Barbat (musical instrument)

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Possible forerunner of the Sassanid short-necked lute barbaṭ and the Chinese pipa . Drawing after a terracotta figure excavated in Khotan , Central Asia

The barbat ( DMG barbaṭ, Pl . Barabīṭ ) is a historical plucked lute instrument that has been documented in the area of ​​today's Iran since the Sassanid period at the latest . It belongs to a group of short-necked lutes with a pear-shaped body , which became tangible around the turn of the ages in Central Asia and North India and which spread under various names to southern Arabia and Southeast Asia . The best-known descendant of the barbaṭ is the Arabic lute ʿūd , whose rounded shape is derived from a lute type newly developed in the 8th century. This larger instrument was no longer carved out of one piece of wood, but put together from several wood chips and a separate neck. It served as a model for the medieval European lute . Until the Persian name barbaṭ for the various sounds disappeared around the 11th century , it was often used synonymously with the Arabic term ʿūd . In today's Iranian music, barbaṭ means the Arabic lute in Persian playing tradition.

etymology

The etymology is uncertain. The derivation from Persian bar ("breast") and baṭ ("duck"), expressed by al-Khwarizmi (around 780 - around 850), after the curvature of the body and neck associated with a duck breast , is often repeated . Another derivation leads back barbaṭ via the Middle Persian barbut or barbud to the ancient Greek lyre barbitos (barbiton) , whose design has little in common with the barbaṭ , except that it is a stringed instrument. In the European 17th century, the bass theorbo was sometimes called "barbiton".

Some music scholars have also suspected that the name could refer to the court musician Bārbad at the time of the Sassanid great king Chosrau II at the beginning of the 7th century AD. But the completely different spelling stands in the way of this. Curt Sachs did not consider the origin of barbitos to be certain and instead suggested a connection to Sanskrit bharbhi , " pulling hard with your finger (the strings)".

origin

Gambus melayu with skin cover, before 1936. Presumably resembles the original form of the barbaṭ. Like the related hasapi, the body is carved out of a block of wood. C-shaped pegbox. Photo from the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam

The earliest images of sounds date back to the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. And come from an area from northern Syria to Mesopotamia . The widely scattered sites suggest that the lute instruments were developed earlier by mountain peoples in the Caucasus and that they migrated to the Near East. Simultaneously with the probably related Hyksos immigration in ancient Egypt around 1700 BC. The first sounds can be found there. The illustrations show instruments with a long neck and a small, bowl-shaped body. Some had frets , but there were no pegs to stretch the two or three strings. Instead, these were tied to the end of the neck with fabric or bast knots.

The oldest long-necked lute consisted of two parts: a long, thin neck, which is pushed through a body, which led to the name "spit lute". According to Curt Sachs , the body of the oldest lute instruments consisted of a natural material such as coconut shell, calabash or a turtle shell. By exporting to areas where such finished natural forms were not available, there would have been a need to make the body out of wood.

For the first time in the 8th century BC A new type of lute without a separate neck can be seen in outline on Elamite clay figures in Iran . It was probably carved out of a piece of wood and formed the original form for the barbaṭ and the large group of sounds derived from it. An ancient Egyptian short-necked lute is possibly even older, but difficult to recognize. The representation on a clay figure comes from the 19th – 20th centuries. Dynasty (13th to 12th centuries BC). On one of the realistic reliefs on the stupa of Bharhut (in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh ) from the 2nd century BC. BC, which is now in the Indian Museum of Calcutta , clearly depicts a short-necked lute. A bas-relief of Chalchayan in ancient Bactria and today's south of Uzbekistan , dated according to different views to the 1st century before or after Christ, shows a similar lute, as does a sculpture from Gandhara in northern Pakistan from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD . A lute with a round body and a slightly longer neck, the so-called "guitar vina ", was depicted on the stupas of Amaravati (2nd century BC) and Nagarjunakonda (3rd century AD). Its name in contemporary sources, kacchapi (from Sanskrit kacchapa , "turtle", cf. kacapi ), is derived from the shape of the body, not from its material. Judging by the location of the sites, the short-necked lute may have been developed in the area from the Iranian highlands to northern India and spread there during the period mentioned.

According to the Arab philosopher al-Masʿūdī (around 895–957), the barbaṭ goes back to the person Lamech mentioned in Genesis . According to the story, Lamech's son Jubal invented the lyre kinnor and is considered the forefather of all musicians. Elsewhere, al-Masʿūdī sees the origin of the sounds among the ancient Greeks. In fact, string instruments with fingerboards do not seem to have been known to the Greeks, only a few terracotta figures from the Hellenistic period in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. Chr. Represent lute players.

