Ravanahattha

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Folk musicians from Rajasthan performing at Akhyan Puppet Theater and Entertainer Festival in New Delhi , October 2010

Ravanahattha , also rāvaṇhatthā, rāvaṇahasta, ravanastron , is a long-necked skewer lute used by street musicians and religious singers in the northwest Indian states of Rajasthan and Gujarat for song accompaniment. The string instrument belonging to the ektaras with one or two melody and up to 16 sympathetic strings owes its name to the mythical demon king Ravana and the Sanskrit addition hasta for "hand". The ravanahattha was honored as evidence of the Indian origin of the string instruments due to its great age, but this cannot be clearly proven.

origin

To the 3rd century. BC were all stringed instruments, for in ancient Indian time the general term n. Vina was used multi-stringed bow harps . Then on reliefs of Buddhist stupas in Gandhara and from the 5th century on paintings in Ajanta, pear-shaped short-necked lutes similar to barbat and longer staff zithers appear. In lute instruments, the neck is organically connected to the sound box, in rod zithers it hangs as a separate component - often in the form of a calabash - under the string support. The simplest Indian stick zithers with a half-shell resonator are depicted on reliefs on Hindu temples up to the end of the 1st millennium and today, apart from the tuila , which leads a niche existence in a rural region in Odisha , have practically disappeared. The vinas played in today's classical music are completely different stick zithers with a wide fingerboard and two calabashes ( rudra vina ) or long-necked lutes with a bulbous body. The simple petty lutes are independent instruments of regional folk music.

The name ravanahattha has been handed down since the 7th century, when the name connection between the stringed instrument and the mythical figure is unknown. In the epic Ramayana , the demon king Ravana from the kingdom of Lanka, which is located at the southern tip of India along with Sri Lanka , embodies the evil antagonist of the god Rama . To please Shiva , Ravana practiced asceticism for years and sacrificed one of his ten heads. Inspired by the sound of a bamboo tube held up against a calabash , he invented a stringed instrument by stretching a string from his body over a wooden stick and connecting it to a calabash ( alabu ). Shiva is said to have been very fond of this instrument, other gods also played vinas in his honor.

The Shivaite singers Appar Swamigal (also Tirunavukkarasar) and Tirugnana Sambandar, who belong to the Tamil saints ( Nayanmar ), praised the musical genius of Ravana in their hymn collection Tevaram in the 7th century . According to her narration, Ravana constructed a seven-string bow harp ( yal ) from the tendons of his hand in order to accompany himself when singing hymns. In the Paumachariya of Svayambhudeva, a Jain version of the Ramayana created around 880, Ravana tries to please the Naga king Dharanendra with a stringed instrument called ravanahatthaya in the Apabhramsha languages , of which, however, it is unclear whether it was plucked or bowed.

Drawing of a ravanastron in the form of a tubular spike violin from the 19th century, which is very similar to the Chinese erhu and the Ugandan endingidi .

In the musicological treatise Sangitamakaranda from the 11th century, a string instrument called ravani is mentioned. The ancient story of Ravana's South Indian musical bow ravanahattha continues to pass on to Nanyadeva (1094–1133) in his work Bharatabhashya , of which a manuscript has been preserved. Without describing its shape, he compares the instrument with Shiva's pinaka in northern India. In the ancient Indian epics, Shiva is sometimes referred to by the epithet Pinakin, as the bearer of the invincible bow pinaka , which - even if the connection is not expressly established - like the pinga mentioned in the Rigveda , may have been a musical bow . Haripala, a ruler and poet in Gujarat in the second half of the 12th century, considered the pinaki vina to be the most important musical instrument. According to his description, their string carrier was made of bamboo, which was strung with an animal tendon. The bow ( karmuka ) was covered with goat hair and rubbed with resin. The music scholar Sharngadeva dealt in detail with the pinaki vina in his work Sangitaratnakara in the 13th century . He is said to have invented another string instrument, which he called nihsanka vina , which could have been an ancestor of the ravanahattha . The last representation of the single-string pinaki vina was given by the Belgian Francois Baltazard Solvyns in 1810, when this bow-struck zither, which had obviously had a second calabash resonator since the 15th century, was practically extinct.

In depictions of the Indian heavenly gods, the main characters are often surrounded by musical accompanists, the Gandharvas and Kinnaras . BC Deva found string instruments depicted on some temple reliefs from the 10th century. However, the images from this early period cannot be clearly interpreted; some of them could also be tubular zithers struck with a stick or rubbed scraper sticks. In the 11th century, a saranga vina is mentioned, which at that time was apparently a popular string instrument with which Jains accompanied their religious chants. Related to this name is the short-necked lute sarangi , which was played in street music from the 16th century , a forerunner of the most famous Indian string instrument that is used today in North Indian classical music. The sarangi could go back to ancient Indian forms or, like the sarinda, derived from similar strokes in the Persian-Central Asian Islamic area. The painted mayuri vina , whose bulbous body ends in a peacock's head, can be derived from the medieval vinas in the form of a lute or rod zither. With their related leaner dilruba likely in the Mughal period and mainly in Bengal occurring esraj have originated in the 19th century. Along with sarangi and ravanahattha , the bowl-neck lute kamaica, which is only played by the Manganiyar, is the third string instrument typical of Rajasthan.

