Tanburo

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Tanburo , tanbūro, damboro , is a five-string, plucked long-necked lute used in the folk music of the Pakistani state of Sindh . The tanburo accompanies a genre of Sufi songs: the compositions of the Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif from the first half of the 18th century, to whom the invention of the tanburo is ascribed. It is possible that Latif provided an older, four-stringed lute instrument with an additional string. According to its religious use, the tanburo can be compared with the tandura of Rajasthan ; In terms of their design, the sounds used for Muslim and Hindu chants are similar to the tanpura played in classical Indian music .

Origin and Distribution

A singer accompanies herself on a tanpura . Miniature painting from around 1790.

An early Indian long-necked lute in today's Pakistan with a pear-shaped body is on a stone relief dating from the 2nd / 3rd centuries. It is dated to the 17th century and is depicted from the Gandhara cultural region . The relief shows dancers and a musical group that includes a long-necked lute and a bow harp ( vina ). The name tanburo is derived from the Arabic tunbūr and Persian tanbūr , which has been used to describe long-necked lutes with a slim body since the Middle Ages in the Arab-Persian-Indian region up to Central Asia. In Arabic literature, the name tunbūr appears for a musical instrument for the first time in the 7th century. A pear-shaped lute with a short neck (forerunner of the barbat ) was already known in the Sassanid period (4th to early 7th century). Today's name-related long-necked lutes, whose distribution area extends in the west as far as the Balkans , are mainly played to accompany melodic singing. In southern Central Asia and Pakistan, these include the dombra in Tajik music , the dambura in northern Afghanistan, the damburag ( tanburaq ) in the Balochistan region and the danburo in the Kohistan district ( NWFP ). The damburag plays as the tanburo a rhythmic drone, among other things, along with the melody leading fiddle Saroz in a possession ritual.

On miniatures from the Mughal period , the tambura is depicted as a three-stringed lute with an almost circular body. It can be recognized as a melody instrument by its broad neck with frets. In contrast, the four-string tanpura is generally used in India today as a drone instrument and its relatives in regional folk music styles, including tanburo and tandura , also contribute drone tones to the singing and accompany it rhythmically.

The Sanskrit word damaru , which stands for a small hourglass drum and is derived from Hindi damru, is older than the Arabic tunbūr , which denotes stringed instruments . On damaru the dual meaning of the word could environment of tunbūr be due for stringed instruments and drums up to tambourine for a frame drum received. The long-necked lute played in Sindh is known as Latif-jo-tanburo , "(Shah Abdul) Latifs tanburo ", in memory of its alleged inventor .

The devotional vocal music of the Manganiyar musicians living in Sindh and Rajasthan, which is accompanied by the bowl-neck lute kamaica , is influenced not only by the classical style of Khyal but also by Sufi music directed at Shah Abdul Latif.

Design

The tanburo has a broad pear-shaped body, which in the older form is carved out of a solid block of wood or consists of wood chips (planks) that are glued to frames. In both cases the body is closed with a flat wooden ceiling. The five metal strings run from the underside over a high bridge placed in the middle of the top to the vertebrae at the straight end of the neck. Three of the wooden pegs are drilled in on the top and two on the side approximately opposite. Some instruments are decorated with light inlays on the edge of the body and neck .

The singer and musician sitting cross-legged on the floor holds the tanburo vertically with the body in his lap and the neck over his left shoulder. The main melody string ( zuban , "tongue"), seen from the left by the musician, is the only one that is gripped with the fingers of the left hand and is tuned to the tone syllable ( sargam ) pa (corresponds to g ). The second string has the pitch upper sa (corresponds to c ' ), strings three and four middle sa (corresponds to c ) and the fifth string has lower sa (corresponds to C ). There are small frets under individual strings .

Style of play

Statue of Shah Abdul Latif with tanburo in Bhit (Matiari District, Sindh).

The tanburo belongs to religious chant groups and their game is one of the meditative exercises ( Dhikr ) of the Sufis in Sindh. A singer who accompanies himself on the tanburo can play short melodic phrases at the beginning of a song, before he strokes all the strings with his fingernails for rhythmic accentuation with increasing dynamics, otherwise with a wire pick attached to the index finger or with the flat of the right hand hits the strings or next to them on the top of the body.

Regardless of the fact that (apart from Islamic fundamentalists such as Deobandis and Tablighi Jamaat ) a traditionally strict and socially high-ranking group of Muslims ( ashraf ) views Islamic popular piety with suspicion and rejects any similarity to the religious practices of the Hindus , who are viewed as inferior , there are a large number of popular religious in Pakistan Traditions that are especially cultivated at the tombs ( dargah ) of venerated saints. Shiite folk poets in Sindh and Gujarat in the past centuries, for example, equated the prophet Mohammed with the Hindu god Brahma and his daughter Fatima with the goddess Sarasvati - in accordance with the prevailing tendency in popular religions to incorporate elements of foreign religions . Dhikr, in this specific case samāʿ (Arabic, “to hear”, the religious chant) and bhakti became related forms of love for God, which Muslims address to the prophet. The tanburo and the tandura used in Rajasthan for singing bhajans belong to parallel religious traditions.

