Sor U

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Sor u

Sor u ( Thai ซอ อู้ ), even so u , English transcriptions saw u, saw oo , is a two-stringed, with the arch painted shell spit loud that in the traditional, originally courtly music in Central thailand is played and their body from a coconut shell consists. The sor u , along with the sor duang and the sor sam sai, is one of the three crossed Thai petty sounds. Their direct ancestors come from southern China. Presumably the sor u in its current form was introduced in Thailand around 1900.

Origin and Distribution

The simplest lute instruments are pike lutes, in which a long string support is pushed through a small resonance body and protrudes a bit at the lower end. In India these one or two-stringed spit lutes, which are usually plucked, are called ektara ("one string"). A distinction is made between shell skewers with a bowl-shaped body that is rounded at the bottom and tube skewers, in which the string holder is placed across a tube. The ravanahattha in the north-west and the single-stringed pena in the north-east of the country are among the crossed shell skewers in India, whose body consists of a coconut shell like the sor u . In India, the 13th century music scholar Sharngadeva mentions the pinaki vina and the nihsanka vina in his work Sangitaratnakara as two string instruments that could have been staff zithers or simple strings.

Under variants of the name rabāb , bowl skewers are widespread in the Islamic cultural area between North Africa and Indonesia. While the round body of the one-string Moroccan ribāb is still counted among the box skewers , two-string fiddles with coconut resonators occur in Egyptian folk music: the rebāb or rebāb el-šāʿer with several sound holes on the underside and the rebāb turqī on the underside how a segment was cut off on the ceiling. In Javanese gamelan , the two-stringed spit violin rebab with a coconut shell and long, laterally opposite pegs is the leading melody instrument. In Myanmar , a bow harp similar to today's saung gauk became historically tangible from around the 9th century. It probably came from southern India with Buddhism spreading eastwards . From the 12th century onwards, a spiked fiddle, probably of the sor u and Javanese rebab type, came to Myanmar, where it was called tayàw . In Myanmar, the violin, also known as tayàw , has replaced the presumably existing spiked fiddles and three-string strings in the 19th century . The other spiked fiddles in Southeast Asia probably did not exist before this time either. The Burmese fiddle with this simple shape has long since disappeared, and another fiddle called tayàw with three strings and a rounded curved body has only been in museums since the 19th century.

The direct ancestors of the Thai spit violinists come from China. There they have been known since the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) under the collective name huqin , where hu derogatory means "barbarians from the north" and indicates that the Chinese pike violins are of Mongolian origin. The Mongolian steppe nomads, who spread to Central Asia in the 12th century, are the alleged origins of all lute instruments bowed with a horse's hair. Qin is an ancient Chinese word for stringed instruments. The sor in the name of sor u is the general name for Thai fiddles, u either onomatopoeically stands for the deeper sound compared to the other two Thai spit- fiddles sor duang and sor sam sai or is - more likely - derived from the Chinese hu .

The Chinese spit violins have two or four strings with different body shapes, which are always tuned in a fifth (four-string instruments are double-choir). Qin stands for string instrument in general. The best known is the Chinese octagonal tube skewer erhu with two strings. Closest related to the sor u is the Chinese two-string fiddle yehu with a resonance body made of a coconut half-shell closed at the bottom and two long wooden pegs protruding backwards. Ye is the Chinese word for "coconut". In Cambodia, the corresponding generic term for spit- fiddles is tro ; the sor u corresponds to the two-string tro u ( tro ou ) in Cambodian music .