The ravanahattha was believed to be predominantly a folk musical instrument. Vemabhupala, a 15th century king in central India who distinguished himself as a patron of music and poetry, declared that the ravanahattha was only played by beggars. At least at the beginning of the 17th century, such an instrument must also have been used in classical South Indian music, because according to the poet Ramabhadrambha it was played by musicians at the court of Thanjavur . According to a description by the missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg from 1711, the ravanastum was a musical bow with a single gut string that was bowed with a bow. Later this South Indian string instrument does not seem to have been known any more. While Shiva's North Indian stick zither pinaki vina has completely disappeared today, the South Indian ravanahattha, ascribed to Ravana in mythology, lives on in the north Indian folk music of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

In Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, fait depuis 1774 jusqu'à 1781, the French natural scientist Pierre Sonnerat (1748–1814) read about Indian history and mythology as well as Indian music , which was lamented as harmless and imperfect, and ravanastron . He wrote that mendicants, whom he called pandarons , accompanied each other on the fiddle ravanastron . Ravana's musical bow ravanahattha , as it occurs in the ancient Indian epics, had developed into a bow harp and finally into a spiked violin, i.e. a different type of instrument from the pinaki vina .

Numerous earlier musicologists referred to Sonnerat and considered the bow to be a very old Indian invention. The Belgian music historian François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) quoted in his biography of Antonio Stradivari ( Antoine Stradivari, luthier célèbre ) from 1856 Sonnerat's statement of the age of the ravanahattha and stated that the violin bow came from India. In 1915, Curt Sachs summed up the previous assessment of ravanastron with the word "progenitor of all string instruments". This theory is no longer upheld.

Up until the first half of the 20th century, the term ravanastron was generally used to describe all archaic gauntlet violins in Asia. In Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt , a "Ravanastron, like a plover" hangs in a music room. It is a puzzling object that should be thought of as a musical instrument, but its shape and sound remain unexplained. With reference to François-Joseph Fétis, the idea of ​​the Ravanastron as a mythical prehistoric instrument stands in the background. The Ravanastron had already appeared in an earlier scene in the novel when it came to the fate of a deceased musician who is mentioned as a marginal figure. As his spiritual legacy he left the writing "Notes on the Ravanastron, or Chinese Violin".

According to Jaap Kunst , the Indonesian gamelan used to have a lute instrument from India called wina rawanahasta . The word was already in use in ancient Javanese literature around 900 and was consequently coined during the Central Javanese Sailendra dynasty.

Design

The body of the ravanahattha consists of half a coconut shell about ten centimeters in diameter, which is covered with one or two layers of animal skin. The membrane ceiling is nailed to the edge or tensioned with cords running across the underside. Occasionally there is a hole in the bottom that is covered with a frustoconical bent sheet of brass and extends the body accordingly so that it has the outer shape of a tubular spit violin. A 40 to 60 centimeter long, thick bamboo tube is used as the string carrier ( dandi ) and is connected to it by an iron rod inserted across the coconut shell. The strings run over a bridge placed on the membrane to the opposite end of the iron spike. One melody string is made of horse hair, the other, tuned an octave apart , made of steel. Both lead to opposing lateral wooden pegs in the middle of the string support; the 12 to 16 sympathetic strings end in a series of smaller pegs that are regularly spaced to the tip of the tube. The slightly curved bow is covered with horse hair. Metal bells ( ghungrus ) are often attached to his staff , like those worn as anklet by some dancers in the region.

Style of play

Scroll painting (phad) depicting the stories of Pabuji.

The seated or standing musician holds the ravanahattha with the body pressed against the upper body. The neck protrudes obliquely upwards or almost horizontally forwards, with the strings pointing towards the musician. With his left hand he grips around the neck and shortens the string with his fingers by touching it on the side without pressing it down completely on the bamboo stick.

The ravanahattha is usually played by street musicians as a soloist or to accompany religious chants ( bhajans ). In Rajasthan, Bhopa is the name of a religious singer and healing priest who comes into contact with a spirit ( Bhuta ) in an invocation ceremony . At night he recites epic stories to accompany the ravanahattha . To do this, a dancer moves with a lamp in her hand. The stories are mainly about the hero Pabuji from the 14th century, who is revered as a folk deity, and other heroes of the Rajputs such as Doongji-Jawarji and Raja Bhartari. The latter was a king who became an ascetic and disciple of Guru Goraksha because of his wife's infidelity . On the Tilla Jogian in today's Pakistan, he is said to have reached the state of samadhi .

