Saung gauk

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Modern design of a Saung Gauk with tuning screws. The red cords are decoration.

Saung gauk , short saung , Burmese စောင်း ကောက် , IPA : [ sáʊnɡaʊʔ ], Burmese harp; is an old bow harp played in Myanmar . It is the only harp still used in classical music in Asia and is considered the country's national instrument.

origin

The Burmese word saung, as the Burmese harp was simply called until the middle of the 18th century, is derived from the Persian cank, chang or tschang and hindi canga , which both denote harps that have long since disappeared and indicate the region of origin for the Burmese instrument. The presumed origin of the name is the Sumerian word ZAG-SAL for a Babylonian angle harp. The angular harp changi in the Georgian region of Svaneti and the west Georgian long-necked lute chonguri are linguistically related to this .

The origin of both harps and lyres was around 3000 BC. In Mesopotamia . The oldest bow harps from the 4th ancient Egyptian dynasty date from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. There is no evidence of such an early spread to South Asia. Around 2000 BC In Mesopotamia, an improved type of harp with a higher number of strings developed with the angle harps, which was developed in the 1st millennium BC. Came to Central Asia. The 4th century BC The Pasyryk harp from the Altai is the oldest find such an angular harp in this northern region. In South Asia , however, angle harps were not adopted.

The earliest general term for Indian string instruments is vina . It is not clear from the Sanskrit texts whether the oldest Indian stringed instruments (including pinaki vina ) were staff zithers or musical bows . Arch harps from around 200 BC are identified by stone reliefs on Indian sacred buildings. Documented until 700 AD. Lute instruments later appear under the name vina . The very simple stick zithers made of bamboo, which are still occasionally used in folk music today, can be found from the 6th century.

Bow harps were common throughout Asia and some areas of sub-Saharan Africa. In the south of Uganda , a bow harp very similar to the saung gauk has been preserved under the name ennanga . Other East African harps such as the Kundi of the Azande differ in their differently constructed neck base. Practically only in museums there are copies of the waji , which until a few decades ago was played by the Nuristani (formerly “Kafir”) in the northeastern Afghan province of Nuristan . Probably the last relic on Indian soil is the five-string bin-baja of the Pardhan in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh . After all, the Karen play the six-string bow harp in the Burmese-Thai border area . The Persian angle harp, the chang, which gave the saung its name and was popular during the Sassanid Empire , still lives on as a changi with six to seven strings in the Caucasian region of Svaneti in Georgia.

An arch harp is depicted on a relief from the 1st century AD in Sanchi , in Ashvaghosha's biography of Buddha Buddhacarita from the beginning of the 2nd century an arch harp with seven strings ( vina ), a bamboo flute ( venu ) and one by women played drum ( pushkara ) mentioned. A gold coin from the 4th century shows the Gupta ruler Samudragupta with an arch harp in his hands. Indian bow harps are last known from Nalanda between the 8th and 12th centuries .

The bow harp probably reached the Pyu with the spread of Buddhism in the first centuries AD and in the following centuries further to Southeast Asia, where it appears several times on reliefs at the Khmer temple Bayon in Angkor and at the Indonesian Borobudur . In the Khmer language the bow harp was called pinn , derived from vina . The royal orchestra pinpeat is named after her.

A relief on the predella below a seated Buddha figure from Leyindaung Hill in Sri Ksetra on the lower reaches of the Irrawaddy from the middle of the 7th century shows seven figures, including a dancer who is accompanied by three musicians. These play a bowed harp, existing probably bamboo rattle and a wind instrument (a mouth organ ?). On the far right sits a bodhisattva in a meditation gesture ( dhyana mudra ). The sound box of the harp is almost completely hidden behind the right forearm in the heavily eroded representation; the strongly inwardly curved neck ends at the level of the left ear. The instrument should have had four to five strings. A similar Sri Ksetra stone relief of a harpist from the time of the Pyu city-states is dated to 809 AD. This type of harp was found in India only in cult buildings of the Shatavahanas from the 2nd to 4th centuries in Amaravati (near Guntur on the east coast of India).

From Sri Ksetra, Sunanda, the king's brother (son?), Sent Pyu musicians and dancers to Chang'an , the capital of the Chinese Tang dynasty , in 802 . In a Tang chronicle ( Hsing-t'ang-shu ) it is mentioned that the 35 musicians had two harps, two crocodile zithers and stick zithers with them. At that time, angle harps were already known in China, an angle harp called konghou with a slim sound box was found together with six other instruments in a tomb of the Zhou dynasty around 700. Two types of Burmese harps are mentioned in this chronicle. One harp is not described in more detail, it may be the older instrument from Amaravati shown in Sri Ksetra. The other type of harp had 14 strings, a 60 centimeter long and 20 centimeter wide body and a 76 centimeter long arched neck, the end of which was bent outwards and provided with an animal head. The description shows it to be the likely forerunner of the pyu harp with a bird's head, which was depicted in Bagan from the 11th to the 13th centuries . Reliefs of the same type of harp can be found at Bengali temples of this time.

