Music to My Ears: Instrumental Vocab

The accordion was invented in the early 1800s, and it's played in many countries around the world. The word comes from the German akkordion, from akkord, "musical chord" or "be in tune."

It's more common to use the plural form — bagpipes — or even "the pipes" or "a set of pipes." The music produced by bagpipes is distinctive, with a constant harmonizing sound being produced by the drone pipe, and no rests between notes. The bagpipe player squeezes the bag with his arm as he blows a pipe called a chanter, and in formal situations he might wear a kilt and knee socks.

Baaaaaaasooooooooooooon. The name of this wind instrument offers a clue and a half to its sound: the bassoon makes a low sound, like all bass instruments. That’s not quite onomatopoeia, but it’s close. Many instruments are classified as bass by their low sound, from the tuba to the bass guitar.

This plural noun is the name of a percussion instrument consisting of round pieces of shell, wood, or bone held in the fingers. Castanets were originally made from chestnuts and get their name from the Spanish diminutive for chestnut.

One of the most fun parts of being a drummer has to be hitting the cymbals, a crashing, clanging instrument that, as you may have guessed, is very loud. A cymbal is a concave, almost flat, circular piece of brass. Drummers hit the cymbal with a drumstick or bang two cymbals together. If you love peace and quiet, stay away from cymbals — and drummers!

A dulcimer is a stringed instrument used mainly in American folk music. It has three strings, and a fretted fingerboard like a guitar. Like a guitar, the strings are strummed with one hand while the strings are held down with the other hand on a fretted fingerboard. Hammers, despite their association with carpentry and Thor, are often used to play musical instruments, including quite a few on this list. Dulcimer has been found in English since the late 1400s.

You’re probably familiar with the small wind instrument called the flute. This is a similar instrument that’s even smaller, with a unique sound. The fife has a particularly folkish flavor and is similar to the piccolo.

The gong, which is part of the percussion family, is a huge, metal, rounded disk. When you hit the disk with a mallet or drumstick, it makes a loud, deep, powerful tone. Why is a gong called a gong? Probably because a gong sounds like gooooonnnnnngggggggggggg. This is an example of onomatopoeia, like buzz and moo.

The harp is a massive instrument that requires the harpist to sit down to strum the strings. Like the lute, the harp has a bright, light sound. The word harp can also mean to talk constantly and dully about one topic: "The harpist did nothing but harp on about the bad weather."

This is a stringed instrument similar to a guitar. Lutes are typically associated with Elizabethan music and Shakespearean plays.

If you don’t want to harp on the word harp, here’s a word for the same thing: lyre. The lyre was specifically a harp played by the Greeks. The word lyre also took on another meaning in the 1700s as a symbol of lyric poetry.

Most traditional maracas are made out of dried, hollow gourds or coconut shells, and they're filled with dry beans or pebbles. The word maraca comes from the Portuguese, via a Brazilian language called Tupi. In some French-speaking parts of the world, maracas are called "shac-shacs."

The piccolo is a woodwind instrument about half the size of a flute. The word piccolo is in the fairly extensive group of Italian words that designate musical instruments and other musical terms. A piccolo plays an octave higher than an ordinary flute; the word comes, appropriately enough, from the Italian for "small," which is also piccolo.

Sitars have long necks and as many as 21 strings. It's like a guitar, but in addition to the six or seven strings that a sitar player plucks, there are more that vibrate beneath the frets, called "sympathetic strings." Despite all these strings, the word sitar means "three-stringed" in Persian.

This percussion instrument’s name sounds like it comes from an alien planet in a distant galaxy of an alternative universe, but there’s nothing super fancy about the xylophone: it’s made of a series of wooden bars that you hit with a little hammer to produce musical notes. The sound of this word is a lot weirder than the sound of the actual instrument.