Mazanki (string instrument)

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Two mazanki with bows from Zbąszyń , western Poland.

Mazanki is a small, rare three-string string instrument that is played in folk music of the Greater Poland region in western Poland . At the beginning of the 20th century, the mazanki gradually disappeared and, like the related string suka, was largely replaced by the violin used in a special way of playing . Since the 1990s there have been individual efforts to revive old Polish folk musical instruments, including the mazanki .

Origin and Distribution

The citole is a plucked lute related to medieval string instruments, which spread northward from the Mediterranean in the 13th century and represents one of the transitional stages between early Central Asian instruments and European fiddles.

The first known, reliable representation of a European string instrument can be found in the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter , which was made in northern France in the first half of the 9th century. You can see a striding musician who, with a straight bow , strokes a lute with a medium-long neck, a spade-shaped body and a round sound hole in the middle, while he also carries a corner harp leaning against his shoulder . Typologically, this type of lute, probably called fidula , is related to Central Asian instruments and occurs in Europe until the 12th century. From the 10th century onwards , a pear-shaped stringed lute ( lira, lyra ) spread across Europe from the east, coming from the Byzantine Empire , and with the Islamic expansion , a string instrument with a long-oval body rounded at the bottom came to the Iberian Peninsula ( rebec , language related to Arabic rabāb ). In addition to this oriental rebec , which was often played vertically on the knees, the pear-shaped lute that was placed horizontally or diagonally against the neck or chest when playing, which was also called rebec , spread more widely across Europe.

The oldest European stringed lute had a corpus carved from a piece of wood with a slightly arched bottom, in line with their Asian models. A typical fiddle of the 13th and 14th centuries had an oval body with straight edges on which a pine wood top was glued. On some instruments, one of the five strings ran next to the fingerboard and produced a drone tone , otherwise the illustrations show fiddles with three or four strings. Such fiddles with C-sound holes and a wide neck still existed around the middle of the 16th century, when the violin with a frame body already existed roughly in its present form. In the centuries that followed, the violin gradually replaced string instruments in the treble register in folk music as well. When the violin took the place of the mazanki in Polish ensembles with several bagpipes and a string instrument around 1820 , the strings had to be shortened by about a third with a kind of capo in order to achieve the higher tuning of the mazanki . In Eastern Europe, the violin is one of the most popular instruments in folk music today.

There are some regions in which folk music has preserved not only forms of medieval fiddles, but also their playing styles. One of the old ways of playing is the musical structure related to a drone tone, whereby a string is only used as a drone, in contrast to the principle of functional harmony in modern music. In the 16th century and into the 17th century, the notated violin music was only played in the first position and mainly on the uppermost and very rarely on the lowest string. This practice, which probably originated from early three-string fiddles, is largely retained in Poland with the mazanki and złóbcoki to this day.

A string instrument that combines old and new designs is the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle . In Slovakia and in other Eastern European countries, simple fiddles played in folk music with a body carved from a piece of wood are or were widespread under the Slavic name husle . The isolated German-speaking region around Iglau in Moravia is also an island of tradition for a family of fiddles that have been handed down since the 16th century. The treble instrument is called the clear fiddle , the rough fiddle sounds medium high and the bass is known as the ploschperment . String instruments related to the medieval three-string rebec , such as the three Iglauer Bauerfideln, the mazanki or the larger bass instruments ( basy ) were evidently - following an old tradition - made by the player himself or his immediate environment using "archaic" methods until the 20th century.

In Poland, the złóbcoki (also gęśliki podhalańskie or oktawi ) is a fiddle similar to the medieval rebec with a slender oval body that occurs only in the Tatravorland (in the Podhale region ). The three or four-string, simply built złóbcoki disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century and is now handcrafted to a limited extent. The body shape is similar to the Slovak gutter violins . In addition to the złóbcoki , the suka and the mazanki , in Polish folk music dominated by the violin ( skrypze ), the skrypze złobione ("hollowed violin") occurs as a simple regional imitation of the same. In this region, the violin used in a folk music ensemble is called gęśle . In medieval Poland, gęśle, gęśl, gąsłki or gusli denoted different, originally plucked and later bowed string instruments.

