Lira (hurdy-gurdy)

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Kolisna lira in the National Historical Museum of Ukraine .

Lira , ( Ukrainian [колісна] ліра , Russian [колёсная] лира ), also lera, relya, rilya, rele , is a hurdy-gurdy with three or four strings and an often waisted or violin-like body, which is mainly found in the Ukraine and also in Belarus ( kalesnaja lera ) is played. In the Ukrainian folk song tradition, the lira is the accompanying instrument of the lirnyk, which has appeared since the 15th century and, like the kobsar with its kobsa lute , especially in the 18th and 19th centuries . Century was popular as a wandering blind singer. In Russia the hurdy-gurdy is known as koljosnaja lira , in Sweden it is called vevlira and in Denmark drejelira . The word lira for hurdy-gurdy was first handed down in Sebastian Virdung , Musica tutscht und pulled out (1511) and spread with this type of instrument in Northern and Eastern Europe in the 16th century.

Origin and Distribution

Organistrum . Detail from a full-page table with several string instruments in Martin Gerbert : De cantu et musica sacra, 1774.

The name organistrum, also rota organistrum, can be traced back to around 1100 for the first string instrument whose strings were struck with a wheel . The existence of the hurdy-gurdy in Europe (with the core countries France, Spain and Germany) is certainly proven by representations from the middle of the 12th century. In addition to the large hurdy-gurdy organistrum , which was operated by two musicians, there was a smaller symphonia for one player. Latin rota means "wheel". The etymology of organistrum is unclear, possibly the word is composed of organum instrumentum (“ organ instrument”) and goes back to the Greek organon : “tool”, in the Middle Ages generally “musical instrument”, in particular “organ”. Organum is also a generic term for the earliest form of European polyphony. The name of the instrument, which was introduced in ecclesiastical circles in Western Europe around this time, can also have been formed from the verb organizo and the suffix -strum .

One of the old Portuguese names for the hurdy-gurdy is lira de roda . Historical Italian names are lira tedesca ("German lyre"), lira rusticana ("peasant lyre") and lira mendicorum ("lyre the beggar"). Northern and Eastern European names of the hurdy-gurdy, which contain the word component lira , are in Polish lira korbowa , in Old Czech lyra (today kolovrátek and niněra in the Czech Republic ), in Romania lira, in Ukraine lira and relia , in Russia rilya, ryle and rele , in Sweden vevlira and in Denmark drejelira . Other Scandinavian names are bondelyre, bondlyror, vondlyra and vivlira. In the second half of the 18th century, a combination of hurdy-gurdy and portable organ called lira organizzata in Italian , vielle organisée in French and organ - organ in German was popular in France , in which the hand crank supplies the stroke wheel and bellows, the wooden pipes with air, to be served.

Lira goes back to ancient Greek λύρα , lyra , for a lyre , which via Latin lyra became Old High German lira and Middle High German lire and lyre . In ancient times, the lyra was always a plucked instrument. When the bow was introduced in Europe in the 10th century , lira could refer to plucked lyres and lute instruments as well as string instruments. A sheet in a codex from the 13th century of the monastery of St. Blasien , which has not survived and which has been passed on by Martin Gerbert's copy in De cantu et musica sacra from 1774, shows a three-stringed hurdy-gurdy (“Organistrum”) and a single-stringed pear-shaped stringed lute (“ Lyra ”), a lyre (“ Cythara teutonica ”) and an angle harp (“ Cythara anglica ”).

It was not until the end of the 15th century at least that the name lira (or lyra ) was only used in Italy for string instruments. In his De inventione et usu musice , written after 1480, the composer Johannes Tinctoris describes the lute as lyra , while Sebastian Virdung first called the hurdy-gurdy lyra in 1511 in Musica and pulled out . In the 16th and 17th centuries, the lira da braccio and the lira da gamba (also arce violyra, arciviolata lira, arce-viola telire, lirone, lira doppia or lira grande ) formed a group of string instruments mainly used for song accompaniment. In German, "lyre" has stood for the hurdy-gurdy since the 17th century.

