Mashak
Mashak , also mašak, maśak, mashaq, mashq ( Hindi , from Persian , “leather sack”), is a bagpipe played in northern Indian folk music with single reeds in the melody and drone reeds . A forerunner of the mashak with a chanter without a drone was called nagabaddha in Sanskrit . The bagpipes with only one drone pipe, sruti upanga and titti , are mainly used by street singers to accompany songs . The now rare Indian bagpipes were replaced in many regions by the Scottish Great Highland bagpipe . This is known as mashak bin in the Himalayan region of Garhwal .
origin
Bagpipes come from the British Isles ( Great Highland bagpipe ), the Spanish Atlantic coast ( Galician Gaita ) and Tunisia ( mezwed ) in the west to the Caucasus ( gudastviri in Georgia ) and to India in the east. Their geographical origin is unknown, it is assumed to be in western Asia, i.e. in the Arab-Persian-Indian cultural area. The airbag, traditionally made from animal bellows, was probably initially not used for making music, but as a blacksmith's bellows. In ancient Egyptian Thebes , in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. A forge fire was created with the help of bellows to melt iron. In the Hebrew Book of Daniel , the word śûmponyâ , borrowed from the Greek sýmphōnia (συμϕωνία, "sounding together") occurs, which presumably means the harmonious harmony of two chimes and was accordingly interpreted (by Derenbourg / Jastrow, 1887, and others) as the name of the bagpipe. Even if śûmponyâ is indisputably read as a musical instrument or wind instrument, the original meaning “bagpipe” is not considered certain either for the Greek word or for the derived Italian zampogna . The interpretation of a 1000 BC is just as questionable. Chr. Dated Hittite reliefs from Alaca Höyük and the Akkadian name takaltu the Assyrians in the 7th century BC. As a bagpipe. Takaltu was probably referring to something made of wood or leather, such as a box or a sack. The Greek orator Dion Chrysostomos first mentioned reliably in the 1st century AD a pipe ( aulein ) that was blown with the mouth or with air from a sack squeezed under the crook of the arm. As ascaules ( askaulos, from askos, "animal skin" and aulos , "pipe", "wind instrument") he called the "bagpiper". Up to a “Letter to Dardanus” by an unknown author called Pseudo-Hieronymus in the 9th century there are no further references to European bagpipes; Avicenna is one of the first Arabic sources in the 11th century to mention the mizmar al-jirab (“reed instrument with sack”) .
The blowing technique, which is still common in that region today, of taking the reeds completely into the mouth and continuously producing tones with circular breathing, points to a likely West Asian origin of the bagpipe . The airbag can have been introduced as a technical relief for the uninterrupted style of play. In the entire distribution area of the bagpipe, from Western Europe to India, there are also hornpipes in different variations. These simple shepherds' instruments, consisting of one or two music tubes with bells, are possible forerunners of the bagpipes and should therefore be correspondingly old.
Reed instruments have been in Mesopotamia since the 3rd millennium BC. In the form of two wind instruments, which, like the ancient Greek aulos, are held at an acute angle by the player and blown at the same time. In South Asia , corresponding doubled wind instruments have been handed down as relief images from the time of the Indo-Greek Kingdom (2nd / 1st century BC) in the Buddhist art of Gandhara . Similar images were preserved at Stupa I of Sanchi (1st century BC) and in the Kushana temporal Mathura (2nd century AD). Today, double wind instruments are only occasionally used in folk music in some regions of South Asia. These include the doneli double flute in southern Pakistan and the rare tirucinnam brass trumpet played in pairs in southern India. In ancient Indian times, double wind instruments were also rare. When they can be seen on stone reliefs, they show musicians who belong to a group of strangers who have traveled from far away. The aulos was probably played with circular breathing like its current Arab descendants in the Orient ( mizmar , zummara , midschwiz ), whereby the musician forms a kind of wind chamber with his mouth. For India this resulted in an almost inevitable development towards wind instruments with a rigid wind chamber made from a bamboo cane, animal horn or, most suitably, from a calabash . The reed of the (relatively few) Indian single reed instruments is not taken with the lips; instead, these wind instruments in India have rigid wind chambers that allow continuous playing and enclose the reeds. A parallel phenomenon was the spread of wind capsule instruments with double reeds in European Renaissance and Baroque music of the 16th and 17th centuries. An exception is the pepa in the northeast Indian state of Assam , which consists of two bamboo tubes with a single reed that the player blows at with his mouth. At the lower end, each tube of the pepa merges into a buffalo horn or a metal bell.