Thai music has been heavily influenced by centuries of Indian and Chinese music . The Thai probably immigrated from southern China to their current settlement area, where they founded the first Sukhothai kingdom in the 13th century . The various types of Chinese strings only spread throughout China during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). It cannot be proven whether these reached Thailand as early as the Sukhothai period. The oldest written source on a Thai fiddle dates back to the 17th century. The French Jesuit missionary Nicolas Gervaise (1663–1729) reports in his Histoire naturelle et politique du Royaume de Siam , published in Paris in 1688, about a string instrument with three brass strings, which was known at the time under the Khmer word tro and which is now the three-stringed sor sam sai corresponded. The sor u and the two-stringed tubular lute sor duang were first mentioned by Frederick Verney (1846–1913), an English clergyman and diplomat at the Siamese legation in London, who in 1885 published a brochure on Thai musical instruments. The musicologist Alfred James Hipkins (1826–1903) shows in his book Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare, and Unique (London 1888) a picture of a sor u , which he explains in the caption to be saw Chine , "Chinese fiddle". From this it can be concluded that the sor u and the sor duang were only integrated into Thai ensembles in the 19th century and played by Chinese musicians.

Chinese fiddlers were certainly already known in Siam because they gave musical accompaniment to plays and puppet shows. In the 19th century, numerous Chinese settled in Siam, most of them from the Chaozhou region in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and who cultivated the tradition of the Chinese chamber ensemble sizhu ("silk and bamboo"). These folk music ensembles, which formed in southern China in the 19th century and are called Jiangnan sizhu after their area of ​​distribution , consist of stringed instruments and bamboo flutes. Ensembles in the Chaozhou region use a special fiddle called tou xian , which has a body that is cylindrical on the outside and conically hollowed out on the inside. It produces a much sharper sound than the erhu and could have served as a model for the sor duang . It is not entirely clear why the depiction of the sor u in Verney shows a fiddle with a similar cylindrical body. Either the fiddles with a round and a cylindrical body were referred to as sor u at the end of the 19th century , or the fiddles with a round body made of coconut shells were only introduced into Thailand later, perhaps around 1900. In the folk music of northeast Thailand ( Isan ), two spit lutes with a bamboo tube as a string carrier occur. The sor bung mai pai (“bamboo fiddle”) is similar to the sor u and has a coconut body. More often, however, the sor bip is played there, the body of which consists of a tin can.

Design

The sor u consists of a long, thin wooden stick that is inserted through a large oval-shaped coconut shell. A segment (about a third) of the nutshell is cut off, leaving an opening of 13 to 15 centimeters, which is covered with goat or calf skin as a blanket. This differs from the Chinese model yehu with a wooden ceiling. The second difference is the small openings on the underside of the sor u , which serve as sound holes and are missing at the bottom of the yehu . The string carrier is about 80 centimeters long. At its upper end there are two wooden vertebrae protruding backwards, which are drilled across the wooden stick. The two gut strings run from their knot at the end of the string carrier , which protrudes slightly from the body, over a bridge that rests on the skin, with a distance of several centimeters from the string carrier to the wooden pegs. The bridge consists of a roll of fabric that is tightly wound together. A cord loop underneath the pegs pulls the strings slightly against the string carrier and replaces the saddle that is common on European string instruments . The base of the body can be decorated with a motif that usually depicts Hanuman , the mythical monkey king from the Indian epic Ramakian . The bow, which is slightly curved and covered with horse hair, is passed between the two strings. The strings are tuned to C and G with a fifth spacing, corresponding to the Khmer fiddle tro ou and lower than the sor duang (G – d).

Style of play

A sor u player near Chiang Mai

The musician sitting on a chair holds the sor u while playing, propped up vertically on his left thigh and strings the strings with the bow in his right hand. With a finger on his left hand, he shortens the strings by pulling them inwards, but not pressing them against the neck. A fingerboard is not required.

