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, ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The hurdy-gurdy is the duck-billed platypus of instruments. It has strings but you don’t pick or strum them. It ...

Ever heard of a hurdy-gurdy? You may know it by many other names – vielle a roue, zanfona, or organistrum – as there is a version of this medieval instrument in ...

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 ...

A mechanical string instrument from the Middle Ages that can still evoke chills today... With a few turns on a hurdy-gurdy’s hand crank, a rosined wheel sweeps against the instrument’s three main ...

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 ...

LEEDS, Alabama – It was Saturday night at the Leeds Theatre and Arts Center and a performance by one of Alabama's most noted storytellers, Dolores Hydock, was about to take place. As Hydock got ready ...

Would you love to launch your own Middle Ages band but can’t find a lutist let alone a good hurdy gurdy player? First off, congratulations on knowing what a hurdy gurdy is (man). But second and more ...

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 ...

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 – ...