The most famous Indian wind instrument with a gourd wind chamber is the pungi (from Hindi ponga, "hollow"), which has a play tube and a drone tube attached in parallel. The alternative names been (as the string instrument vina is also called) and mahudi (to mohori ) go back to ancient Indian times. In the closely related tarpu, the player blows into the end of an elongated calabash, in the other end of which two parallel play tubes with single reeds are stuck. A second calabash attached to the lower ends of both tubes serves as a bell. The step to the bagpipe, in which the rigid wind capsule is replaced by an elastic bag, makes the sound production independent of the constant blowing pressure of the player, so that the player gets breaks to breathe. According to Curt Sachs (1915), this further development - the invention of the bagpipe - could have taken place in India. Since bagpipes with two pipes traditionally occur further west in the Orient as far as North Africa (such as ney Anban, also nay mashak, in Iran), Sachs (1930) gives western Asia including India as the likely region of origin of the bagpipe.
The Indian bagpipes represent the closest relatives of the wind capsule instruments mentioned in terms of instrument science. Another attempt to separate the player's lips from the reeds, as with the rigid wind capsules, is the chorus ( Middle Latin, from corium, "fur", "skin") of the early European Middle Ages. In a manuscript by Walahfrid Strabo from the 9th century, a musician blows through a tube into a round air bag and operates a single playing tube with four finger holes with one hand. The primitive sack pipe had no drone tube and the sack held in front of the face was not pressed according to the illustration.
An outwardly similar group of instruments, but different in terms of sound generation, are the oral organs , in which several pipes with a penetrating tongue are supplied with blown air from a common wind capsule. Most of the representatives of this group are common in East and Southeast Asia ( sheng , qeej and khaen ). In India, this includes the rasem in the extreme northeast.
The Persian word mashak (“leather sack”, “water sack”) was in Middle Persian mustak in Sassanid times . In Taq-e Bostan in western Iran , Sassanid rock reliefs depict the investitures of three kings and other scenes. The relief of the deer hunt shows several rows of figures playing musical instruments. Two musicians in a group of four blow into a misshapen instrument that they hold at head height. The music historian Carl Engel (1874) interpreted this as a bagpipe, possibly due to the imprecise drawing. Henry George Farmer (1938), on the other hand, came to the conclusion that, because of the way it is played, it should be a mouth organ similar to the Chinese sheng , which was known under the name muschtaq sīnī ("Chinese muschtaq ").
Design
The sack of a mashak consists of the airtight leather of a whole goat hide. He is depilated and shiny black. The production of leather sacks has a long tradition in India, as they are primarily used for non-musical purposes. Leather bags filled with air have been used since ancient times - apart from bellows - as floats for rafts to cross rivers. To this day, drinking water is stored in them or they are used to sprinkle the dusty soil with water.
The north Indian bagpipe mashak has a short bamboo blowing tube and usually two bamboo tubes with single reeds, one for the melody and the other for the drone. The two pipes glued together are 24 centimeters long in Rajasthan. The chanter of the mashak has six finger holes, the drone whistle has the same number or less. The holes of the drone whistle are sealed with black wax depending on the desired pitch. The pipe pipes can be decorated with colorful, hanging strips of fabric and tassels. The sound of the two pipes is much quieter than the chanter with the double reed of the Scottish bagpipe. In addition to the Hindi name mashak , the old Sanskrit name nagabaddha is common in northern India , which used to stand for a bagpipe with only a melody pipe without a drone pipe.