Sassanid silver plate with several musicians from the 7th century. On the right edge an early form of the barbaṭ

Little is known about the design of the barbaṭ until the Sassanid period (4th to 7th centuries). It is possible that the instrument received a slightly different, improved form during the reign of Shapur I (241-272). It is unclear whether the ceiling was made of animal skin or a thin wooden board. In Sassanid images showing musicians, the motif of a dancer within a musical group comes to the fore. A silver plate in the British Museum shows a frontal view of a standing lute player on the edge of a banquet scene. He is holding a pear-shaped instrument with probably three strings at an angle in front of his chest. On another silver plate, in an unusual depiction, sits a woman figure with a lute in the center, without the usual dancer or banquet motif. Her head is surrounded by a nimbus , which is usually a symbol of divinity and immortality.

The Sassanid ruler Bahram V (r. 420-438), famous for his musicality, helped the musicians to a higher reputation and encouraged the immigration of thousands of singers and dancers from northern India. Those who came into the country via Balochistan were called ẓuttī . Chosrau I (r. 531-579) lowered the status of musicians back to the previous low level. The most important was the court musician below . Chosrau II (reg. 590-628) acting Barbad . He was considered a virtuoso barbaṭ player and had a decisive influence on the Persian music of the time through his compositions and music theories . On rock paintings, ceramics and metal dishes of the Sassanian period are beside the Barbat the two angular harps van (played lying) and Cang (standing), the long-necked lute Rabab , the fork pool Cagan and a mouth organ to be seen.

The Sassanid barbaṭ usually had four strings, in contrast to the two-stringed long-necked lute ṭunbūr . In addition, there must have been a two-string short-necked lute in Iraq at the end of the 7th century. A barbaṭ with two strings remained from the 8th / 9th centuries. Century preserved. The four strings were partly attached twice, tuned in fourths and were plucked with a plectrum . The barbaṭ was the most popular musical instrument for the Arab tribal association of the Ghassanids in pre-Islamic times in Syria and under the early Islamic Umayyad dynasty . From the 5th century he accompanied the singing of the Persian and Byzantine singing girls. Ten or more singing girls performed with barabīṭ at the Ghassanid court in the 7th century . Via the culturally important Lachmid capital al-Hira on the lower reaches of the Euphrates , where around the year 600 Arabs took over the lute, it reached Mecca and Medina in the course of the 7th century , possibly in the luggage of Persian slaves who went to work in the Cities of the Arabian Peninsula were spent.

The legal scholar and founder of the Hanbalite law school Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) forbade all un-Islamic music making, so that practically only religious poetry was left. In addition to singing, he banned instruments played by professional musicians, which included the barbaṭ, the ʿūd, the bamboo flute nay , the harp ṣanj, and the bowed lute rabāb . On the other hand, the drum ṭabl , the frame drum daff and the beat-stick qaḍīb were allowed.

In addition to the name barbaṭ , there were also the Arabic names mizhar and kirān for sounds in pre-Islamic times . If the barbaṭ had a solid wooden ceiling, the last two instruments mentioned, otherwise identical in construction, could have been covered with a cover made of animal skin. Mizhar was also simply identified with the ʿūd in contemporary sources and also translated as tympanum ( frame drum ) in the Latin-Arabic dictionary of the 10th century . String instruments and drums were often referred to by the same Arabic word. Muwattar , which simply means “stringed instrument”, was also identified by the early historians as a lute whose strings were obviously plucked with the thumb.

Regardless of the naming, a completely new form of a short-necked lute developed in the 7th or 8th century. Its body was no longer narrow and made from one piece of wood, but had a deep, bulbous shape made of wood chips (planks) glued together and a separate fingerboard with a pegbox bent downwards. The Arab philosopher and musician al-Kindī (around 800–873) mentions that the lute body should be as thin and even as possible, although it is not clear whether he meant wood chips in this context. The author of a collection of Arabic writings on science and philosophy from the 10th century entitled Ikhwān al-Ṣafaʾ clearly calls for the planks ( alwāḥ ) to be thin and made of light wood. The musician Ziryab , who refused to play on the lute of his teacher Isḥāq al-Mauṣilī at his first performance before Hārūn ar-Raschīd (r. 786-809), because it was “by another Structure “and preferred to use his own, much lighter instrument.

