Tautirut

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Tautirut from Hudson Bay . Illustration of a box zither in Lucien M. Turner, 1894, p. 259

Tautirut ( Inuktitut script : ᑕᐅᑎᕈᑦ ), also tautiruut, tauterut, tautik is a stringed instrument with mostly three strings, which, according to its design , is counted as a box zither . The "Inuit violin" is known to the Inuit in northeastern Canada . According to popular belief , their shape is probably derived from drone zithers that seamen brought with them from northern Scotland in the 18th century .

Design

Replica of the historical two-stringed lyre gue of the Shetland Islands with the characteristics of a box zither for the tautirut .

The ethnologist and naturalist Lucien M. Turner (1884–1909) described the instrument in 1894 as a simple violin made of spruce or birch wood with one to three strings of twisted sinews . According to the Hornbostel-Sachs system, violins belong to the lute instruments that consist of a resonance body of any shape and an attached neck. The tautirut , on the other hand, is one of the box zithers because the strings run over the top of a box that serves as a string carrier. Its slender body, made of boards, is trapezoidal and measures 50 to 75 centimeters in length with a width of about 13 centimeters at the wider end. One such, almost long rectangular string instrument is in the Canadian National Museum of History and Society . It comes from Baffin Island and measures 51.4 centimeters in length, 9.5 centimeters at its widest point and is 8 centimeters deep. The instrument pictured by Turner looks different, it is bulged in a semicircle on the broader side and tapered to a point on the narrow side. There is a sound hole under the strings near the bridge.

Most tautirut have three strings made of a sinew or cord, which lead from the edge on the wider side over a moveable bridge on the ceiling to tuning pegs or another attachment at the narrow end. One string is used as a drone , the other two are melody strings that are picked up with the fingers of the left hand or occasionally crossed without shortening. The bow consists of a thin, elastic wooden stick, which instead of the hair covering is stretched around by a strip of whale bone. This is a combination of a medieval rubbing stick and a modern bow. The musician holds the instrument while sitting on his lap or he puts it across on a table in front of him. The strings are bowed at a fast pace, creating a rough sound.

Origin and Distribution

The simple form of a box-neck lute from Alaska called agiarut came into the collection of the McManus Galleries , Dundee , Scotland in 1874 .

The traditional music of the Inuit and other Eskimo ethnic groups in the Arctic Circle is almost exclusively vocal. The melodies have a small range and move in relatively little defined intervals around a pitch, which has the function of a fundamental . Up until 1902 only melodies consisting of two or three tones were described. The only musical instrument of its own is a large flat frame drum called qila , which used to be used as a shaman's drum . In the past, the Eskimos sometimes still used rattles , rattles and buzzers . The stringed instruments, which only occur in small numbers and in certain areas, as they came into the possession of museums in the 19th century, are considered to be a recent cultural takeover from neighboring peoples, Christian missionaries or traders with whom the Eskimos were in contact, especially the Basic form of all stringed instruments, the musical bow , only occurs in a few areas in America.

Together with the tautirut , the Apache fiddle is mentioned as a rarity , the origin of which is disputed. Paul Collaer reflects the popular belief that the Apache fiddle - a two-stringed tubular zither that was bowed with a horsehair bow - originally came from Mexico and was adapted to the European violin by the Apaches. The shape of the tubular zither has little in common with the simple box-neck lute common in South America, which is likely to be predominantly of Afro-Arab origin.

The ethnologist Ernest William Hawkes (1916) considered the tautirut to be a coarse imitation of fiddles that the Eskimos must have seen on European whaling ships. According to Peter Cooke (1986), the low distribution of the tautirut among the Inuit, especially in the hinterland of the Hudson Bay, is an indication that the instrument was used by sailors from the Hudson's Bay Company at the end of the 17th century or in the 18th century by the Orkney and brought to the Shetland Islands . The ethnomusicologist Anthony Baines (1992) shows similarities between the tautirut and the Icelandic fiðla . Although the fiðla was already known to the seafaring Vikings , Arima and Einarsson (1976) consider an early medieval spread of the instrument as far as Canada to be unlikely for historical reasons.