In Andhra Pradesh the bagpipe is called Telugu titti ("sack"), as well as Canarese and Malayalam in other southern Indian states , as well as sruti upanga or bajanasruti in Tamil . The sruti upanga with only one pipe is named after the Sanskrit shruti (“what is heard”) and upanga (“appendage”, “supplement”), like the titti, it is mainly a drone instrument. According to the description of the English major Charles Russell Day (1860–1900) in British India from 1891, the sruti upanga has a short blowpipe and a longer chanter made of plant reed with a single reed. The black wax with which the drone whistle holes are closed also serves to seal the leather sack.
The bagpipe used mainly in India today is the Great Highland bagpipe , which came to South Asia with the soldiers of the Scottish Highland Regiment around the middle of the 18th century. This type of bagpipe is industrially produced in northern India, mainly in Meerut . One of the largest manufacturing locations for Great Highland bagpipes in the world is Sialkot in Pakistan.
Style of play
Indian bagpipes are or were widespread from Afghanistan to Pakistan to southern India. In many regions, however, the Great Highland bagpipe, introduced during the British colonial era, has ousted Indian bagpipes and also established itself in areas where bagpipes were not previously played.
In the states of Rajasthan , Madhya Pradesh , Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand , Indian bagpipes are still part of some ceremonial ensembles that traditionally play at family celebrations and other festive occasions. Bagpipes are usually played at weddings, they accompany folk dances and songs. The ensembles intended for outdoor performance essentially consist of the cone oboe shehnai , other wind instruments and drums, including the kettle drum naqqara , and are called shehnai-naubat , based on the former great palace orchestras naubat . Bagpipes can support or replace the shehnai as a melody instrument.
Mashak bin
In the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in some places in northern India, the bagpipe is also called mashak bin or bin baja (not to be confused with the central Indian bow harp bin-baja ). In the Himalayan region of Garhwal in Uttarakhand, the mashak baja ( mashak for short ) is an indispensable part of the wedding ceremony. One or two mashak baja players precede the wedding procession with drummers. The large barrel drum dhol and the small, bowl-shaped kettle drum damau ( dhamu ) are always used in pairs. The musicians who play at weddings and public ceremonial occasions are members of the Auji hereditary caste; after their drumming they are also called dholaks. They are considered to be socially lower than the Hurkiyas, who sing epic songs with the hourglass drums hurka or daunr and perform at private evocation ceremonies .
The pair of drums can also be played on other occasions, but the mashak baja in Garhwal is practically never used outside of weddings. The tall and fair-skinned Garhwali belonged with the Sikhs and Gurkhas to the population groups who were preferred to be included as sepoy in the British-Indian Army during the colonial period . The mashak baja corresponds to the type of the Scottish Great Highland bagpipe , which probably reached Garhwal around the middle of the 19th century. Indian bagpipes were previously unknown there. It is said that musicians from Garhwal were allowed to take their bagpipes with them as a souvenir after they were released from military service. Instead of the bagpipe, the S-shaped curved natural trumpets ransingha , straight long trumpets bhankora or the European brass bands adopted from urban wedding music are played at some weddings . In addition to its connection with the British military, Andrew Alter (1997) considers the mountain location to be a factor that contributed to the fact that bagpipes became an integral part of the ceremonies at weddings in Garhwal. The previously used ransingha and the bowling oboe shehnai played with circular breathing make the wedding procession audible at a similar distance as the bagpipe, but the latter is less strenuous to play when walking on mountain paths.
Mashak
The use of the traditional Indian mashak by the Bhopas of Rajasthan is known. The Bhopas are a religious and social caste group that worships different deities. They sing religious songs accompanied by the spit- lute ravanahattha , act as priests driving out spirits ( bhutas ) and, like the Bengali patua, perform fabric picture rolls ( phad ). Mataji ka Bhopa is the name of a subgroup of the Bhopas who worships the regional mother goddess Mataji and plays mashak to her songs .
