Kontra Bida
   HOME
*





Kontra Bida
A kontra is a Hungarian ( hu, háromhúros brácsa, 'three-stringed viola'), Czech, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Romani instrument common in Transylvania. Construction The ''kontra'' can be constructed new, but is most often classical viola which has undergone several organological changes, for example, thinning ("regraduating") the top, back, and sides to increase the amplitude, and flattening the bridge, which allows the player to sound all three strings at once in order to produce chords. In addition, unlike the viola, they are only strung with three strings. Tuning The ''kontra'' is tuned like a viola, though lacking its low c string: g – d' – a' and frequently the a' string is replaced with a second g string tuned to a, a major second above the g, in a form of re-entrant tuning. Technique Due to the flattened bridge, the standard method of play is to play double stops and three-note chords and let the fiddle play melody lines. Ensemble playing The ''kontra'' ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Chordophone
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. Musicians play some string instruments by plucking the strings with their fingers or a plectrum—and others by hitting the strings with a light wooden hammer or by rubbing the strings with a bow. In some keyboard instruments, such as the harpsichord, the musician presses a key that plucks the string. Other musical instruments generate sound by striking the string. With bowed instruments, the player pulls a rosined horsehair bow across the strings, causing them to vibrate. With a hurdy-gurdy, the musician cranks a wheel whose rosined edge touches the strings. Bowed instruments include the string section instruments of the orchestra in Western classical music (violin, viola, cello and double bass) and a number of other instruments (e.g., viols and gambas used in early music from the Baroque ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Romani Music
Romani music (often referred to as gypsy or gipsy music, which is sometimes considered a derogatory term) is the music of the Romani people who have their origins in northern India but today live mostly in Europe. Historically nomadic, though now largely settled, the Romani people have long acted as entertainers and tradesmen. In many of the places Romanies live they have become known as musicians. The wide distances travelled have introduced a multitude of influences of: Byzantine music, Byzantine, Music of Greece, Greek, Arabic music, Arabic, Music of India, Indian, Persian traditional music, Persian, Music of Turkey, Turkish, Slavic peoples, Slavic, Music of Romania, Romanian, Music of Germany, German, Music of the Netherlands, Dutch, Music of France, French, Music of Spain, Spanish, and even Jewish musical forms. It is difficult to define the parameters of a unified Romani musical style, as there are many differences in melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and formal structures from ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ütőgardon
The ütőgardon also called a gardon, gardony, ütősgardony, tekenyőgardon, is a folk musical instrument played in regions of Transylvania and Hungary. It is similar in appearance to a cello, but it is played percussively: instead of using a bow, the player plucks and beats the strings with a stick. Description The body of this relatively large stringed instrument, usually carved from a single piece of maple, poplar or willow, resembles classical stringed instruments, with a flat or slightly convex back and top, but with much thicker wood. There are four, or sometimes three, strings which are beaten with the bow which resembles a stick approximately 40 cm long and 2 cm in diameter. On the four-string version, three thicker strings correspond to the G-string of the double bass, and the thinner string, used as the plucking string, corresponds to the D or G string of the cello. Currently the most common tuning of the strings is D – D – D – d; previously on three- ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Accordion
Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed in a frame), colloquially referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist. The concertina , harmoneon and bandoneón are related. The harmonium and American reed organ are in the same family, but are typically larger than an accordion and sit on a surface or the floor. The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows while pressing buttons or keys, causing ''pallets'' to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called '' reeds''. These vibrate to produce sound inside the body. Valves on opposing reeds of each note are used to make the instrument's reeds sound louder without air leaking from each reed block.For the accordion's place among the families of musical ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound. Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches. The clarinet family is the largest such woodwind family, with more than a dozen types, ranging from the BB♭ contrabass to the E♭ soprano. The most common clarinet is the B soprano clarinet. German instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner is generally credited with inventing the clarinet sometime after 1698 by adding a register key to the chalumeau, an earlier single-reed instrument. Over time, additional keywork and the development of airtight pads were added to improve the tone and playability. Today the clarinet is used in classical music, military bands, klezmer, jazz, and other styles. It is a standard fixture of the orchestra and concert band. Etymology The word ''clarinet'' may have entered the English language via the Fr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Zither
