Hurdy Gurdy

The hurdy gurdy is an instrument used from the 10th to the 18th century, was a mechanical fiddle activated by a rosined wheel (house within the body) turned by the hand crank. A series of rods were turned to stop the strings simultaneously, producing either unisons of paralel organum depending on the tuning. The earliest depictions (12th century) of the hurdy gurdy show an instrument 1.5-1.8 m (5-6 ft) long and played by two seated men. In the 13th century the invention of a smaller, higher pitched instrument made on player operation possible.

Its more facile key mechanism, pressed upward from iceland to Russia, its social position by the 17th century had descended from the lofty an instrument for blind beggars. In the 18th century it became a fad of the French court and was made in guitar and lute shapes, it has been designed variously as organizzata. Haydn and Mozart, among others, wrote for the instrument.

The hurdy gurdy, a nearly obsolete stringed instrument, its shape like a large, broad necked violin and is played on the lap. When the hurdy-gurdy is played, the strings are vibrated through the friction of a rotating wheel with a handle. A small keyboard is used for stopping the strings.

Indian of North America's Music

The earliest known inhabitants of North America were a highly music and dance oriented people who responded to their environment by creating a vast repertoire of unwritten songs and dances were transmitted orally from generation to generation down to the present. Although many native Americans have been assimilated into modern society, several tribal group are making serious effort to preserve their traditional cultures.

The music of the north American Indians is primarily vocal-monodic (single melodic line). Some songs are conceived during visionary or dreamlike states, while others are consciously created for special functions. Extemporization is rare. Musical notation is nonexistent in the traditional culture, although isolated instances of mnemonic music aids have been found. Although there is free use of microtones (intervals smaller than a semitone), melodies are based predominantly on the pentatonic (5-tone) and modal scales with intervals of the fourth and fifth being the most common. Indian music and dance range widely in character, from vigorously rhythmic to smooth and melodious. Dance is nearly always accompanied by vocal music and some kind of percussive instruments.

European forms of harmony and counterpoint are absent, although instances of incidental harmony do occur. Accompaniment is mainly percussive: drums with animal skin heads and rattles, shakers, and scrapers made of various materials such as deer hooves, seashells, bird breaks, animal horns, and so on. Flutes, whistles, and some stringed instruments are also used. All music is functional and accompanies specific activities such as dance, work, games, prayer, harvesting, healing, hunting, whaling, burial ceremonies, etc.

Musical forms are often related to function. For example, the war dance songs of the plains Indians generally have a descending contour with an introduction followed by variations of A - as in the formula AA' BA' CA - ending with a "tail-dance" section that reiterates part of the principal section.

Indian Music

Indian music encompasses some of the richest musical traditions of the world. India's musical history begins in the second millennium BC with the advent of the Vedic period. The Samaveda, one of the sacred four Vedas ("four books of knowledge"), comprises the world's oldest notated melodies. Beginning the second century AD, complicated theoretical system developed, and the important raga principle was established. Islamic influences brought about the division, about 1200, of Indian music into the northern and southern systems that continue today.

The Raga
A raga is identified by a particular combination of musical phrases that gives it its distinctive melodies character. The pitches in a raga may be represented in the form of ascending and descending scales. Many of the standard phrases are so well known that the informed listener is able to tell immediately which raga is being performed. Regardless of whether the raga performance is vocal or instrumental, a drone (a sustained tone of fixed pitch) is invariably heard in the background. The drone instrument is usually the tambura, which has a long neck and four strings tuned to the basic tones of the raga. Magical power is attributed to some ragas, and many ragas should be performed only at certain times of the day on night or during specific periods of the year.

The Tala
The other basic element of Indian art music, the tala, is a rhythmic cycle containing of fixed number of beats. Talas five the rhythmic foundation of melodic structure and are performed on drums. Within the sequence of beats the drummer plays rhythmic patterns associated with a particular tala. The drummer may repeat the sequence more than a hundred times in a single performance. The tala divided into subsections, marked by accents on their first beat, the most important accent occurring on the very first beat of the tala cycle.

Greek Music

The musical culture of ancient Greece is known more through literacy references than through preserve musical documents. About 20 fragments of music are extant, written in a relatively late Greek notational system, but references to music performed at various rites and social occasions abound in the work of ancient Greek autors. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey report vintners' song, dirges, and hymns of praise to Apollo (paeans). Music was described as an art exerting great string instrument, came to be linked with Apollo, the god of Sun and reason, while the aulos, a loud double reed instrument, was identified with Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic revelry.

Among the earliest known Greek musicians are Terpander of Lesbos (7^th century BC), the founder of lyric khitara performance; Pindar of Thebes (6^th – 5^th Century BC), whose odes represent the rise of Greek choral music; and Timotheus of Miletus (5^th – 4^th century BC), a virtuoso performer on the khitara. In the Athenian drama of the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC. Solo and choral singing, instrumental music, and dance all played essential roles.

According to legend, the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (6^th – 5^th century BC) discovered the mathematical rationale of musical consonant from the weight of hammers used by smiths. He is thus given credit for discovering that the interval of an octave is rooted in the ratio 2:1, that of the fifth in 3:2, that of the fouth in 4:3, and that of the whole tone in 9:8. Followers of Pytagoras applied these ratios to lengths of a string on an instrument called a canon, or monochord, and thereby were able to determine mathematically the intonation of an entire musical system. The Pythagoreans saw these ratios as governing forces in the cosmos as well as in sounds, and Plato's Timaeus describe the soul of the world structured according to this same musical ratios. For the Pythagoreans as well as for Plato, music consequently became a branch of mathematics as well as an art; this tradition of musical thought flourished throughout antiquity in such theorists as Nicomachus of Gerasa (2d century AD) and Ptolemy (2d century AD) and was transmitted into the middle ages by Boethius (6^th century AD). The mathematics and intonation of the fluence in the development of European music during the middle ages and after.