With the Bhil and other ethnic groups, the Bhopa and his wife (Bhopi) perform the epic of Pabuji as Pabuji-ki-parh ( Pabuji ki phad ), as a narrative with a scroll painting . The bhopa - accompanied by the singing of his wife - reads the story, plays the ravanahattha and in between points with the bow at the scenes of the fabric picture.

The Ceylonese composer and violinist Dinesh Subasinghe (* 1979) used a ravanahattha for the first time in his 2009 pop and world music album Rawan Nada .

distribution

Similar spiked fiddles in the region are known as nareli ("coconut"), gujri (the "Gurjars", an ethnic group from northern India to Afghanistan), sarangi or harangi . One or two-string spike violins used elsewhere in folk music are the pena in northeast India, the banam in Odisha , the three-string kingri played by the Pardhan musicians in Andhra Pradesh , the koka in Maharashtra and the kinnari in southern India . In Kerala , the Pulluvan caste plays the single-stringed pulluvan vina in an obsession ritual in which snake deities are invoked in songs ( pulluvan pattu ).

The second group of Indian string instruments, which can be distinguished from the spit violins, are the shell lutes with a half-open body like the sarangi and the sarinda . This also includes the string instruments known in Central Asia as ghichak , although the court chronicle of the Mughal ruler Akbar , Ain-i-Akbari , mentioned a string instrument called ghichak with a coconut shell, written at the end of the 16th century . The relationship to the Chinese huqin family of two-stringed fiddles, which also includes the tubular spit violin erhu , is unclear. Real tubular spit violins similar to the above illustration of a ravanastron from the 19th century do not occur in India. Its distribution area is East and Southeast Asia with the western border in Assam .

literature

  • Joep Bor: The Voice of the Sarangi. An illustrated history of bowing in India. In: National Center for the Performing Arts, Quarterly Journal , Vol. 15 & 16, No. 3, 4 & 1, September-December 1986, March 1987
  • Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments . National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, p. 103
  • Alastair Dick, Neil Sorrell: Rāvaṇahatthā . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 3. Macmillan Press, London 1984, pp. 198f
  • Rāvanahatho . In: Late Pandit Nikhil Ghosh (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India. Saṅgīt Mahābhāratī. Vol. 3 (P – Z) Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2011, p. 895

Web links

Commons : Ravanahattha  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Monika Zin: The ancient Indian vīṇās. (PDF; 3.1 MB) In: Ellen Hickmann, Ricardo Eichmann (Hrsg.): Studies on Music Archeology IV. Music archaeological source groups: soil documents, oral tradition, recording. Lectures of the 3rd symposium of the International Study Group Music Archeology in the Michaelstein Monastery, 9. – 16. June 2002, pp. 321-362, here p. 322
  2. ↑ Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva, p. 103
  3. ↑ Joep Bor, 1987, p. 43
  4. ^ Joep Bor, p. 40
  5. ^ Alastair Dick, Neil Sorrell, p. 199
  6. ↑ Joep Bor, 1987, pp. 40f
  7. ↑ Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva, p. 101
  8. ↑ Joep Bor, 1987, pp. 53f
  9. ^ Joep Bor, 1987, pp. 43, 45
  10. ↑ Joep Bor, 1987, p. 45
  11. ^ Joep Bor: The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780 - c.1890. In: Yearbook for Traditional Music , Vol. 20, 1988, pp. 51-73, here pp. 54, 60
  12. ^ Curt Sachs : The musical instruments of India and Indonesia. At the same time an introduction to instrument science . Berlin 1915, p. 17
  13. ↑ It is possible that rubbing sticks were first used on lute instruments around the 6th century in the Central Asian region of Sogdia , from where this technique came to China and is mentioned there by the earliest source in the 8th century as a way of playing a tubular zither. See Harvey Turnbull: A Sogdian friction chordophone . In: DR Widdess, RF Wolpert (Ed.): Music and Tradition. Essays on Asian and other musics presented to Laurence Picken . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981, pp. 197-206
  14. ↑ Michael Maier: Ghost Trio. Beethoven's music in Samuel Beckett's second television play. In: Archives for Musicology . 57th year, volume 2. Steiner, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 172–194, here pp. 193f
  15. ^ JM Coetzee: The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt (1972). In: David Attwell (ed.): JM Coetzee: Doubling the Point. Essays and Interviews. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1992, p. 41
  16. ^ Jaap Art : Hindu-Javanese Musical Instruments . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1968, p. 17
  17. ^ Alastair Dick, Neil Sorrell, p. 199
  18. ^ Curt Sachs: The musical instruments of India and Indonesia. At the same time an introduction to instrument science . Berlin 1915, p. 111