Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The kithara (Greek: κιθάρα, romanized: kithára), Latinized as cithara, was an ancient Greek musical instrument in the yoke lutes family. It was a seven-stringed professional version of the lyre , which was regarded as a rustic, or folk instrument , appropriate for teaching music to beginners.
A musical instrument of the chordophone family, the lyre-guitar was a type of guitar shaped to look like a lyre, popular as a fad-instrument in the late 1800s. It had six single courses, with a fretboard located between two curved arms recalling the shape of the ancient Greek kithara. It was tuned and played like the conventional guitar.
Like all instruments in the lute family, different chords are played on the barbat by fingering the pitch of the strings. Like all instruments in the lyre / kithara family, different chords were played on the strings by resting fingers against strings for the unwanted notes, to silence them.
Examples of yoke lutes are the lyre, the kithara, the barbiton, and the phorminx from Ancient Greece, and the biblical kinnor, all of which were strummed instruments, with the fingers dampening the unwanted notes in the chord.
Cithara octochorda (English: Eight-string kithara) is an 18th-century hymnal, containing hymns written in both Latin and Croatian language. Its first two editions (1701 and 1723) were published in Vienna, while the third (1757) was published in Zagreb. [1]
The earliest reference to the word "lyre" is the Mycenaean Greek ru-ra-ta-e, meaning "lyrists" and written in the Linear B script. [5] In classical Greek, the word "lyre" could either refer specifically to an amateur instrument, which is a smaller version of the professional cithara and eastern-Aegean barbiton, or "lyre" can refer generally to all three instruments as a family. [6]
The musical system of ancient Greece evolved over a period of more than 500 years from simple scales of tetrachords, or divisions of the perfect fourth, into several complex systems encompassing tetrachords and octaves, as well as octave scales divided into seven to thirteen intervals.
The Gold Lyre of Ur now held in the Iraq Museum is a partial reconstruction; the original was destroyed in the looting that followed the US invasion of Baghdad during the second Iraq War. [126] Musicologist Samuel Dorf details the event: [126] In early April of 2003, the museum was looted. The lyre went missing, only to be found in pieces.