While the hurdy-gurdy was initially an instrument of churches and monasteries, the portative , a small, "portable" organ (from Latin portare, "to carry") took over this function in the 14th century and the hurdy-gurdy became an accompanying instrument for blind musicians. The French theologian Jean Corbichon said in Le Propriétaire des choses in 1372 : “In French, an instrument is called a 'symphony' that is played by the blind while singing chanson de geste , and this instrument has a very sweet sound and is pleasant to hear. ”In the 15th century a smaller version of the hurdy-gurdy appeared, which the musician can conveniently hang on a ribbon around the neck and is still in use today.

Beggar with a Ukrainian lira around 1900 in Moscow.
Ukrainian bandura ensemble with a lira player that performed in Ochtyrka in 1911 .

In Western Europe, the hurdy-gurdy used by blind singers sank in the 16th century to the status of an instrument for blind beggars, which in France was renamed from symphonie to the everyday vièle à roue ("wheel fiddle") or derogatory to instrument de truand ("Beggar instrument"), according to Latin lyra mendicorum ("beggar lyre") shows. In Syntagma musicum (1615) Praetorius expresses his aversion to the “peasants and circulating women-leyers”. Later the hurdy-gurdy regained prestige in Western Europe, but reached the East as an instrument of folk music and the street singer, played in that capacity in Silesia until the mid-19th century and in the Alps until the end of the 19th century. To this day the hurdy-gurdy is still used in the folk music of Western Europe mainly in France (apart from efforts to introduce an idealized medieval music ).

The hurdy-gurdy was most widespread in the 16th century. In Denmark, 32 angels playing music can be seen on a mural in the Rynkeby Chapel in Rynkeby Sogn, built around 1560 . An angel plays a hurdy-gurdy, which, like the two fiddles shown, has two heart-shaped sound holes in the top of the body. The design refers to an influence from northern Germany. Further string instruments in the hands of angels are the nyckelharpa , which is derived from the hurdy-gurdy construction, and a fretboard zither of the Norwegian Langeleik type . The hurdy-gurdy reached as far as Iceland, which is passed down by the last Catholic bishop of Iceland, Jón Arason (1484–1550), who used the name fon (short for simfon , from Latin symphonia ). The later Protestant bishop Þórður Þorláksson (1637-1697) in Iceland was a good musician and played the hurdy-gurdy, harpsichord and shelf .

In Poland, the hurdy -gurdy known today as lira korbowa was simply known as lirę from the 16th to the 18th centuries . In Hungary the tekerőlant , which did not find its way into folk music until the end of the 18th century, only appeared sporadically in the first half of the 20th century, but today it enjoys a certain level of interest that has been awakened. In Ukraine, the lira spread during the 15th century.

The lira, first mentioned there in the 16th century, reached Russia via Poland, Ukraine and Belarus as an instrument of the traveling blind singers. A hurdy-gurdy was first described in more detail around 1605 in Moscow . Russian hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy seems to have been less widespread since there are no other written documents from the 17th century. According to sources, hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy music, which is believed to have been played by Ukrainian musicians, was involved in the coronation ceremony of Russian Empress Catherine II in 1762. There is no evidence of hurdy-gurdy in Russia for the 19th century. Hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy was never part of the bourgeois musical culture there, but was, apart from alleged exceptions, apparently exclusively in the hands of simple business people from Ukraine. In the 19th century in Belarus and Ukraine, the hurdy-gurdy was used only by blind and otherwise physically disabled beggars who roamed a limited area and performed at festivals and fairs. The hurdy-gurdy was seen in this environment at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the Ukraine, the hurdy-gurdy was still sporadically found in the 1970s among blind musicians who were out and about with their guide for the blind. The hurdy-gurdy is played to a small extent in the Ukraine, also in Belarus and in western Russia in a renewed folk music.

Design

Two Eastern European hurdy-gurdy

The Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian lira used in folk music is a hurdy-gurdy with the body of a box-neck lute, which is usually elongated and tapered at the middle of the sides. There are also oval shapes and long rectangular ones with rounded corners. Some Russian instruments have a flat violin body with corresponding f-sound holes. The lira has three or four strings, one or two melody strings and two or three drone strings . The two drone strings are tuned to a fifth apart. The melody strings are shortened with four to thirteen keys. In addition to the diatonic tuned hurdy-gurdy, an improved version with a chromatic tuning with a range of two octaves is used in the state folk music ensembles in Belarus .

