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Yatga player Altantsetseg Badgar
Word of the week: Related to the Chinese guzheng, this beautiful and delicate sounding instrument is a traditional fingernail-plucked Mongolian zither, the other hand applying pressure to strings to change the notes
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Typical wooden zurna
Word of the week: You will know it as soon as heard. With it distinctively high, reedy, resonant and evocative sound, this short folk, conical-shaped oboe of Arab origins can be heard from Turkey across south-east Europe and parts of Asia made of wood with a double reed
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Alphorn ensemble
Word of the week: Traditionally a herdsman’s mountain call instrument, but also surprisingly beautiful and with full range, this distinctive long wooden, often curved trumpet is most common in Switzerland, across the European Alps, Scandinavia, Russia, Hungary and Romania
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The contrabass balalaika
Word of the week: A distinctive long-necked three-stringed lute used in traditional Russian folk and dance music with a triangular body, this instrument has short sustain with a small sound hole, so requires rapid strumming or plucking, and comes a range of sizes and tunings
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Crwth player Cass Meurig
Word of the week: Intriguingly vowel-less, this is a bowed medieval Welsh lyre with a flat bridge ideal for playing chords and melodies, with a design dating back to Roman times and reached peaked popularity in the Middle Ages
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Vintage damascene violin with interwoven silver and gold
Word of the Week: Craft, art, flower, a city and people, it’s a word used in different parts of speech, meanings and associations, it has a certain musical beauty to its sound but is surprisingly rare in song lyrics
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One of many visual impressions of the great early Renaissance satirist François Rabelais
Word of the Week: It’s a bewildering world, and this wonderful sounding evocative verb, attributed originally to translated François Rabelais from 1469, indeed means to confuse, and its four syllables trundle musically with a form of crash-bang rhythm
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William Shenstone: poet, pioneer landscape gardener and an early user of this flowery word
Word of the week: One of the longest in English, it’s the action or habit of estimating something as worthless or unimportant, but is it worth exploring this through the prism of song lyrics? Perhaps …
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That certain smile: Alan Rickman as Obadiah Slope, the calculating curate in BBC’s The Barchester Chronicies
Word of the week: It’s an adjective to describe the act of flattery, often false and deceitful, toadying, fawning and that done by a sycophant, but where does it come from and how might it show up in song?
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Three recent books that are more than relevant to the current word
Word of the week: About whom could this apply right now? It's a word for extreme, foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with arrogance that tends to lead to a fall, and a dangerous thing in the head of someone with power who refuses to acknowledge it.
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The ibex will clamber almost vertical walls …
Word of the week: From the genus Capra, or mountain goat, a species that survived the ice age, these specialist climbers have huge horns and spreading feet for death defying climbs and ascents, but how might they have inspired songwriters?
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Lou Reed
Word of the week: A rare and archaic word from the late 17th century, and an alternative adjective to hepatic, from the French jécoraire and Latin jecur, it means relating to the liver, but not necessarily organ songs
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Autumn is a kexy time of year …
What old meanings are we cranking out this week?
Word of the Week: They’re going fast! This archaic adjective in use from the mid-17th to mid-19th century describes something in great demand and ready for a quick sale, from the Middle and Old English lieftell, meaning agreeable and countable
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A small part of a myriander …
Word of the week: It sounds like an exotic name, a form of wandering, or a term for many items, but this beautiful late 17th-century word pertains to an army of 10,000 men, a phrase spanning history and personal metaphor
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The figure portrayed on this famous record cover could be described as a practitioner of nosism
Word of the Week: It sounds like a strange religion or nasal habit, but from Latin ‘nos’, this is the practice of using the ‘we’ pronoun when really only referring oneself in action or opinion - it’s more common in song than ‘we’ might imagine
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The Ariston Organette
Word of the Week: It’s a mechanical, hand-operated organ instrument first manufactured in the late 1870s playing music from perforated paper, cardboard, or metal disks on wooden rolls or “cobs” that clunkily and rather beautifully captures another era
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The phorminx (centre) alongside the harp and lyre.
Word of the week: Taking us back to some of the earliest ever music, in ancient Greek φόρμιγξ, the phorminx, a developed form of lyre, is one of the oldest instruments and the a forerunner to the kithara
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From The Quincunx, the 1989 novel by Charles Palliser
Word of the week: This ancient symbolic word is not really one to sing, but points down many cultural roads through history, as well as unearthing a variety of lesser known music
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Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820
Word of the week: What comes around … this week's rather shapely word circles culture in many directions – from medieval French poetry to a 17th-century musical form all the way to modern slang on sport stars to derogatory cars
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