So, I recently got onto Stumble Upon and loaded it with every music love I could find. Today it gave me an encyclopedia of plucked instruments. And as I was perusing the lute section I complained to my Dear Husband that the picture of the chitarrone was too small for me to see all the wonderfulness that they described in the article. So, he did a Google Image Search. Wow! For an instrument I'd never heard of, there was a butt load* of pictures on the web. This is the instrument in question:
Pretty cool, huh? But wait. That doesn't really give you a perspective on the instrument. Allow me to try again.
Yeah. That instrument is wider than my torso. I could in no way have ever played it. Not to mention that my fingers couldn't reach all the way across that fretboard. But it does have a pretty sound.
Didja notice that there is a tail that he had to sit on to make sure that the instrument would stay in place while he played it? Pretty damn cool.
And for those who want the details, a chitarrone is a bass lute that was developed in the Renaissance. Mozart was known to include a chitarrone part for some of his orchestral pieces. So, now you have a wonderfully useless bit of trivia to spout at people when you want to ensure blank looks.
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