In the Ukraine, several innovations were introduced to the lira from the 1920s . These include a hurdy-gurdy with nine strings, which are tuned in minor thirds and whose melody strings are shortened with a novel mechanism. Instead of the stringing wheel, the strings are coated with a circumferential plastic band whose pressure on the strings is variable.

Style of play and cultural significance

A Ukrainian Lirnyk. Wood engraving by the Polish graphic artist Jan Styfi after a work by the painter Michał Elwiro Andriolli , 1880.
Organ grinder and singer (Lirnyk). Painting by the Polish painter Hipolit Lipiński, 1876.

In Ukraine, the lira is associated with the tradition of the kobsari , who were mainly blind singers from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century and used Christian songs ( psalmy , singular psalma ) and epic songs ( dumky , singular dumka ) for alms ) lectured on the life of the Cossacks . A legendary Cossack named Wernyhora who is believed to have lived in the 18th century is sometimes depicted with a hurdy-gurdy.

Most of these professional singers accompanied each other on the plucked lute instrument kobsa or on a slightly larger bandura , while others, who were equally marginalized, played lira and were called Lirnyky. Lirnyky could perform Christian psalmy , historical dumky and satirical songs, or specialize in a genre. In rare cases, they also played to dance in the Polesia region . Kobsa and lira were usually only used as soloists to accompany vocals, not in ensembles. A Lirnyky usually began his performance with a prelude to the lira , then sang the first verse unaccompanied or only with a drone and continued this alternately, so that the hurdy-gurdy was never heard in a melodic play together with the vocal part.

Lira and kobsa are completely different musical instruments in terms of design, playing style, sound and their origin in the region, which is why they probably belonged to separate groups of musicians in the past. The polyphonic lira makes louder singing necessary, in which fine vocal nuances have to be dispensed with. According to the musicologist and composer Nikolai Iwanowitsch Privalow (1905), not only the Kobsari, but also a good number of the audience thought the hurdy-gurdy was a “screaming, clumsy instrument”. The Kobsari generally knew more about the epics than the Lirnyky. The epic stories were accompanied by the kobsa and the Christian psalms with the lira , until the repertoire was harmonized at the end of the 19th century. Epics accompanied by the hurdy-gurdy are a specifically Ukrainian tradition that only occurred in regions where the kobsa or bandura was played. The blind epic singers, moving from village to village, appeared at markets and other social occasions, but were seen as outside the village community.

The blindness of the singers was seen by many as a God-given fate, which is why they were given moral authority and certain magical abilities. The Ukrainian ethnographer and bandura player Hnat Chotkewytsch (1877–1938) mentions a miniature in a psalter from the 13th or 14th century that shows the biblical King David not with the lyre ( kinnor ), as usual , but with a Ukrainian lira . Through the connection with the biblical legend, the Lirnyk is moved into a spiritual sphere. Lirnyky accordingly took the view that their instrument was derived from David's lyre. One version of this narrative reads:

“The lira is King David's lyre. King David felt compassion for the disabled and gave them a mountain of gold to mine and earn a living. The son of Solomon declared this to be illegal, it was not appropriate for the handicapped because it would kill them (for the gold). Instead, they should be given the 'volot' and the 'zakharbet' (the horse and the begging bag) so that they could travel the world, go from village to village and beg for alms from house to house. So they would take care of themselves and no one could take this away from them. They would go from house to house, praising God and thus providing for themselves. "

The epic singers are therefore not presented as the creators of their music, but rather as transmitters of divine music to the Ukrainian people.

