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Traditional Musical Instruments

Until the middle of the 19th century, the flute and the bag pipe were still in the most of the Romanian Transylvanian villages common instruments for playing dance music. The instruments with strings (the lute and the zither) have a significant oldness in the rural Hungarian and Saxon society, and the violin and the double bass appeared in the Transylvanian villages at the end of the 18th century. The signal instruments (the alpenhorn) had an old tradition in most of the Transylvanian regions.

The exhibition unit I contains flutes and long pipes from different areas of Transylvania, the oldest ones (1) dating from the beginning of the 20th century, two of them being new, unused, executed in the Romanian village Hodac, specialised in this field (2).

The exhibition unit II contains signal instruments of big sizes named depending on the area, alpenhorns or clarions. Made of two wooden elements, opened, hollowed and then glued, straight or curved, these objects were used by peasants into a pastoral context for communication at distance and for moving off the prey animals. There are exhibited two main forms of the instruments: the straight truncated-cone shape jointed with twig rings, general in Apuseni Mountains and around (3) and the curved type, wrapped up in bark, presented in the Eastern Carpathians (4).

The exhibition unit IIII presents a bag piper from Padureni (5), area situated in the south-western of Transylvania where this instrument was used even from the beginning of the 20th century. The costume dates from the same time, being similar with the ones from the background photo.

The exhibition unit IV illustrates musical string instruments dated in the second half of the 19th century. There is exhibited a zither (6), a lute (7), an archaic double bass, used by hitting the strings (8), two violins (9) and elements of violin during its working (10).

The exhibition unit V contains a special board (toaca) (11) used in the traditional village only in a sacred context. It was made of sycamore maple wood and kept at the church where it marked at Romanians certain moments of the religious service. Between the Holy Thursday and the night of Resurrection, the sound of the bells was completely replaced to the sound of the board.