century a fairly standard dance ensemble was made up of two or three shawms with a
slide trumpet (the slide trumpet was replaced by a trombone at the end of the century).
Of the soft instruments, the vielle, or fiddle, is most often mentioned in the
performance of many kinds of music. The medieval fiddle was a bowed instrument with
four or five strings and is found in the iconography in sizes from soprano to bass. Many
of the paintings and sculptures show that it had a flat bridge, suggesting that it could only
sound several strings together, but there are also representations of a rounded bridge,
which means that some fiddles could have performed single-line melodic passages. The
fiddle and another bowed instrument, the smaller three-string rebec, or rubelle, were
adopted from the East sometime in the late 11th century. Prior to that in Europe, all string
instruments were plucked, and of these there was a great variety of sizes, shapes, and
numbers of strings.
Principal among the plucked strings were the harp, gittern (or guiterne), and lute (leü).
The harp could have from ten to twenty-five strings; the gittern could have from three to
five, either in pairs or single strings; and the lute usually had five pairs. The cytolle, a
small instrument resembling the gittern, had strings of metal, whereas the lute, the gittern,
and usually the harp were strung with gut, which produces a softer sound. Gittern, cytolle,
and lute were plucked with a plectrum, as was harp on occasion. Another member of this
group was the psaltery (psalterion), having from ten to twenty metal strings stretched
across a wooden sound box. The psaltery came in a number of shapes, it was either
plucked with a plectrum or hammered. All of these instruments were seen to be the
proper media of the jongleurs and were associated with accompaniment of song and
dance.
Less frequently mentioned, but also among the bas group associated with the minstrels
is the hurdy-gurdy, a string instrument sounded by a turning wheel. A two-player version
of this instrument, the organistrum, is often depicted in the hands of church elders on
Gothic cathedral tympana, but it is not clear what function it played, if any, in church
music. The organ was also a member of the soft group. This term referred not only to the
larger church instrument but also to the small portable organ held in the lap, which served
as a melody instrument for minstrels.
The soft winds included flutes, flageolets, recorders, and the buzzy reed instruments
cromorne and douceinne. The bagpipe was also sometimes included in the list of bas
instruments, indicating that one variety of that instrument was suitably modulated in
volume to play along with the other members of the soft group. It is probably this type of
bagpipe referred to by the 12th-century troubadour Peire d’Alvernhe: “This verse was
made to the bagpipe at Puivert with everyone playing and laughing.”
Not only were the haut and bas instruments kept apart for performance purposes, but
by and large they were assigned to different classes of performers. Players of trumpets,
drums, and shawms were a special group of servant musicians who specialized in those
instruments and played only in those groups. They were usually employed by the civic
government and assigned specific tasks.
The soft instruments, however, were played by nobles and peasants, masters and
servants. Though it is difficult to ascertain if certain instruments were favored by certain
social classes, iconographic and literary evidence indicates that until the end of the 14th
century most of the soft instruments were played by all classes. It is entirely possible that
the music played on them was somewhat different, but we have no information about the
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