is the generic modern term used to denote various 16th- and 17th-century forms of bass instruments of the violin (i.e. "viola da braccio") family. They were the direct ancestor of the modern cello. Bass violins were usually somewhat larger than the modern cello, but tuned the same or sometimes just one step lower than it. The image shows a "great bass viol" or violone, painting by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1640, showing the large size and typical violin shape of a bass violin. | |
| Bell |  | The bell is a percussion instrument and an idiophone. Its form is usually an open-ended hollow drum which resonates upon being struck. The striking implement can be a tongue suspended within the bell, known as a clapper, a small, free sphere enclosed within the body of the bell, or a separate mallet. Bells are usually made of cast metal, but small bells can also be made from ceramic or glass. Bells can be of all sizes: from tiny dress accessories to church bells weighing tons. The image shows the La Piagnona bell, from San Marco Museum in Florence Italy. | |
| Cello |  | The violoncello, usually abbreviated to cello or 'cello, is a bowed string instrument. The cello is used as a solo instrument, in chamber music, and as a member of the string section of an orchestra. The cello is most closely associated with European classical music, and has been described as the closest sounding instrument to the human voice. The cello is typically made from wood, although other materials such as carbon fibre or aluminum may be used. A traditional cello has a spruce top, with maple for the back, sides, and neck. The top and back are traditionally hand-carved, though less expensive cellos are often machine-produced. The sides, or ribs, are made by heating the wood and bending it around forms. The neck, pegbox, and scroll are normally carved out of a single piece of wood. The cello has four strings, which are referred to either by number or by their standard tuning. The cello developed from the bass violin, first referred to by Jambe de Fer in 1556, which was originally a three-string instrument. | |
| Chitarra Batente |  | The chitarre battente (Italian: lit. "beating guitar") is a musical instrument, a chordophone of the lute family. At a casual glance, it is similar to the everyday classical guitar, but larger and typically strung with four steel strings. Nowadays it is typical of folk music mainly in Calabria, Puglia and Basilicata, as well as in other areas of southern Italy; in previous centuries was common in most of central and southern Italy. There are versions of the historical 17th instrument in museums, but the commonly played folk instrument comes in three sizes: small, medium, large. The medium and large instruments are the most popular; the small instrument is a toy and has traditionally been used to train children to play. | |
| Cimbasso |  | The Cimbasso is a brass instrument in the trombone family, with a sound ranging from warm and mellow to bright and menacing. It has three to five piston or rotary valves, a highly cylindrical bore, and is usually pitched in F or Bb. It is in the same range as a tuba or a contrabass trombone. | |
| Cittern |  | The cittern is a fretted instrument similar to a mandolin. It is a stringed instrument of the lute family dating from the Renaissance. With its flat back, it is much simpler and cheaper to construct than the lute. In its simplest form it has four courses of 2 or 3 strings each. It is played by plucking the strings with the fingers or with a plectrum. | |
| Cornu |  | The Cornu was a type of brass instrument similar to the Buccina used by the Roman army of antiquity mainly for communicating orders to troops in battle. It is a Latin word literally meaning horn. The instrument was about 3m (11 feet) long and took the form of a letter 'G'. The instrument was braced by a crossbar that stiffened the structure and provided a means of supporing the instrument's weight on the player's shoulder. | |
| Dulcian |  | The dulcian is a Renaissance bass woodwind instrument, with an exposed double-reed and a folded conical bore. Equivalent terms include "curtal" in English, "dulzian" in German, "bajón" in Spanish, "douçaine"' in French, "dulciaan" in Dutch, and "fagotto" in Italian. The predecessor of the modern bassoon, it flourished between 1550 and 1700, but was probably invented earlier. Towards the end of this period it co-existed with, and was then superseded by the baroque bassoon, although it continued to be used in Spain until early in the twentieth century. | |
| Electronic Piano |  | An electronic piano is a keyboard instrument designed to simulate the timbre of a piano (and sometimes a harpsichord or an organ) using analog circuitry. Electronic pianos work similarly to analog synthesizers in that they generate their tones through oscillators, whereas electric pianos are mechanical, their sound being electrified by a pickup. Most electronic pianos date from the 1970s and were made in Italy, although similar models were made concurrently in Japan. An exception is the range of instruments made by RMI in the USA from 1967 to approximately 1980, which became one of the more popular electronic pianos used by professional musicians. Most electronic pianos (including the RMI) are not velocity sensitive, in that they do not vary their volume based on how hard or soft the keys are played, like an organ. | |