Sir Arthur Edmondstone first mentioned the Shetland Islands gue in 1809 , which was apparently an indigenous forerunner of the violin. The gue had two strings made of horse hair and was used in the vertical playing position of a cello to accompany entertainment dances. Because of the yoke arms on one side, the gue, like the Welsh crwth, belongs to the lyres . All later discussions about the form and relationship of the long-vanished gue and a possible connection with the tautirut are based on Edmondstone's description.

The tautirut is related to the group of Nordic drone zithers, which include the Norwegian plucked langeleik , the Icelandic langspil , as well as the crossed zithers the Icelandic fiðla and the northern Finnish virsikantele , which exclusively accompanied the psalm song. The box-shaped Estonian talharpa and the similar Finnish jouhikko belong to the lyres in terms of instruments.

A common word for “fiddle” in Inuktitut and Greenlandic is agiarut . To distinguish it from the traditional string instrument tautirut , European fiddles are now called agiarut . Another old Greenlandic word for today's violin that has undergone a change in meaning is agiaq (formerly "shaman's grindstone").

literature

  • Eugene Yuji Arima, Magnús Einarsson: Whence and When the “Eskimo Fiddle”? In: Folk , Vol. 18, 1976, pp. 23-40
  • Paul Collaer: America. Eskimo and Native American people. ( Music history in pictures , Volume I: Musikethnologie, Delivery 2) Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1966
  • Beverly Diamond: Tautirut. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 4, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, pp. 722f

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lucien M. Turner: Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory. Eleventh annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution . 1894, p. 259 ( at Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b Lucien Schneider: Ulirnaisigutiit: an Inuktitut-English dictionary of Northern Quebec, Labrador and Eastern Arctic dialects with an English-Inuktitut index , translated from the French. Presses de l'Université Laval, Québec 1985, ISBN 2-7637-7065-7 , p. 402
  3. ↑ Lucien M. Turner, 1894, p. 259
  4. ^ Paul Collaer: America. Music history in pictures , 1966, p. 70
  5. ↑ Beverly Diamond: Tautirut , 2014, p. 722
  6. ^ Paul Collaer: America. Music history in pictures, 1966, p. 32
  7. ↑ Michael Hauser: Traditional Inuit Songs from the Thule Area. Volume 1. Museum Tusculanum Press, Njalsgade (Denmark) 2010, p. 571, ISBN 978-8763525893
  8. ^ Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, Franziska von Rosen: Visions of sound: musical instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America . Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo (Ontario) 1994, p. 56, footnote 6, ISBN 0-88920-228-1 .
  9. ^ Max Peter Baumann : String instruments in Latin America. In: Erich Stockmann (Ed.): Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis VIII. (Musikhistor. Museets Skrifter. 10) Musikmuseets, Stockholm 1985, pp. 157–167, here p. 165, footnote 40
  10. ^ Paul Collaer: America. Music history in pictures, 1966, p. 90
  11. ^ Ernest William Hawkes: The Labrador Eskimo . (Geological Survey of Canada, Memoir 91. Anthropological Series, No. 14) Government Printing Bureau, Ottawa 1916, p. 122 ( at Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Anthony Baines: The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-19-311334-1 , p. 189.
  13. ^ Peter Cooke: The Fiddle Tradition of the Shetland Isles. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986, pp. 4f, ISBN 0-521-26855-9
  14. ↑ Beverly Diamond: Tautirut, 2014, p. 723
  15. ↑ Michael Fortescue, Inge Kleivan: Greenlandic-Danish. In: Hans Goebl (Ed.): Kontaktlinguistik / Contact Linguistics / Linguistique de contact. 2nd half volume, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1997, p. 1052