Among the stone reliefs at Ananda Temple, which was built by King Kyanzittha (ruled 1084–1131) in Bagan, there is a representation of such a harp. At the Nagayon Temple (at the same time as the neighboring Abeyadana Temple ), Kyanzittha is depicted in two reliefs on the wall of the inner pilgrimage around the cella as the Naga king, playing the harp in front of a Buddha to worship him. Harps and other musical instruments are also depicted on wall paintings in Bagan. Stone inscriptions from the 11th to 13th centuries list the names of 21 musical instruments, most of the stringed instruments are likely to have been simple stick zithers. The bird's head harp has disappeared, today's saung gauk corresponds in its shape to the older Amaravati type with inwardly bent neck and not the harps depicted in Bagan.

A stone relief that is kept in the Museum of Bagan shows a unique standing harpist. It comes from the now-gone Paunggu Temple in Bagan and is dated around 1050 AD. The bow of the harp held in front of the chest, but hardly recognizable, ends under the chin. The five or more strings are shown at a 45 degree angle. Harps of a similar style are otherwise only known from India and, in one illustration, from Cambodia. The relief may have been influenced by Sri Ksetra and southern India. From the 9th to the 14th centuries, bow harps similar to the saung gauk were depicted on Buddhist paintings in Japan, although it is believed that only vertical angle harps called kugo were played in Japan until the 10th century .

U Shin Gyi , a protective spirit of the waterways who is revered in the Irrawaddy Delta . He is a benevolent Nat who is represented with a tiger and a saung gauk in his hands.

The earliest song texts come from the 14th century. Nothing is known about the music of that time; the chants were probably accompanied by a harp. A famous harpist after the collapse of the Bagan Empire during the reign of Taungoo (1486–1573) was King Nat Shin Naung. During the cultural heyday of the Konbaung dynasty, the last independent Burmese rule from 1752 to 1885, the saung gauk experienced increasing appreciation as the finest musical instrument played at court. When King Hsinbyushin conquered the capital of the Siamese Empire Ayutthaya in 1767 , he brought with him many court musicians who introduced Siamese playing styles to Burmese music. This included a pentatonic mood (belae) and new melodies for old Burmese songs, sometimes only the rhythm was adopted. The most important harpist in the Konbaung era was Myawaddy Mingyi U Sa (1766-1853), a minister, poet, composer and general in the first war against the British (1824-1826). He processed the Indian-Thai epic Ramakien into a Burmese theater play (general: enaung ), as well as western musical influences of the British colonial rulers.

Stories from life at the royal court were staged in the Konbaung period as dramas ( zat pwe ) and puppet theater ( yoke thé ), which were accompanied by large hsaing waing orchestras. A special genre of song adapted from Ayutthaya are yodaya songs, which are accompanied by the saung gauk . The entire repertoire of Burmese music , with a bandwidth between the Adoration of the Nat - ghosts and courtly classical, is in the Verssammlung mahagita ( Pali : "great song", Burmese: thachin gyi ) are summarized.

The last known harpist at the royal court of Mandalay was U Maung Maung Gyi (1855–1933), who was employed by King Mindon Min and received the title of master harpist deiwa einga ("heavenly musician"). Today's musicians derive their lineage from him. After the British conquest of the north, court culture shifted to the Shan state in Hsipaw for a while .

The music of the Mahagita songs was never written down. It was not until 1965 that the saung-gauk player Inle Myint Maung began to organize these into a collection and record them in Western notation. He documented a total of 500 compositions, another 200 songs had already been lost with the death of the musicians who had performed this repertoire.

The first piano in the country was a gift to King Mindon in 1872. Until 1920 the piano (in Myanmar: sandaya ) was widespread, accepted by the population and had taken over a large part of the song accompaniment from the saung gauk . The piano was retuned to Burmese notation and its playing style was based closely on the harp as a model. In the beginning, the piano, like the harp, was only played with two fingers.

With the fall of the royal family, the environment for classical harp music disappeared. Instead, with the independence movement in the 1920s, the return to the country's cultural heritage began. Since this social change, the saung gauk has been used by a wider section of the population, but to a relatively modest extent, as an instrument of quiet chamber music. Its importance as a national musical instrument has given it a higher symbolic than practical importance. The harp has received recent competition in popular music from the Hawaiian guitar . In contrast, the saung gauk is experiencing a modern renaissance as a coveted and decorative object of sale for tourists.

Design

Traditional saung gauk , whose strings are tuned by moving the red cords.

