So, I was watching a little TV here in my room in England and a show on BBC2 featured a performance by The Arcade Fire. The Arcade Fire is a fairly awesome band and they are definitely worth checking out. They are reminiscent of The Decemberists. Anyway, one member of the band was playing this fairly bizarre instrument. It had a crank, a couple of strings, and a keyboard. And after a little bit of cyber sleuthing I found out that the instrument is called the “hurdy gurdy”. The hurdy gurdy consists of a rosin wheel which drags across several strings. The keyboard presses on the strings which causes changes in pitch. It’s a medieval and renaissance era instrument that has a reasonable following over parts of Europe and there has been a increasing interest in it in the US. There are hurdy gurdy festivals on the west coast. There are a few videos of hurdy gurdy players on youtube such as here and here. There have been a handful of other mainstream artists who have used the hurdy gurdy in their music such as Sting and Led Zepplin. Check out wont you?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.