| Flute |  | The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike other woodwind instruments, a flute is a reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air against an edge, instead of using a reed. The flute appeared in different forms and locations around the world. It has been dated to prehistoric times (30,000 to 37,000 years ago). The image shows an Etruscan flute player from Tarquinia, Italy. | |
| Fortepiano |  | Fortepiano designates the early version of the piano, from its invention by the Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 up to the early 19th century. Fortepianos have leather-covered hammers and thin, harpsichord-like strings. The tone of the fortepiano is softer and has less sustain than the modern piano. Fortepianos also tend to have quite different tone quality in their different registers. The image shows a fortepiano by Paul McNulty after Walter & Sohn, ca. 1805. | |
| Glass Harmonica |  | The glass harmonica, also known as the glass armonica, hydrocrystalophone, or simply armonica (derived from "armonia", the Italian word for overtones) is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction. Because its sounding portion is made of glass, the glass harmonica is a crystallophone. The phenomenon of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wine goblet to produce tones is documented back to Renaissance times. | |
| Harp Guitar |  | The harp guitar is a stringed instrument with an incredibly rich history of well over two centuries. It is defined as "A guitar, in any of its accepted forms, with any number of additional unstopped strings that can accommodate individual plucking." Additionally, in reference to these instruments, the word "harp" is now a specific reference to the unstopped open strings, and is not specifically a reference to the tone, pitch range, volume, silhouette similarity, construction, floor-standing ability, nor any other alleged "harp-like" properties. To qualify in this category, an instrument must have at least one unfretted string lying off the main fretboard. Further, the unfretted strings can be, and typically are, played as an open string. | |
| Launeddas |  | The launeddas, triple clarinet or triplepipe, is a typical Sardinian (the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea) woodwind instrument, consisting of three pipes. It is polyphonic and played using circular breathing. It is an ancient instrument, dating back to at least the 8th century BC. It is still played during religious ceremonies and dances (su ballu). | |
| Mandolin |  | A mandolin is a musical instrument which is plucked, strummed or a combination of both. It is descended from the mandora. The most common design as originated in Naples, Italy has eight metal strings in four pairs (courses) which are plucked with a plectrum. Variants include four-string (one string per course), six-string (one string per course) as per the Milanese design, twelve-string (three strings per course), and sixteen-string (four string per course). It has a body with a teardrop-shaped soundtable (i.e. face), or one which is essentially oval in shape, with a soundhole, or soundholes, of varying shapes which are open and not latticed. The image shows a F-Style mandolin with hand-rubbed varnish finish. | |
| Organetto |  | The modern organetto is a popular folk instrument used in Italian folk music. It is a free reed instrument, allied to the accordion. | |
| Organetto |  | The medieval Organetto was a portable pipe instrument, allied to the later classical pipe organ, and pumped with the hand. It is referenced in the Roman de la Rose: "There are easily manageable organs which are portable and are pumped and played by the same person, who also sings either the soprano or tenor part." It was among the most popular instruments in Europe from the 13th to the 16th century. The organetto was relatively lightweight and could be carried with a sling to use in religious processions or other occasions. Bellows provide the wind supply, and a button-type keyboard could be used across approximately two octaves. The organetto could only play one note at a time, and was used for a single part in a polyphonic piece, motet or chanson, and for monophonic dance music. | |
| Piano |  | The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard that produces sound by striking steel strings with felt hammers. The hammers immediately rebound allowing the strings to continue vibrating at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies them. The piano is widely used in Western music for solo performance, chamber music, and accompaniment. It is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal. Although not portable and often expensive, the piano's versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the most familiar musical instruments. It is sometimes classified as both a percussion and a stringed instrument (in a loose sense of that term). According to the Hornbostel-Sachs method of music classification, it is grouped with Chordophones. | |
| Piano Accordion |  | A piano accordion is a type of accordion having a right-hand keyboard similar to a piano. It may have any of the available left-hand keyboard systems. In Italy a chromatic piano accordion is called a fisarmonica. | |