The bow harp has a narrow sound box made of a hollowed-out piece of hardwood, mostly Siamese rosewood or Burmese padauk ( Pterocarpus macrocarpus or P. indicus ). The skin of the Burmese Thamin , a species of deer, is used for the blanket . The membrane is pulled up when wet and nailed to the side. Like the body, it is often painted red. The 16 strings common in today's instruments are clamped between the semicircular arc of an acacia root (sha) , the lower part of which ends at the bottom of the resonance body and which ends at the upper end in an abstracted leaf of the bodhi tree , a symbol of Buddha's enlightenment. The attachment of the neck in the body corresponds to the “spoon in the cup” principle as with the ennanga and other East African harps. The construction differs from the one-piece curved support rod of the Afghan waji and the Indian bin-baja . The whole instrument has the shape of a gooseneck. The strings used to be made of silk, but new harps are made of nylon. They run almost parallel from the string carrier, a wooden stick that bulges in the middle below the skin and is connected to the neck, to red cotton cords with which they are attached to the neck and which hang down with thick tassel ends.

The string support is about half the length of the top, it transmits the vibrations of the plucked string to the skin top, where they are passed on to the wooden body in a direction changed by 90 degrees. Depending on the direction in which the strings are plucked, the top vibrates to varying degrees, which can produce subtle differences in sound. The Indian plucking drum ektara produces a similar, but much coarser addition of two directions of vibration for sound formation .

The tuning has to be set up for certain tone scales and is not done by swirling , but by complicated shifting of the cords. Below the beginning of the neck, there is a handle on the body with which the instrument can be held while tuning. Newer harps have side tuning screws on the neck, similar to the guitar.

The sound box is about 80 cm long and 16 cm wide and high. The neck arch protrudes about 60 cm upwards. The instruments are often ornately decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones, glass, gold-plated sheet metal and red and black lacquer patterns. The wooden surface is shiny and smooth thanks to a triple layer of lacquer.

There are four small holes in the membrane skin. The point in time at which they are cut is astrologically significant for the fate of the harp. When opening the holes, the spirits are asked to take up residence in the resonator, which is why the instrument must be treated with respect.

The oldest Burmese bow harp had 5 strings, Myawaddi Mingyi U Sa expanded the number of strings from 7 to 13 in the 18th century. These later became 14 and 15 strings, since the middle of the 20th century the two have been made by Saung U Ba Than added bass strings 16 strings common. Another type of harp with 14 strings and an outwardly curved neck from the Pyu city-states in the 9th century and a harp with a thick but only slightly curved neck from the Bagan period are not classified as saung gauk .

Style of play

An unusual duet in classical music. Mandalay 2011. The strings of these instruments are tensioned on small metal pegs drilled through the neck. The red cords are decorative

The player sits cross-legged or with the legs sideways on the floor with the saung gauk resting across the legs and the neck to the left. The strings are almost horizontal with an incline of up to about 20 degrees. Normally, only the thumb and forefinger of the right hand grip the strings from the outside with different movements. With the left hand, notes played quickly from the inside are shortened or the reverberation is dampened. With the left thumb, higher intermediate tones can be achieved directly on the neck by pressing the strings on the side. Deviating from this rule, Inle Myint Maung (1937–2001) occasionally used both hands to pluck. The left thumb can pluck a drone to the melody or an octave.

The strings are traditionally tuned to different pentatonic scales. A common mood begins with c - e - f - g - b. Up to the end of the Konbaung period, four tunings were still in use according to certain modes:

  • hnyin-lon is the oldest tuning, named after the hnyin mouth organ that is no longer used . It is part of the learning scope for young musicians and is used for 13 songs called kyo ("strings") from the 18th and 19th centuries.
  • auk-pyan accordingly, transposed
  • Palè is a new mood brought by musicians abducted from Thailand in 1776
  • myin-zaing is a variant of pale

The last court harpist, U Maung Maung Gyi, mentioned above, introduced a tuning for 14 strings, hsé-eu-gyò hnyì-nì, after which it is no longer necessary to retune different modes. The most recent further development to the 16-string tuning apò-nyí-nì has approximated the western temperament and follows the general trend of western orientation. The tempered mood is not suitable for rendering the older traditional songs adequately.

The most common songs in the Mahagita collection are compositions from the 18th and 19th centuries. The singing voice sets the melody line, whose expressive technique of expression (han) is not necessarily subordinate to the harpist in harmony. The singer indicates the rhythm with a few hand cymbals (si) made of metal, which are held between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand with the palm facing up. For this purpose, a hand rattle (wa) made of bamboo is hit against the thigh with the left hand . Even if these percussion instruments are small, their function corresponds to the gongs and drums of the large hsaing-waing orchestra. Due to the choppy, syncopated style of playing, parallel rhythmic structures between vocals and instrumental accompaniment are not very pronounced.