The most famous singing styles of religious Sufi music in Pakistan and Indian Punjab are the qawwali , in which the singers are accompanied by a tabla and an Indian harmonium , and the sūfiāna kalām ("Sufi poetry"), which is written in the various regional languages be performed by a solo singer and an accompanying instrument. The general name for religious songs of the Pakistani Sufis, which are sung with melodies from folk music, is kāfī. In accordance with the regional Indian folk song tradition, the songs deal with mythical heroic figures and their fateful love for one another. In a popular way, the songs paraphrase the mystical search for the deified lover. In addition to the content and formal relationship to Indian folk poetry, the genus kāfī is less influenced by the Persian form ghasal and more by the Indian meter of qasīda . Musically, kāfī is based on the Indian tonal system of raga ; however, Pakistani singers often disregard the raga scales. There is no particular style of music associated with kāfī . Typical is the accompaniment of the solo singer with harmonium, sarangi and tabla . Further drums from folk music such as the dholak (also dholki ) or the bamboo flute bansuri can be added. In Sindh a dervish (here faqīr ) accompanies his kāfī singing while he dances with the one to two-stringed long-necked lute yaktaro (corresponds to the ektara ) and rattles with wood .

A form related to kāfī is wāy ( wā'ī ). This is the name of the verses accompanied by the tanburo in Sindh , composed by Shah Abdul Latif (1690–1751). Latif is considered the most important popular Sufi poet in the country. He established suitable melodic patterns ( sur ) for his verses , which he derived from classic ragas and folk song melodies. Characteristic of the wāy is the alternation between the main verses performed by a solo singer and the content summary by a choir. The tanburo is used to accompany the wāy, both in the free rhythmic style ( cherr ) and in metrically bound compositions in which the hard hits on the tanburo set the beat ( tal ). Latif 's poetry collection, first published in 1866 under the title Shah jo Risalo , contains 30 chapters (which are also named sur like their melodic implementation), which are named after the classical Indian raga on which the respective melody is based or after a tone scale he introduced . At the beginning of each chapter the tanburo plays an introduction ( tand wajāin ), in between it plays instrumental interludes ( jharr ) addressed to Yakub Shahid. Venerated as a saint, Yakub Shahid was a Muslim martyr according to popular legends; practically nothing is known historically about him. Pilgrims visit his tomb (shrine, mazār ) in Varanasi .

After the musicians have struck drone notes in the lower and middle registers, they follow the lead singer and sing with falsetto voices. The high - female - voice with which men recite Sufi verses is also common with Qawwali singers and represents a form of religious devotion. God is to be praised in the songs with the high voice of a woman.

Some of the sur are based on folk legends such as Sassui Punhun. The tragic love story is about Sassui, the daughter of a Raja who was abandoned as a toddler on the Indus and raised by a washer, and the king's son Punhun, who was in love with the beautiful girl but was not allowed to marry the supposedly socially inferior daughter of a launderer . Abdul Latif brought the Sassui Punhun love story together with the traditional kāfī melody kohiyārī , which is known in western Sindh . Sur kohiyārī is characterized by repetitions in sections and a descending melody line.

Sohni Mehanval is a variant of Hero and Leander , in which it is not the male hero but the girl who swims across the river and drowns after her sister-in-law swaps the jug, which she previously used as a life jacket, for an unfired clay jug. In the imagination of the Sufis, the jug softening in the middle of the river, which causes the death of the girl and her lover, who jumped into the water to help, receives a central symbolism: Whoever is on the (so understood) divine river does not need an unburned one , so unfinished, but a fired, finished clay pot as a companion, that is, an experienced soul guide. In the Sindhi tale Umar Marui , a village girl resists the king's offer to move into the palace and prefers a modest life in the country. In the stories, the ideal of love that transcends social barriers is evoked. Other verses are about the camel that becomes tame on the long journey to the beloved. Latif's poems relating to popular legends are particularly popular.

The mausoleum of Shah Abdul Latif is in the small town of Bhit (Bhitshah, Matiari district) in Sindh province. Here is the center of wāy music. A group of five to six singers recites the verses with a rhyming refrain in unison or octave intervals and everyone accompanies each other on a tanburo . The singers meet every Thursday night, on the anniversary of Abdul Latif or any other public holiday.

literature

  • Alastair Dick: Tanbūro. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 4, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 708

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Kaufmann : Old India. Music history in pictures, Vol. 2. Music of antiquity, delivery 8. VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1981, pp. 140f
  2. ↑ See J.-C. Chabrier: Ṭunbūr. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 10, Brill, Leiden 2000, p. 625
  3. ↑ Hiromi Lorraine Sakata: Spiritual Music and Dance in Pakistan. In: Etnofoor, Vol. 10, No. 1/2 (Muziek & Dans) 1997, pp. 165–173, here p. 170
  4. ^ Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments. Harper & Row, New York 1975, p. 431
  5. ↑ Cf. Michael Knüppel: Once again on the possible origin of osm. tambur (a) ~ dambur (a) ~ damur (a) etc. In: Marek Stachowski (Ed.): Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia. Vol. 14. Krakau 2003, pp. 221-223
  6. ↑ Ali S. Asani: Sufi poetry in the folk tradition of Indo-Pakistan. In: Religion & Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, (The Literature of Islam) Spring 1988, pp. 81–94, here p. 82
  7. ↑ Peter Manuel: North Indian Sufi Popular Music in the Age of Hindu and Muslim Fundamentalism. In: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 52, No. 3, Fall 2008, pp. 378-400, here p. 379
  8. ↑ Hiromi Lorraine Sakata: Devotional Music . In: Alison Arnold (Ed.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 5: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent . Routledge, London 1999, p. 753
  9. ↑ Annemarie Schimmel : Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The history of Sufism. Insel, Frankfurt 1995, pp. 445, 551
  10. ^ Jürgen Wasim Frembgen : Night music in the land of the Sufis. Unheard of Pakistan. Waldgut, Frauenfeld 2010, p. 145
  11. ^ Regula Qureshi: Pakistan. 7. Musical idioms. (i) Sindhi music. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Vol. 18, 2001, p. 922
  12. ↑ Annemarie Schimmel, 1995, pp. 553f
  13. ↑ Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Garland, 1999, p. 759