So yesterday, I went to the Kutztown Folk Festival in Kutztown, PA. It’s a festival that celebrates the Pennsylvania-Dutch traditions of the area and includes a lot of folk art from people in the area and also some from the Appalachian states. 

I was looking for something steampunk-ish when I happened across this instrument at one of the booths. It’s called a bowed psaltery, and it’s kind of like a cross between a piano and a violin. 

There are 24 strings, and it’s range is from G2 to G4. It’s like a piano by the way the strings are arranged, except it’s more like if you took the reflection of piano keys and put it on there. So, it’s backwards. You can see the violin aspect. It’s a fixed pitched instrument, unlike the violin, which can play many pitches that aren’t necessarily notes in Western music. 

It’s made of walnut with a mahogany soundboard. The bow hair is synthetic. If any of my SPG followers are reading this, guess why I chose that design. :3

The cool thing about it (from a music theorist’s point of view) is that (looking at the first picture) on the left side is a pentatonic scale and on the right side is a mixolydian scale.