Among the string instruments of modern Ukrainian folk music are primarily Violin ( Skrypka (), Bass basola, three-stringed viola da gamba ), dulcimer ( cymbaly ) and bandura , rare Kobsa that sounds Torban and the bagpipe lira . The kobsa and the lira , which were reintroduced at the end of the 20th century, are presented as “authentic Ukrainian folklore” at folk music festivals. A current lira player is the Ukrainian composer, torban and bandura player Yuri Fedynskyj (* 1975), who lives in the United States.

literature

  • Marianne Bröcker: The hurdy-gurdy. 2nd edition in two volumes. Publishing house for systematic musicology, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1977 (English translation of the first volume, up to p. 431, at hurdygurdy.com )
  • Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments. Harper & Row, New York 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 458
  2. ^ Christopher Page: The Medieval Organistrum and Symphonia. 2: Terminology. In: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 36, March 1983, pp. 71-87, here p. 76
  3. ↑ Ephraim Nissan: Terminology and Referential versus Connotated Neologisation, II: Illustration from a Few Domains . In: Nachum Dershowitz, Ephraim Nissan (eds.): Language, Culture, Computation: Computational Linguistics and Linguistics. Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka on the Occasion of His 75 Birthday, Part III. Springer, Berlin 2014, pp. 483-536, here pp. 524f
  4. ↑ Johannes Hoops (ed.): Reallexikon der Germanischen antiquity . “Harp and Lyre” Vol. 14. De Gruyter, Berlin 1999, p. 2, ISBN 978-3-11-016423-7
  5. ↑ Shown in: Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 460
  6. ^ Lyra (ii) . In: Grove Music Online , 2001
  7. ^ Anette Otterstedt: Lira. I. Terminology and general information. In: MGG Online , November 2016 ( Music in the past and present , 1996)
  8. ↑ Marianne Bröckers, 1977, p. 232
  9. ↑ Quoted from: Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 462
  10. ^ Willi Apel: Harvard Dictionary of Music . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1969, p. 396
  11. ^ Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, pp. 462, 464
  12. ↑ Marianne Bröcker, 1977, p. 424
  13. ↑ Jan Ling: Nyckelharpan. Study folk music instrument . Musikhistoriska museets skrifter 2. Nordstedt, Stockholm 1967, chapter of the English translation by Patrick Hort: The Keyed Fiddle , pp. 231, 253
  14. ^ Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 462
  15. ^ Árni Heimir Ingólfsson: Iceland. Music history until 1850. In: MGG Online, November 2017
  16. ^ Bálint Sárosi: The folk musical instruments of Hungary . ( Ernst Emsheimer , Erich Stockmann (Hrsg.): Handbook of European Folk Music Instruments. Series 1, Volume 1) Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1967, p. 55
  17. ↑ Lira . In: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine
  18. ↑ Ulrich Morgenstern: Russia. A. Folk music. II: Instrumental folk music. 2. The traditional instruments. c. Chordophones. In: MGG Online, October 2017; Marianne Bröcker, 1977, p. 816
  19. ↑ Marianne Bröcker, 1977, pp. 817–819
  20. ↑ Marianne Bröcker, 1977, p. 832
  21. ↑ Margaret Downie Banks: Lira . In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 292
  22. ↑ Alexander Buchner: Handbook of musical instruments . 3rd edition, Werner Dausien, Hanau 1995, p. 287
  23. ↑ Lirnyks . In: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine
  24. ^ Iryna Fedun: The Folk Dances of the Western Polissia Region of Ukraine: Traditions and Innovations. In: Traditiones , Vol. 34, No. 1, 2005, pp. 155–164, here p. 157
  25. ^ William Noll: The Social Role and Economic Status of Blind Peasant Minstrels in Ukraine . In: Harvard Ukrainian Studies , Vol. 17, No. 1/2, June 1993, pp. 45-71, here pp. 69f
  26. ↑ Marianne Bröcker, 1977, p. 823f
  27. ↑ Marianne Bröcker, 1977, p. 821
  28. ^ Natalie O. Kononenko: Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing. ( Folklores and Folk Cultures of Eastern Europe ) ME Sharpe, Armonk (New York) 1998, pp. 154f
  29. ↑ Natalie O. Kononenko, 1988, p. 133
  30. ↑ Cf. Melissa Bialecki: “They Believe the Dawn will come”: Deploying Musical Narratives of Internal Others in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine . (Master's thesis) Graduate College of Bowling Green State University , Ohio 2017, p. 36f
  31. ↑ Ihor Poshyvailo: Folklore Festival in Ukraine - Guardians of Traditional Cultural Heritage (Historical and Ethno Logic Aspects). In: Етнічна історія народів Європи, 2002, pp. 120–124, here p. 123