Visit any local farmers market, summer festival or coffee-house jam session, and you’ll likely see adults making music with fiddles, banjos and mandolins. It’s no surprise, then, that Vermont kids ...

The sounds of a harp-like instrument called the yazh, named for the mythological animal Yali whose image was carved into its stem, once filled the halls of temples and royal courts in southern India.

At the heart of many of the world’s musical instruments is the same, simple component—a string stretched tight between two points. Plucked, bowed, or struck, each of an instrument’s strings creates ...