Design

Mazanki

The Mazanki similar in their appearance a violin, but only in some instruments the body as in that of soil, Zargenkranz and ceiling is composed. Such instruments belong to the box-neck lute according to the Hornbostel-Sachs system . Traditionally, the back and sides of the body are made from one piece of wood. This construction makes the mazanki a bowl-neck lute. The total length of the mazanki is about 50 centimeters, it is smaller than the violin. The shape details are not standardized and are different. As with the violin, the central bow (waisted central part of the frame rim) can be flat C-shaped or deeply curved inwards in a narrow semicircle. In a modern version, the otherwise unadorned pegbox ends in a snail as an adaptation to the violin. The f-sound holes have no notches in the middle.

The three strings run from lateral pegs on a straight pegbox over a fingerboard and a narrow bridge to a tailpiece that is attached to the lower edge. The bridge is asymmetrical like that of the Fidel von Płock, a find from the 16th century that was important for the knowledge of Polish stringed instruments and was excavated near Płock . The web foot of the highest string rests on the ceiling, while the web is extended below the lowest string and through a hole in the ceiling pushed through the bottom reached to the function of a soundpost to take over.

The strings are tuned to a 1 –e 2 –b 2 higher than on the violin . Scordatura -Stimmungen with which the Mazanki is set to be the interaction with a bagpipe, are: a 1 -e 2 -h 2 and g 1 -d 2 -a 2 and fis 1 -cis 2 -GIS 2 and f 1 -c 2 - g 2 .

Style of play

While playing , the musician holds the mazanki approximately horizontally against the crook of his left arm and strokes it with a violin bow. The strings are shortened with the fingertips of the left hand on the fingerboard.

The Polish folk music styles can be regionally divided into five musical landscapes. For the central region, to which Greater Poland belongs, melodies with rhythms in three-time rhythm are characteristic in the songs and dances. Wielkopolska ensembles consist of one of several types of bagpipes, especially the large kozioł ("buck") or a smaller bagpipe dudy and a mazanki , provided that it is not replaced by the violin. In other regions, a violin and a small hand drum with a bell ring or a rhythmically inserted, small bass violin with two drone strings play together. Up until the First World War, an ensemble of bagpipes and mazanki was part of the ceremonial part of a wedding celebration. According to a description from 1861, a violinist, accompanied by a bagpiper, played a high- pitched mazanki from the arrival of the guests until dinner . As long as this sounded, the groom had to pay for the vodka, beer and food. As soon as the violinist switched to the violin and the bagpiper to another instrument, the wedding guests had to take over all further food and drink costs.

literature

  • Jan Stęszewski: Mazanki. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments . Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 418

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Laurence Wright: Citole . In: Grove Music Online, 2001
  2. ^ Curt Sachs : Handbook of musical instrumentation. (2nd edition 1930) Georg Olms, Hildesheim 1967, p. 175
  3. ^ Marianne Bröcker: Rebec. II. Description. In: MGG Online , November 2016 ( Music in the past and present , 1998)
  4. ↑ Fidel . In: Anthony Baines: Lexicon of Musical Instruments. JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 2005, p. 91
  5. ^ Andreas Michel, Oskár Elschek: Instruments of folk music. In: Doris Stockmann (Ed.): Folk and popular music in Europe. (New Handbook of Musicology, Volume 12) Laaber, Laaber 1992, p. 279
  6. ↑ Zbigniew J. Przerembski: Studying folk violin playing to recover early music performance practices. The Violin in Polish Collections, Institut of Music an Dance (IMiT), Warsaw
  7. ^ Andreas Michel, Oskár Elschek: Instruments of folk music. In: Doris Stockmann (Ed.), 1992, pp. 305f
  8. ^ Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments . Harper & Row, New York 1975, pp. 474f
  9. ↑ Thomas Drescher: String instrument making. A. The violin family. II. Early history up to approx. 1550: Rebec, Fidel, Lira. In: MGG Online, November 2016
  10. ↑ January Stęszewski: Poland. II. Folk music. 4. Regional differentiation. In: MGG Online , October 2017
  11. ^ Peter Cooke: The violin - instrument of four continents. In: Robin Stowell (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the Violin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, p. 239
  12. ↑ Gęśle. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 418
  13. ↑ See Ewa Dahlig: A Sixteenth-Century Polish Folk Fiddle from Płock. In: The Galpin Society Journal , Vol. 47, March 1994, pp. 111-122
  14. ↑ January Stęszewski: Mazanki. In: The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments , 2014
  15. ↑ Marianne Rônez: Scordatura. III. History. 3rd violin. b. Folk music. In: MGG Online, November 2016
  16. ↑ Mazanki (fiddle). Polish folk musical instruments