If you attend a classical music concert performed on “period instruments,” which are the types that were in use when the music was composed, you might see and hear a “clavichord.” It resembles a piano, which is a more recent version of the same thing; an instrument in which strings are played via keys. The name “clavichord” simply means “keys and strings.” “Clavi” comes from “clavis” (key), and “chord” originally meant “string.” “Chord” in the sense of string is still in use today; it’s just spelled without the “h.”
There are other types of instruments with keys, too. Much rarer than a clavichord is a “clavicylinder,” on which you pressed keys that produced tones via a glass cylinder. It was invented by Ernst Chladni in 1799, and supposedly was inspired by the “glasspiel,” which was nothing but a row of beer glasses filled with different amounts of water and tapped with a mallet to produce notes. Benjamin Franklin also invented an instrument based on the glasspiel (or “verrillon”); he called it a “glass armonica”. Both of these gadgets are the direct predecessors to the “Cristal Baschet,” a similar sort of thing invented in 1952. The Cristal Baschet doesn’t have keys, though; it has metal rods connected to glass rods, and you rub the glass rod to produce sound. You have to dip your fingers in water to make it work, which seems slightly inconvenient, but then so is carrying a clavichord around.
Another option, though, is a clavicymbal. It’s not, as you might think, an instrument that plays cymbals by pressing keys; a “clavicymbal” is just an old (as in late 1400s) name for a harpsichord. That instrument, of course, could also have been called a clavichord, because it contains strings that you play via keys. The word “harpsichord” was formed out of “harp” and “strings” which doesn’t really make sense, since it leaves out the keys, and since a harp already has strings the “chord” is kind of redundant. Yet another version of the harpsichord was called the “lyrichord.” Although the instrument is almost entirely forgotten, the word “Lyrichord” was used as a record label starting in 1950.
There is even a “claviola.”This one is particularly odd; it has keys, of course (given the “clavi”), but it has nothing to do with a viola. Nope, this one was invented in the 1960s by someone from the Hohner harmonica company. You blow into it and use the keys to play. Ernst Zacharais, the inventor, also designed the “clavinet.” Yet another instrument with keys, but unrelated to the clarinet. The Clavinet was an early (1964) electronic keyboard.
Any number of other musical instruments have been named by combining two words, from the “jazzophone” (a kind of kazoo, of all things) to the “keybugle” (a trumpet with keys — could have been called a “clavibugle”) to the classic “lagerphone.” That last one is pretty interesting, it’s a percussion instrument and the “lager” actually refers to beer — more precisely, caps from beer bottles, which are nailed loosely to a piece of wood you shake to make noise.
There are several instrument names including “harmoni-“, from “harmonica” to “harmonium” to “harmoniphone” and the even better “panharmoniphone.” The “harmoni-“ prefix comes from “harmony”, which is originally Greek. And “phone” means simply “sound,” so a “harmoniphone” generates harmonious sounds, and “panharmoniphone” (more commonly called a “panharmonicon, is a huge mechanical device invented in 1805 that supposedly was capable of reproducing the sounds of an entire orchestra, plus the sounds of cannons. It was invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who was a friend of Beethoven. The panharmonicon was copied a few years later by Friedrich Kaufmann, who called his version an “Orchestrion.” By 1817 there was another version called an “Apollonicon”, and in 1821 the “Componium” appeared, which did everything the earlier machines did as well as being able to automatically play variations on a musical theme.
None of this is to omit the bagpipe, another musical instrument with a compound name. Although the bagpipe is famously Scottish and Irish, there are also version from the Slavic area of Europe (the “zurla”), Turkey (“zurna”), Italy (“zampogna”), and Spain (“gaita”). In fact most obscure musical instruments tend to hail from specific regions, and they don’t really vary all that much. The trumpet has been reinvented many times, from West Africa, where it’s the “kakaki,” to Scandinavia (the “lur”) to Jamaica (the “abeng”) to Europe, where it’s been called, amazingly enough, the “trumpet” since sometime in the 1300s.
