Crwth
The crwth ( , ), also called a crowd or rote or crotta, is a bowed lyre, a type of stringed instrument, associated particularly with Welsh music, now archaic but once widely played in Europe. Four historical examples have survived and are to be found in St Fagans National Museum of History (Cardiff); National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Warrington Museum & Art Gallery; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (US). Origin of the name The name is Welsh, derived from a Proto-Celtic noun *- ("round object") which refers to a swelling or bulging out, a pregnant appearance or a protuberance, and it is speculated that it came to be used for the instrument because of its bulging shape. Other Celtic words for violin also have meanings referring to rounded appearances. In Gaelic, for example, "" can mean "hump" or "hunch" as well as harp or violin. Like several other English loanwords from Welsh, the name is one of the few words in the English language in which the letter W is used as a vowel. The traditional English name is crowd (or rote), and the variants , and are little-used today. In Medieval Latin it is called the chorus or . The Welsh word means a performer on the crwth. The Irish word is cruit, although it also was used on occasion to designate certain small harps. The English surnames Crewther, Crowder, Crother and Crowther denote a player of the crowd, as do the Scottish names MacWhirter and MacWhorter. For this article's purposes, crwth denotes the modern, or most recent, form of the instrument (see picture). History A variety of string instruments so designated are thought to have been played in Wales since at least Roman times. Continuous, clear records of the use of crwth to denote an instrument of the lyre (or the Byzantine bowed lyre) class date from the 11th century. Medieval instruments somewhat resembling the crwth appear in pictures (first in Continental Europe) as far back as the 11th century, shortly after bowing was first known in the West. In Wales, the crwth long took second place to the harp in the musical hierarchy. Schlesinger in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica mentioned the crwth in an article about transition of instruments from the lyre to plucked and bowed instruments: Physical description and playing technique The crwth consists of a fairly simple box construction with a flat, fretless fingerboard and six gut strings, purportedly tuned gg´c´c´´d´d´´. The original report of that tuning (Edward Jones, Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards; London: 1784), from which most subsequent others appear to draw their information, uses arbitrary pitch designations for illustrative purposes. Jones also states that the tuning procedure began by tightening the highest string as much as possible without breaking it, subsequently tuning the others to it intervallically. Such was not an uncommon practice in the days before standardized pitch and was, in fact, mentioned in other manuals on string instrument playing. While Jones's report was widely read