The Hindu community of Jogi Nath also has its own tradition in Rajasthan. “Jogi” is derived from Sanskrit yogi for a yoga practitioner, “Nath” denotes a certain Hindu sect. A subgroup of the Jogi Nath are the Kalbelia, who wander around as snake charmers and herbalists and whose wives perform the dance of the same name. In Alwar , the Jogi Nath musicians appear either as solo singers who accompany each other on a simple variant of the string sarangi with three melody strings or a mashak , or they play in small ensembles with up to five members. Usually one singer emerges as the leader of the ensemble, sometimes two singers alternate on an equal footing. There are interruptions in the musical process when a singer has to inflate his empty bagpipe again. Each singer accompanies himself on one of the two melody instruments. The range of the singing voice and melody instruments seldom exceeds an octave , and in some cases is significantly smaller. The Jogi Nath usually call the bagpipe pungi, just like the snake charmers among them their wind capsule wind instrument. The mashak's chanter produces three to four tones in practice, other tones can be achieved, but they are neither clean nor loud enough. The melodies played on the bagpipe usually have C as the root note ( tonic ), the drone pipe is tuned a fourth lower than the root note. When the singers accompany themselves with the mashak , they mostly stay within the narrow pitch range given by the instrument. The barrel drum dholak , the kettle drum pair nagara , the wooden rattles kartal and small cymbals janjh provide the rhythm . Some singers accompany their songs with a plucked drum , which is called bhapang here , or instead of the mashak with the long-necked lute tandura .
Titti
South Indian instruments with only one drone pipe can represent a remnant of the oldest bagpipes, a regression of the North Indian type with two pipes or a special form specially adapted to the requirements of South Indian music. In the south, the way of playing and the musical use of bagpipes and pungi are similar. An Indian storyteller, who wants to accompany himself with the drone of a titti , first inflates the air sac like in the north, then folds the blow-in tube to the side and begins his vocal performance, while lightly pressing the sack produces a whistle. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, storytellers recite the Telugu-language epic Palnati Virula Katha , which is about Palanati Brahmanaidu, who in the 12th century administered the rulership of Palnadu, which is located roughly in today's Guntur district . The epic describes the battle of Palnadu, which is important for the national historical tradition, and was written by the well-known Telugu poet Srinatha (1365–1441). The performance of the epic takes place on special festive days in Hindu temples where the heroes of the battle are worshiped. Several singers recite the verses while they are rhythmically accompanied by the double drum pambai and the drone of a titti .
Sruti upanga
The sruti upanga with its drone in Tamil Nadu occasionally accompanies the short bowling oboe mukhavina , which is often played in temple music together with the small kettle drum dhanki . The combination of the double reed instrument with different drums is part of the religious music at temple festivals throughout South India.
literature
- Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments of India: Their History and Development . KLM Private Limited, Calcutta 1978, p. 117f
- Peter Cooke: Bagpipes in India. In: Interarts , spring 1987, p. 14f
- Alastair Dick, Geneviève Dournon: Maśak. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, pp. 409f
Web links
- Jogini wyklęci. Bakri ki Mashak. Youtube video (the north Indian group Bakri ki Mashak at the Brave Festival 2016 in Wroclaw , Poland. From left to right: cymbals manjira, barrel drum dholak , frame drum dafli , fiddle banam and mashak .)