Mahori is an ensemble of courtly Thai music, which, unlike the traditionally male-played court music ensemble Pi Phat, does not contain loud double-reed instruments ( pi nai ), but rather soft-sounding instruments and used to be the domain of women at court. A typical Mahori ensemble includes idiophones ( xylophone ranat ek and cymbal ching ), stringed instruments and the bamboo flute khlui . The leading melodic instrument in Mahori is the three-stringed fiddle sor sam sai , which is also used to accompany singing. In addition to entertainment, the main task of the Mahori is to provide background music to the dance drama lakhon . The Mahori comes in different line-ups. The mahori wong lek includes nine musical instruments, including a small ranat ek , a sor u and the other two fiddles, a chakhe (“crocodile zither”), the single-headed beaker drum thon and a pair of cymbals. In the mahori khrüang khu , all nine musical instruments are played in pairs, including two flutes khlui and two sor u . In other Mahori ensembles that only consist of six or seven instruments, a sor u is also included . The ensembles belong to theater pieces in which music, dance and a game are combined. In addition to the lakhon , other performing genres are the mask drama khon and the puppet theater nang yai with large shadow play figures .

There are also several occupations within the more important Pi Phat genre. A more muted sounding ensemble is called piphat mai nuam ("Pi Phat with soft mallets"). It corresponds to the louder piphat khrüang yai consisting of 13 instruments , whereby the two double reed instruments pi nai are replaced by the bamboo flute khlui and a sor u is added. Another melody instrument is the xylophone ranat ek , the rhythm is provided by the large barrel drum klong that , the small barrel drum taphon and the cymbal ching.

The third ensemble is the Khruang Sai ("string instruments"). It consists of sor duang, sor u , the zither chakhe and the flute khlui , other instruments such as the beaker drum thon , the single-headed, very flat drum rammana , the cymbal ching and the gong mong can also be used.

Thai melodies consist partly of fixed and more or less improvised elements. The specific melody form ( thang ) of the xylophone ( thang ranat ek ), for example , differs from that of the singer and the fiddle ( thang sor u ). The harmony results in a complex heterophony . Among the three string instruments, the sor sam sai performs complex and richly ornamented melodic movements, while the sor duang contributes a simple melody with a rhythm; The sor u , whose range is higher, sounds a bit more versatile .

The classical Thai ensembles play old courtly compositions, melodies from folk music and more recently composed pieces. Small groups perform at ceremonies in a Buddhist shrine.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alastair Dick, Neil Sorrell: Rāvaṇahatthā . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 3. Macmillan Press, London 1984, p. 199
  2. ^ Paul Collaer, Jürgen Elsner: North Africa . Series: Werner Bachmann (Hrsg.): Music history in pictures . Volume I: Ethnic Music. Delivery 8. Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1983, p. 38
  3. ^ Robert Garfias: The Development of the Modern Burmese Hsaing Ensemble . In: Asian Music , Vol. 16, No. 1, 1985, pp. 1-28, here p. 3
  4. ↑ Roderic Knight: The "Bana". Epic Fiddle of Central India . In: Asian Music , Vol. 32, No. 1 (Tribal Music of India) Autumn 2000 - Winter 2001, pp. 101–140, here p. 106
  5. ^ Kurt Reinhard : Chinese Music . Erich Röth, Kassel 1956, p. 134
  6. ↑ Terry E. Miller, Jarernchai Chonpairot: A History of Siamese Music Reconstructed from Western Documents, 1505-1932. In: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Vol. 8, No. 2, 1994, pp. 1-192, here pp. 73f
  7. ↑ Terry E. Miller, Jarernchai Chonpairot: The Musical Traditions of Northeast Thailand. (PDF) In: Journal of the Siam Society , Volume 67, 1976, pp. 3–16, here p. 5
  8. ↑ Terry E. Miller, Sam-ang Sam: Classical Musics of Cambodia and Thailand: A Study of Distinctions. In: Ethnomusicology , Vol. 39, No. 2, spring – summer 1995, pp. 229–243, here p. 230
  9. ↑ Terry E. Miller: Thailand . In: Terry E. Miller, Sean Williams (Eds.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 4: Southeast Asia . Routledge, London 1998, p. 239
  10. ↑ Terry E. Miller: Thailand. In: Garland Encyclopedia of World Music . Pp. 242, 271