The technique of bending wooden panels by soaking in water or with steam is much older and was already known in Greek antiquity ; wood bent by the Romans has been preserved from the 1st century AD. Ancient Egyptian chariots owned in Thebes around 1500 BC. Chr. Curved wooden wheels. Nevertheless, the production of suitable thin planks for making instruments was time-consuming and complicated, which could be a reason for the relatively late introduction. The Arabs are considered to be the inventors of the lute with a plank body.

With the new lute, the number of strings increased from four to five double strings, which ran over a fingerboard with seven frets . Other lute forms existed in parallel. Around this time and in the 11th century, the terms barbaṭ and ʿūd were still used synonymously. Until the 10th century the barbaṭ appeared in its older form in Persian illustrations, later the name and instrument disappeared from the region of origin and the name ʿūd began to establish itself for the new design.

distribution

Persian lute from 1910. Corresponds to the barbaṭ developed in the 8th century and today's ʿūd. The body consists of strips of wood glued along the length. Peg box bent backwards

During the Umayyad period there were several different types of lute: 1) The "Persian lute", al-dieūd al-fārisī, was known until the Abbasid period of the 9th century . It should have meant the old slim form of the barbaṭ . 2) The new lute form, the model for today's ʿūd, is attributed to the music theorist and famous court musician of Baghdad Manṣūr ibn-Caʾfar Ḍārib Zalzal († 791), called ʿūd aš-šabbūṭ, after the name of a round-bellied fish. There was a new fret on his instrument that could be grasped with the middle finger and provided a " neutral " third. The scholar al-Farabi (around 870–950) later introduced this tone into Arabic music theory. 3) In Iraq in the 10th century the long-necked ṭunbūr temporarily pushed the ʿūd into the background. 4) At the end of the 7th century there was a two-string short lute. 5) The ṭunbūr al-mīzānī (also ṭunbūr al-Baġdādi ) described by al-Farabi in his "Great Book of Music" ( Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr ) in the 10th century had frets that made the game of quarter tones made possible. After the 10th century, a variant of the old barbaṭ with four double strings under the new name ʿūd e-qadīm ("classical" lute) may have continued to exist and differed from the slightly larger five-string lute ʿūd-e kāmel ("perfect" lute).

The older pear-shaped type of lute made from a block of wood has practically disappeared in its region of origin, but began to spread in Asia, Africa and Europe around the same time as the round-bellied shape. From the two- or three-stringed lute Central Asian kopuz headed Curt Sachs from a number of covered with animal skin short-necked lutes whose names begin with the Arabic term al-qanbūs are related. The Yemeni lute qanbus , also known as gabus and gabbus on the Arabian Peninsula, played a central role . Gabbusi is the name of the corresponding instrument in the Comoros .

By the 15th century at the latest, Arab traders from the southeast Yemeni region of Hadramaut brought names and types of instruments to the Malay Peninsula , Sumatra and later on to other Indonesian islands. The short-necked lute could have been brought to some Malay coastal settlements by Sufi missionaries from Persia as early as the 9th century, long before the establishment of the Arab trading posts. All sounds that originate from Arab countries and are widespread in the Malay islands are called gambus and are only played in various musical styles associated with Islam. The early pear-shaped form, which is derived from the Yemeni qanbus , is called gambus melayu .

Illustration from the manuscript Cantigas de Santa Maria, 13th century

Since larger numbers of other hadramaut dealers came to Southeast Asia with the ʿūd in their luggage in the 19th century , the bulbous lute, named after its region of origin, gambus hadramaut , has pushed the older gambus melayu into the background. In Yemen, too, around the middle of the 20th century the ʿūd largely took over the place of the last lute derived from the old barbaṭ in the Arab world . The qanbus is rarely heard in medieval Yemeni folk music.

Another pear-shaped short-necked lute of the barbaṭ type is the Chinese pipa , which is said to have been known since the Han period (206 BC – 220 AD). In the 13th century it came to Baghdad in the course of the Mongol conquests, where it was called miʿzaf and compared to a ṭunbūr . The Japanese lute biwa is related to it .