Individual evidence
- ^ Anthony Baines: Lexicon of Musical Instruments. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 278, keyword: bagpipe (bagpipes)
- ↑ Emanuel Winternitz: Bagpipes and Hurdy-Gurdies in their Social Setting . The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1943, p. 71
- ^ Hartwig Derenbourg, Morris Jastrow: The Greek Words in the Book of Daniel. In: Hebraica, Vol. 4, No. 1, October 1887, pp. 7-13, here p. 10
- ↑ George F. Moore: Συμφωνία Not a Bagpipe. In: Journal of Biblical Literature , Vol. 24, No. 2, 1905, pp. 166-175
- ^ Francis W. Galpin: The Music of the Sumerians and their Immediate Successors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1937, p. 16
- ^ Anthony Baines, 2005, p. 281
- ^ Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments. Harper & Row Publishers, New York 1975, p. 674
- ^ Sibyl Marcuse: Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary. Country Life Limited, London 1964, p. 30, keyword Bagpipe
- ↑ Walter Kaufmann : Old India. Music history in pictures, Vol. 2. Music of antiquity , delivery 8. VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1981, p. 62
- ^ Curt Sachs : The musical instruments of India and Indonesia (at the same time an introduction to instrument science). Georg Reimer, Berlin 1915, p. 157
- ^ Georg Kinsky : Double reed instruments with wind capsule. A contribution to the history of wind instruments in the 16th and 17th centuries. 17th century. In: Archive for Musicology, Volume 7, Issue 2, June 1925, pp. 253–296, here p. 255
- ↑ Bigamudre Chaitaniya Deva: Musical Instruments. National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, p. 65
- ↑ Curt Sachs, 1915, p. 159
- ^ Curt Sachs: Handbook of musical instrumentation. 2nd edition, Leipzig 1930, reprint: Georg Olms, Hildesheim 1967, p. 349f
- ↑ Bigramude Chaitaniya Deva, 1978, p. 117
- ^ William Henry Grattan Flood: The Story of the Bagpipe. The Walter Scott Publishing Co., London 1911, p. 11
- ^ Carl Engel: A descriptive catalog of the musical instruments in the South Kensington museum. Chapman & Hall, London 1874, p. 58 ( online )
- ^ Henry George Farmer : The Instruments of Music on the Ṭāq-i Bustān Bas-Reliefs. In: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 3, July 1938, pp. 397-412, here p. 404
- ^ Charles Russell Day: The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan. London / New York 1891, plate XVI ( at Internet Archive )
- ^ Peter Cooke, 1987, p. 14
- ↑ Top bagpipe exporter: Pakistan? Youtube video (CNN report)
- ^ Alastair Dick, Geneviève Dournon: Maśak . In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 2014, p. 409
- ↑ Projesh Banerji: The Folk Dance of India. 2nd edition, Kitabistan, Allahabad 1959, pp. 168f
- ^ Garhwali Traditional Music: Dhol Damau and Masak Baja. Youtube video
- ^ Alain Daniélou : South Asia. Indian music and its traditions. Music history in pictures . Volume 1: Ethnic Music . Delivery 1. Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1978, p. 88
- ↑ Andrew Alter: Garhwali Bagpipes: Syncretic Processes in a North Indian Regional Musical Tradition. In: Asian Music, Vol. 29, No. 1 Fall / Winter 1997/1998, pp. 1-16
- ^ Allyn Miner: Musical Instruments: Northern Area. In: Alison Arnold (Ed.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 5: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent. Routledge, London 1999, p. 345
- ↑ Elizabeth Wickett: Songs of the Jogi Nath Kalbelia of Jaisalmer. Fellowships for the Collection of Oral Literature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, 2013
- ^ John Napier: They Sing the Wedding of God: An Ethnomusicological Study of the Mahadevji ka byavala as Performed by the Nath-Jogis of Alwar. McFarland, Jefferson 2013, pp. 43-45, 48, 53
- ↑ Gene H. Roghair: The Epic of Palnāḍu: A Study and Translation of Palnāṭi Virula Katha, aTelugu oral tradition from Andhra Pradesh, India. Oxford University Press, New York and Clarendon Press, Oxford 1982, p. 41
- ^ David B. Reck: Musical Instruments: Southern Area. In: Alison Arnold (Ed.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 5: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent . Routledge, London 1999, p. 366