page_title: Cythara
section_title: Winternitz's theory, a continuous chain
hierarchical_section_title: Cythara / Dr. Emanuel Winternitz / Winternitz's theory, a continuous chain
caption_attribution_description: Woman with a Cittern
context_page_description: The cythara is a wide group of stringed instruments of medieval and Renaissance Europe, including not only the lyre and harp but also necked, string instruments. In fact, unless a medieval document gives an indication that it meant a necked instrument, then it likely was referring to a lyre. It was also spelled cithara or kithara and was Latin for the Greek lyre. However, lacking names for some stringed instruments from the medieval period, these have been referred to as fiddles and citharas/cytharas, both by medieval people and by modern researchers. The instruments are important as being ancestors to or influential in the development of a wide variety of European instruments, including fiddles, vielles, violas, citoles and guitars. Although not proven to be completely separate from the line of lute-family instruments that dominated Europe, arguments have been made that they represent a European-based tradition of instrument building, which was for a time separate from the lute-family instruments.
  In the 9th century, one of the instruments that cythara was actively used to name was a large plucked or strummed instrument; pictures show it being played with a plectrum.
context_section_description: Dr. Emanuel Winternitz talked about musical instruments evolving over time. From this perspective musical instruments change as luthiers build new instruments; the instruments retain features of older instruments out of concern for customer preferences. Winternitz saw a pattern in which the ancient cithara was given a fingerboard and developed into necked instruments. He interpreted the illustrations in the Charles the Bald Bible, the Utrecht Psalter and the Stuttgart Psalter as illustrating this transformation, and gave many more examples in books and papers that he wrote. Part of his idea was that civilizations are constantly undergoing renaissances in which they rediscover and recreate the past. He pointed to the Carolingian Renaissance as one of these renaissances, that recreated old instruments anew. He also believed that since classical times there was an unbroken "stream of tradition".
  To Winternitz, in the Stuttgart Psalter old features were visible in its 9th-century illustrations of the cythara. The instrument had a "superstructure" that reminded him of the "yoke" on the cithara lyre and "enormous ornamental wings" that were remains from the cithara lyre's arms.
  Under the theory, a neck was constructed between the two arms of the lyre, and then the arms of the lyre became vestigial, as "wings" (on the cittern "buckles"). Pictures from the 9th century books, the Charles the Bald Bible and the Utrecht Psalter, illustrate this theory. The development continued from the early cithara lyre, through the forms of instruments (called generically cithara), through the citole, and becoming the cittern. Winternitz credited a Professor Westwood for making the Utrecht Psalter discoveries, quoting Westwood's 1859 paper, Archæological Notes of a Tour in Denmark, Prussia, and Holland: "...frequently shows the ancient kithara side by side with an instrument that has the body of a kithara but a neck in place of the yoke, in other words, a cittern, that is if we want to project this term as far back as the 9th century. The frets are usually carefully indicated on the neck, the graceful curvature of the wings corresponds precisely to that of the arms of the kitharas nearby."
caption: Netherlands. Cittern, showing the buckles, knobs where the neck meets the instrument's body, remnants of the citole's shoulder projections.
exif: {}