Het Vlier, En Hommel Op Aarde

What you are listening to is the sound of a forgotten instrument. It has existed since the middle ages, but the earliest example still intact is from 1608. Once a staple in most households in the low countries, it is a true folk instrument, of the people, mainly played in the past by women who used their kitchen tables as a resonating surfaces to amplify & accompany traditional religious & secular tunes. Nowadays it seen rarely outside of museums in Brussels & other places you most likely have never heard of. It is not spectacular, its simplest version is just a long thin box with strings on top. Some of the strings are melody strings, which have frets placed underneath them, some are drone strings that have no frets. Traditionally it was strummed with a goose feather & notes were made by sliding a hard stick with a handle, from fret to fret on the melody strings leaving the drone strings ringing openly. The constant hum of the drones is where the name of the instrument comes from: bumblebee, which in Flemish, is a hommel.