In addition to the vocal accompaniment, the saung gauk is used in classical chamber music together with the xylophone pattala , possibly the bamboo flute palwei , the crocodile zither mí-gyaùng saung and earlier the three-stringed fiddle tayaw , now the violin of the same name. Western diatonic keys, violin, piano and guitar are increasingly replacing Burmese scales and sometimes musical instruments in popular music. At its core, the music remains Burmese, as the western instruments, like the new melodies from Siam in the past, are adapted to the Burmese musical taste. The very unusual way of playing the saung gauk with its fine, delicate sound is also indirectly retained.

See also

  • Hne , Burmese oboe, melody instrument in the hsaing waing orchestra

Discography

  • Inle Myint Maung ( saung gauk ) and Yi Yi Thant (vocals): Mahagita. Harp and Vocal Music of Burma. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2003 CD insert

literature

  • Anthony Baines: The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992, pp. 295f.
  • Judith Becker: The Migration of the Arched Harp from India to Burma. (PDF file; 582 kB) The Galpin Society Journal (Galpin Society) 20, March 1967, pp. 17-23.
  • Ward Keeler: Burma. In: Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams: The Garland handbook of Southeast Asian music. Routledge, 2008, pp. 208-209.
  • Muriel C. Williamson: The iconography of arched harps in Burma. 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. 209-228.
  • Muriel C. Williamson: The Burmese Harp: Its Classical Music, Tunings, and Modes. Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.
  • Muriel C. Williamson, Gavin Douglas, John Okell: Saung Gauk. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments . Vol. 4. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, pp. 397-399.

Web links

Commons : Saung gauk  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Curt Sachs : The musical instruments of India and Indonesia. Association of Science Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin and Leipzig 1915, p. 139f (reprint: Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 1983)
  2. ^ Francis W. Galpin: The Music of the Sumerians and their Immediate Successors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1937, p. 29, ISBN 978-0521180634
  3. ↑ Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Sachteil 9, 1996, col. 1530
  4. ^ Roger Blench: Reconstructing African music history: methods and results. (PDF file; 2.16 MB) Safa Conference, Tucson, May 17-21, 2002, Chapter: The arched harp and its history , pp. 2–6
  5. ^ Ugandan musician playing the ennanga arched harp. Photo by Gerhard Kubik
  6. ↑ Photo gallery: Documents relacionats amb la photo. Photo of the four-string bow harp waji from Nuristan
  7. ^ Anthony Baines, p. 337
  8. ^ Roderic Knight: The Pardhan people of Dindori District, Madhya Pradesh (MP), India. Oberlin College
  9. ↑ Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present. Material part 4, 1996, col. 660
  10. ↑ Shown in: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in history and present. Part 4, 1996, Col. 666
  11. ^ Roger Blench: Musical instruments of South Asian origin depicted on the reliefs at Angkor, Cambodia. EURASEAA, Bougon, September 26, 2006
  12. ↑ Muriel C. Williamson 1981, pp. 212f
  13. ↑ U Minn Kyi: Saung (Myanmar Harp). Yangonow ( Memento of the original from May 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.yangonow.com
  14. ^ Judith Becker, p. 21
  15. ↑ Thomas O. Höllemann: The old China. A cultural story. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2008, p. 267
  16. ↑ Judith Becker, pp. 17-21; Hsing-t'ang-shu first translated in Denis C. Twitchett, Anthony H. Christie: A Medieval Burmese orchestra. In: Asia Major. VII, 1959, pp. 176-195; Tunings of the instruments corrected in: Laurence Picken: Instruments in an Orchestra from Pyu (Upper Burma) in 802. In ders. (Ed.): Musica Asiatica 4. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984, pp. 245-279
  17. ↑ Muriel C. Williamson 1981, pp. 218-220
  18. ↑ Muriel C. Williamson 1981, p. 214
  19. ↑ See Susumu Kashima, Seishiro Niwa: Depictions of “Kugo” Harps in Japanese Buddhist Paintings. In: Music in Art, Vol. 24, No. 1/2, Spring – Autumn 1999, pp. 56–67
  20. ↑ Robert Garflas: The Maha Gita. University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  21. ↑ John Sheperd and David Horn (Eds.): Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. 2: Performance and Production. Continuum, 2003, p. 435
  22. ↑ Randy Raine-Reusch: Play The World: The 101 Instrument Primer. Mel Bay Publications, Fenton 2015, p. 16
  23. ↑ Laurence Picken : String / Table angles for harps, from the Third Millennium BC to the present. In the S. (Ed.): Musica Asiatica 3. Oxford University Press, London 1981, pp. 35-51
  24. ^ Ward Keeler, p. 208
  25. ↑ Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present. Sachteil 7, 1997, Col. 7-9