The form in which the lute came to Europe via Andalusian music can be seen on an illustration of the Cantigas de Santa Maria song collection from the 13th century. A fat-bellied kink-neck lute with nine lateral vertebrae is shown. In addition to the sounds mizhar and barbaṭ , the other musical instruments brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Abbasids included the Arabic lyres qītāra and kinnāra .

literature

  • Henry George Farmer , Jean-Claude Chabrier: “ʿŪd”. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition , Vol. 10, Brill, Leiden 2000, pp. 768-773
  • Henry George Farmer: “ʿŪd”. In: M.Th. Houtsma (Ed.): The First Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. 8, EJ Brill, Leiden 1927, pp. 985-988
  • Henry George Farmer: A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century. Luzac & Co., London 1929 ( Online at Archive.org )
  • Hans Hickmann: The music of the Arabic-Islamic area. In: Bertold Spuler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1. Dept. The Near and Middle East. Supplementary Volume IV. Oriental Music. EJ Brill, Leiden / Cologne 1970, pp. 1-134
  • Nasser Kanani: Traditional Persian art music: history, musical instruments, structure, execution, characteristics. 2nd revised and expanded edition, Gardoon Verlag, Berlin 2012, pp. 156–158.
  • Jean During, Zia Mirabdolbaghi, Dariush Safvat: The Art of Persian Music . Mage Publishers, Washington DC 1991, ISBN 0-934211-22-1 , pp. 106-109 ( The Lutes: Barbat and 'Ud ).
  • Jean During: Barbaṭ. In: Encyclopædia Iranica , December 15, 1988

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Persian باربد, DMG Bārbad or Bārbud (name of the court musician), in contrast to Persian بربط, DMG Barbaṭ (lute)
  2. ↑ Curt Sachs : Real Lexicon of Musical Instruments at the same time a polyglossary for the entire field of instruments. Julius Bard, Berlin 1913, p. 30 f.
  3. ^ Wilhelm Stauder: The music of the Sumer, Babylonier and Assyrer. In: Bertold Spuler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1. Dept. The Near and Middle East. Supplementary Volume IV. Oriental Music. EJ Brill, Leiden / Cologne 1970, 195–197
  4. ^ Curt Sachs: Real-Lexikon, 1913, keyword Tunbûr. P. 375.
  5. ^ Curt Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments. WW Norton, New York 1940, pp. 251 f.
  6. ^ Hickmann: Ancient Egyptian Music. In: Handbuch der Orientalistik, p. 160
  7. ↑ a b c Jean During, 1988
  8. ↑ Emmie te Nijenhuis: Dattilam. A Compendium of Ancient Indian Music. K. Sambasiva Sastri (Ed.), Trivandrum Sanskrit Series no. 102. Trivandrum 1970, pp. 83f
  9. ^ Helmut Brand: Ancient Greek musical instruments. A brief overview.
  10. ↑ Larry Francis Hilarian: The Transmission and Impact of the Hadhrami and Persian Lute-type instrument on the Malay World. P. 5.
  11. ↑ Mirjam Gelfer-Jorgensen: Medieval Islamic Symbolism and the Paintings in the Cefaly Cathedral. Brill, Leiden 1997, p. 104 f, ISBN 978-90-04-07927-4 .
  12. ^ Henry George Farmer: Persian Music . In: Friedrich Blume (Ed.): The music in history and present , 1st edition, Bärenreiter, Kassel 1962, vol. 10, col. 1094
  13. ↑ Farmer 1929, p. 12
  14. ↑ Farmer 1929, p. 29 f.
  15. ↑ Larry Francis Hilarian: The migration of lute-type instruments to the Malay Muslim world. (PDF; 739 kB) Conference on Music in the world of Islam. Assilah, August 8-13 August 2007, p. 3: Sketch of the different body shapes using the example of the two types of the Malay gambus .
  16. ↑ Harvey Turnbull: The genesis of carvel-built lutes. In: Laurence Picken (Ed.): Musica Asiatica 1. Oxford University Press, London 1977, p. 79; quotes Henry George Farmer: The Structure of the Arabian and Persian Lute in the Middle Ages. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1939, p. 45 and ders .: A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century , 1929, p. 219.
  17. ↑ Turnbull, pp. 75-83.
  18. ^ Hickmann, The Music of the Arab-Islamic Area, 1970, pp. 67f. Hickmann writes of six types, although it is unclear what the difference between the (1) "Persian lute" and (6) the barbaṭ should have been.
  19. ↑ Larry Francis Hilarian: The gambus (lutes) of the Malay world: its origins and significance in zapin Music. Paper presented at the UNESCO Regional Expert Symposium on Arts Education in Asia, Hong Kong 2004, p. 4
  20. ↑ Farmer 1929, p. 209.