Ask Idahoans today what a hurdy-gurdy is, and most will have no idea. A few will probably know that a hurdy-gurdy was a kind of hand-cranked musical instrument popular in the 19th century. But if you ...

Editor’s note: This tale comes from Mary Ellen Gilliland’s humorous local history, “Rascals, Scoundrels and No Goods.” The book captures the high-spirited antics of shysters and shady ladies, ...

Twenty-seven years ago, in search of a hurdy-gurdy master, Donald Heller wandered into a music shop in Budapest. There, he saw a beautiful maiden, an ancient-looking stringed instrument in her lap, ...

Today's Beautiful Music is an introduction to the hurdy-gurdy. The unusual string instrument is played with a hand crank, and its ancestor -- the organistrum -- dates back at least to the 12th century ...

Movies benefit from Oscar exposure--and so do weird instruments. In the week after Sting played a hurdy-gurdy (a wooden stringed instrument with a keyboard and a crank that turns a wheel that acts as ...

The hurdy-gurdy is one of Europe's oldest musical instruments. A kind of mechanical violin, it uses keys and a crank, along with melody and drone strings. Some call it the medieval synthesizer, and a ...

It never hurts to iterate the phrase “Op-Ed” at the beginning of articles in this section. It may help us (in this case, I) remember that the writer is not an encyclopedia or – to be more current – ...

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory ...

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