Zithers (; , from the Greek word ''cithara'') 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. Zithers are typically played by strumming or plucking the strings with the fingers or a plectrum. In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, the term refers to a larger family of similarly shaped instruments that also includes the hammered dulcimer family and piano and a few rare bowed instruments like the bowed psaltery, bowed dulcimer, and streichmelodion. Like an acoustic guitar or lute, a zither's body serves as a resonating chamber (sound box), but, unlike guitars and lutes, a zither lacks a distinctly separate neck assembly. The number of strings varies, from one to more than fifty. In modern common usage the term "zither" refers to three specific instruments: the concert zithe ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cimbalom
The cimbalom (; ) or concert cimbalom is a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box on legs with metal strings stretched across its top and a damping pedal underneath. It was designed and created by V. Josef Schunda in 1874 in Budapest, based on his modifications to the existing Hammered dulcimer instruments which were already present in Central and Eastern Europe. Today the instrument is mainly played in Hungary, Slovakia, Moravia, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. The cimbalom is typically played by striking two sticks, often with cotton-wound tips, against the strings which are on the top of the instrument. The steel treble strings are arranged in groups of 4 and are tuned in unison. The bass strings which are over-spun with copper, are arranged in groups of 3 and are also tuned in unison. The Hornbostel–Sachs musical instrument classification system registers the cimbalom with the number 314.122-4,5. The name “cimbalom” is also sometimes used to descr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Stroh Violin
The Stroh violin or Stroviol is a type of stringed musical instrument that is mechanically amplified by a metal resonator and horn attached to its body. The name Stroviol refers to a violin, but other instruments have been modified with the amplification device, including the viola, cello, double bass, ukulele, mandolin, and guitar. John Matthias Augustus Stroh, an electrical engineer in London, invented the instrument in 1899. Description The Stroh violin has a horn at the end of the fingerboard to project the sound to an audience or recording horn, and often a smaller monitoring horn that the performer placed at their ear to hear what was being played more distinctly. The Stroh violin is much louder than a standard wooden violin, and its directional projection of sound made it particularly useful in the early days of phonographic recording. Wooden violins recorded poorly with the early acoustic-mechanical recording method, and the Stroh violin improved this by producin ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Fiddle
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. Fiddling is the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians that play it. Among musical styles, fiddling tends to p ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Chord (music)
A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of pitches/frequencies consisting of multiple notes (also called "pitches") that are heard as if sounding simultaneously. For many practical and theoretical purposes, arpeggios and broken chords (in which the notes of the chord are sounded one after the other, rather than simultaneously), or sequences of chord tones, may also be considered as chords in the right musical context. In tonal Western classical music (music with a tonic key or "home key"), the most frequently encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: the root note, and intervals of a third and a fifth above the root note. Chords with more than three notes include added tone chords, extended chords and tone clusters, which are used in contemporary classical music, jazz and almost any other genre. A series of chords is called a chord progression. One example of a widely used chord progression in Western traditional music and blu ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Double Stop
In music, a double stop is the technique of playing two notes simultaneously on a stringed instrument such as a violin, a viola, a cello, or a double bass. On instruments such as the Hardanger fiddle it is common and often employed. In performing a double stop, two separate strings are bowed or plucked simultaneously. Although the term itself suggests these strings are to be fingered (stopped), in practice one or both strings may be open. A triple stop is the same technique applied to three strings; a quadruple stop applies to four strings. Double, triple, and quadruple stopping are collectively known as multiple stopping. Early extensive examples of the double stop and string chords appear in Carlo Farina's ''Capriccio Stravagante'' from 1627, and in certain of the sonatas of Biagio Marini's Op. 8 of 1629. Bowing On instruments with a curved bridge, it is difficult to bow more than two strings simultaneously. Early treatises make it clear that composers did not expect three ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Transylvania
Transylvania ( ro, Ardeal or ; hu, Erdély; german: Siebenbürgen) is a historical and cultural region in Central Europe, encompassing central Romania. To the east and south its natural border is the Carpathian Mountains, and to the west the Apuseni Mountains. Broader definitions of Transylvania also include the western and northwestern Romanian regions of Crișana and Maramureș, and occasionally Banat. Transylvania is known for the scenery of its Carpathian landscape and its rich history. It also contains Romania's second-largest city, Cluj-Napoca, and other iconic cities and towns such as Brașov, Sibiu, Târgu Mureș, Alba Iulia and Sighișoara. It is also the home of some of Romania's List of World Heritage Sites in Romania, UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as the villages with fortified churches in Transylvania, Villages with fortified churches, the Historic Centre of Sighișoara, the Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains and the Rosia Montana Mining Cultural Landsc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]