Musical instrument the violin, viola, baryton, and various lutes dominated popular music. Beginning in around 1750, however, the lute disappeared from musical compositions in favor of the rising popularity of the guitar. As the prevalence of string orchestras rose, wind instruments such as the flute, oboe, and bassoon were readmitted to counteract the monotony of hearing only strings. In the mid-seventeenth century, what was known as a hunter's horn underwent transformation into an "art instrument" consisting of a lengthened tube, a narrower bore, a wider bell, and much wider range. The details of this transformation are unclear, but the modern horn or,
Recorder (musical instrument) "silently practicing a tune" or "sing or render in song" (both almost exclusively referring to songbirds), long after the recorder had been named. Thus, the recorder cannot have been named after the sound of birds. The name of the instrument is also uniquely English: in Middle French there is no equivalent noun sense of "recorder" referring to a musical instrument. Partridge indicates that the use of the instrument by "jongleurs" led to its association with the verb: "recorder" the minstrel's action, a "recorder" the minstrel's tool. The reason we know this instrument as the recorder and not one of the