The theme is similar to the classic Music Lesson genre, and features a bass viol, virginal, and cittern ( in the woman's hand, out of frame in this detail ; see: Image: VerkoljeJan CoupleDutch1674. jpg | full image ).

Bellman mostly played the cittern ; the instrument is on display in Stockholm City Museum.

In April 2007, the Museum outbid New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art at a Christie's auction in acquiring a rare English cittern dating from the late 16th century, " This instrument is extremely rare, probably the only English cittern from the Renaissance known to survive ," Museum Director Andre Larson said.

Played by all classes, the cittern was a premier instrument of casual music making much as is the guitar today.

The cittern may have a range of only an octave between its lowest and highest strings and employs a " re-entrant " tuning-a tuning in which the string that is physically uppermost is not the lowest, as is also the case with the five-string banjo for example.

There is a tendency in modern German to interchange the words for cittern and zither.

The cetera, a cittern of 4 to 8 double strings that is of Tuscan origin and dates back to the Renaissance, is the most iconic Corsican traditional instrument.

The Bandora or Bandore is a large long-necked plucked string-instrument that can be regarded as a bass cittern though it does not have the " re-entrant " tuning typical of the cittern.

In fact, the barring is very close to an orpharion, and closer to contemporary lute than to cittern or guitar construction.

The Russian guitar ( sometimes referred to as a " Gypsy guitar ") is an acoustic seven-string guitar that arrived in Russia toward the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, most probably as an evolution of the cittern, kobza, and torban.

This tuning is thought to have been derived either from the baroque cittern ( of the English guitar type ), or from that of the torban, a Ukrainian variety of theorbo, as one of its tunings was also based on major triads.

The bandurria is a plectrum chordophone from Spain, similar to the cittern and the mandolin, primarily used in Spanish folk music.

The name cittern is often applied to instruments of five courses ( ten strings ), especially those having a scale length between 20 and 22 inches ( 500mm and 550mm ).

The waldzither () is a stringed instrument from Germany, a type of cittern.

" We already have an Italian cittern from the same period, but it's one of two or three that have survived.

Even though there are few academic and scientific studies about it, all facts indicate that the instrument we now call a Portuguese guitar ( or depending on the used name and definition, its direct ancestor ) was known until the nineteenth century throughout Europe as citra or cítara ( Portugal and Spain ), cetra ( Italy and Corsica ), cistre ( France ), cittern ( British Isles ), zither and zitharen ( Germany and Low Countries ).

Their politically tinged music was informed by MacGowan and Stacy's punk backgrounds, yet used traditional Irish instruments such as the tin whistle, cittern, mandolin and accordion.

Broken consorts combined a mixture of different instruments — a small band, essentially — usually comprising a gathering of social amateurs and typically including such instruments as a bass viol, a lute or orpharion ( a wire-strung lute, metal-fretted, flat-backed, and festoon-shaped ), a cittern, a treble viol ( or violin, as time progressed ), sometimes an early keyboard instrument ( virginal, spinet, or harpsichord ), and whatever other instruments or players ( or singers ) might be available at the moment.

A cittern, labeled cythara Italica et Germanica ( to distinguish it from other instruments also referred to as cithara in the Latin of the era ), from Athanasius Kircher | Kircher's Musurgia Universalis

The cittern family survives into the present day in the German ' waldzither ', the Corsican Cetara, Spanish Bandurria and Laúd, as well as the Portuguese guitar, the descendant of English instruments brought into Portugal in the 18th century.

Traditional instruments included alphorn, hammered dulcimer, fife, hurdy-gurdy, rebec, bagpipe, cittern and shawm.

All of the band members play multiple instruments, and frequently rotate instruments between songs ; Das letzte Einhorn frequently plays a cittern during certain songs, such as Ai Vis A Lo Lop.

Personally-owned instruments recorded included the cittern, virginals, soprano clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, fife, flute, viol and violin and fiddle and the Mrs. Healy pipe.

In 1582, Friar Phillipe de Caverell visited Lisbon and described its customs ; he mentions the Portuguese people ’ s love for the cittern and other musical instruments.

Through his association with Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan's bass player, Larry joined the band, replacing John Jackson as a guitarist, and expanded the role to multi-instrumentalist, playing instruments such as cittern, violin / fiddle, pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, mandolin, banjo, and slide guitar.

Luthier Stefan Sobell, who coined the term " cittern " for his modern, mandolin-based instruments, originally used the term for short scale instruments irrespective of the number of their strings, but he now applies " cittern " to all 5 course instruments irrespective of scale length, and " octave mandolin " to all 4 course instruments, leaving out bouzouki entirely.

The band uses a mix of modern and medieval instruments, such as the lute, cittern, crumhorn and rauschpfeife, along with the moog synthesizer, bass and electric guitars.

His first known book was the Cittarn Schoole of 1597, consisting of compositions for the cittern.

In 1649 was published the catalogue of the Royal Music Library of King John IV of Portugal containing the best known books of cittern music from foreign composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the complexity and technical difficulty of the pieces allow us to believe that we had highly skilled players in Portugal.

The word " kit " probably arose from an abbreviation of the word " pocket " to "- cket " and subsequently " kit "; alternatively, it may be a corruption of “ cittern ” ( Gr. ).

This instrument certainly directly descended from the Renaissance European cittern and very probably derived in turn from the medieval citole.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Ribeiro Sanches ( 1699 – 1783 ) had cittern lessons in the town of Guarda as he mentions in a letter from St. Petersburg in 1735.

* The Renaissance Cittern Site: Informational page about the NMM English cittern

In the same period there are other evidence to the use of the cittern alluding to a repertoire of sonatas, minuets, etc.

Confusingly, in Portugal, the word vihuela referred to the guitar, whereas guitarra meant the " Portuguese guitar ", a variety of cittern.

Fanned frets first appeared on the 16th century Orpharion, a variant of the cittern, tuned like a lute.

Mandolas are not uncommon in folk music, ( particularly Italian folk music ) and sometimes used in Irish traditional music, although far less often, in the latter case, than the octave mandola, Irish bouzouki, and modern cittern.

" Woman with cittern ", canvas painted 1677 by Pieter van Slingeland ( ca.

The cittern or cither ( Fr.

From the 16th until the 18th century the cittern was a common English barber shop instrument, kept in waiting areas for customers to entertain themselves and others with, and popular sheet music for the instrument was published to that end.

Just as the lute was enlarged and bass-extended to become the theorbo and chitarrone for continuo work, so the cittern was developed into the ceterone, with its extended neck and unstopped bass strings, though this was a much less common instrument.

In Germany the cittern survives under the names Waldzither and Lutherzither.

In the early 1970s, using the guitarra and a 1930s archtop Martin guitar as models, English luthier Stefan Sobell created a " cittern ," a hybrid instrument primarily used for playing folk music, which has proved to be popular with folk revival musicians.

They include hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes, Uilleann Pipes, shawm, nyckelharpa, harp, cittern, tromba marina, hammered dulcimer, Klangbaum, and various types of drums and percussion.