| Piffero |  | The piffero or piffaro is a double reed musical instrument with a conical bore, of the oboe family. It is used to play music in the tradition of the quattro province, an area of mountains and valleys in the north-west Italian Apennines. The reed used by the piffero is inserted in a conical brass tube, which is itself inserted in a pirouette. This peculiarity, which is shared with oriental and ancient oboes, is unique in Italy. The piffero has eight tone holes, one of which, on the back of the instrument, is usually covered by the left hand thumb, and ends with a bell, where a cock tail feather (used to clean the reed) typically rests during execution. | |
| Putipu |  | The putipu is a traditional folk percussion instrument of Naples (a historic city in southern Italy.) It consists of a membrane stretched across a resonating chamber, like a drum. A handle attached to the membrane compresses air rhythmically within the chamber; the air then spurts out of the not-quite-hermetic seal that fastens the membrane to the wooden body of the instrument to produce a "burping" sound. | |
| Roman Tuba |  | The Roman tuba is an ancient musical instrument, different from the modern tuba. Tuba (from tubus, Latin for tube) was produced around 500 BC, and like the Cornu (a similar instrument), was used as a military signal trumpet. The origin is Etruscan and has many similarities with the Greek Salpinx. It was a straight instrument, usually of bronze, about four feet long, and played with a detachable bone mouthpiece. This instrument, although disputed, could be the ancestor and the source of the name for the modern tuba. | |
| Suspended Cymbal |  | A suspended cymbal is any single cymbal played with a stick or beater rather than struck against another cymbal. In an orchestral setting, suspended cymbals are most often used for rolled crescendos, or swells. To do this, the player uses a single-stroke roll on the outside edge of the cymbal, using soft mallets, one on each side. At times, a score also calls for hitting the cymbal with a stick or scraping it with a triangle beater. | |
| Triangle |  | The triangle is an idiophone type of musical instrument in the percussion family. It is a bar of metal, usually steel in modern instruments, bent into a triangle shape. On a triangle instrument, one of the angles is left open, with the ends of the bar not quite touching. This causes the instrument to be of indeterminate pitch. It is either suspended from one of the other corners by a piece of thin wire or gut, leaving it free to vibrate, or hooked over the hand. It is usually struck with a metal beater, giving a high-pitched, ringing tone. | |
| Viola D'amore |  | The viola d'amore (Italian: love viol) is a 7- or 6-stringed musical instrument with sympathetic strings used chiefly in the baroque period. The viola d'amore shares many features of the viol family. Like viols, it has a flat back and intricately carved head at the top of the peg box, but unlike viols, it is unfretted, and played much like a violin, being held horizontally under the chin. It is about the same size as the modern viola. The viola d'amore usually has six or seven playing strings, which are sounded by drawing a bow across them, just as with a violin. In addition, it has an equal number sympathetic strings located below the main strings and the fingerboard which are not played directly but vibrate in sympathy with the notes played. Largely thanks to the sympathetic strings, the viola d'amore has a particularly sweet and warm sound. | |
| Water Organ |  | The water organ or hydraulic organ (early types are sometimes called hydraulis or hydraulos or hydraulus or hydraula) is a type of automatic pipe organ blown by air, where the power source pushing the air is derived by water from a natural source (e.g. by a waterfall). Consequently, the water organ lacks a bellows, blower, or compressor. In addition to being the source of power to push air through the organ pipes, the water is also used as a source of power to drive a mechanism similar to that of the Barrel organ, which has a pinned barrel that contains a specific song to be played. The image shows the most famous water organ of the 16th century. It is at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Italy. | |
| Wood Block |  | A wood block is essentially a small piece of slit drum made from a single piece of wood and used as a percussion instrument. It is struck with a stick, making a characteristically percussive sound. The orchestral wood-block instrument of the West is generally made from teak or another hardwood. The dimensions of this instrument vary considerably, although it is always a rectangular block of wood with one or sometimes two longitudinal cavities. The wood block may be the oldest musical instrument known to man, given that it would have been possible to construct and play this idiophonic instrument before the Bronze Age. | |
| Zampogna |  | Zampogna is a generic term for a number of Italian double chantered pipes that can be found as far north as the southern part of the Marches, throughout areas in Abruzzo, Latium, Molise, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily. The tradition is now associated with Christmas, and the most famous Italian carol, "Tu scendi dalle stelle" (You Come Down From the Stars) is derived from traditional zampogna music. All chanters and drones are fixed into a single round stock that the bag is attached to. Each chanter is tuned differently, according to the tradition it represents, and there are dozens. Today some pipers are substituting the traditional goat and sheep hide bags with a rubber inner tube which is covered with an artificial fleece. |
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