Tidinite

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Tidinit , also tidnit ( hassania ), DMG tidīnīt, Pl .: tidānāten; is a plucked long neck lute that is traditionally played by nomadic Berber people in the West African Sahara in Mauritania and in the Western Sahara area . It is one of the inland skewers with a shell resonator.

origin

The two basic forms of West African lute instruments, long oval and circular, both appear for the first time on the African continent at the beginning of the ancient Egyptian 18th dynasty on wall paintings in burial chambers . The Egyptian lute had a long stick-like neck with or without frets made of leather strips. From Egypt, the gauntlet is likely to have spread up the Nile to the Kingdom of Kush (7th century BC to 4th century AD).

From the 3rd or 4th century AD the first tribal groups of the Sanhajah came to the western Sahara from the east or northeast. They probably not only introduced camels , but also preforms of today's musical instruments into the Maghreb . Until the Arab conquest and Islamization of North Africa from the 8th century, the culture of various Berber tribes had spread south to the black kingdom of Gana . The inland spits of the Berbers (such as the gimbri ) in the north of the Western Sahara and similar musical instruments in the Sahel region to the south (such as the ngoni ) are still related to one another today, but not to those of later introduced Arabic music . They occur in the areas of West Africa that were Islamized by Arabs from the 11th century onwards.

The tidinit- related lutes in the region are the box-shaped three-string gimbri ( sintir ) played by the Gnawa musicians in Morocco , the single-string fiddle ribab of the Moroccan Schlöh- Berber, the loutar of the Imazighen (Berbers in Morocco), the three-stringed lute tahardent ( teharden ) of the Tuareg and, as a well-known example from the black African south, the three to four-string ngoni from Mali , which in Senegal bears the Wolof name xalam . The tidinit is only played by men in Mauritania. The melody instrument used by women, the ardin bow harp, may also come from Egypt . It was first mentioned by a French traveler in the 17th century.

Design

In 1950, ten types of musical instruments were listed for Mauritania, most of which have a bowl-shaped resonance body covered with a skin at the top. The tidinit has a slender, oval body (tāzuwwa) with a slightly waisted body (tāzuwwa) made from a calabash or mostly from the wood of Balsamodedron africanum, other name Commiphora africana, in Hassaniya the three to four meter high tree is called adreṣ (Pl.). The body is made from a piece of wood, which is hollowed out thin-walled with a dexel , neǧǧar (m.), Nǧāǧīr (pl.). The fine work is done with knives and rasps. The soundboard consists of a degreased but untanned animal skin. In contrast to tanned leather, this raw hide becomes very hard and remains firm. The skin swollen in water is soft when wet and can be pulled over the body and pressed against the sides. When it dries, the skin shrinks and forms a tightly stretched membrane. Using these tensile forces, wooden parts are otherwise fixed together with strips of skin.

The tidinit is counted among the long-necked spit lute, because the long round neck made of a wooden rod is led through the body lengthways in the middle to the lower end, it is also called the internal spit lute. This is where the four horsehair strings end, recently made of gut or nylon, which are attached to the neck not with swivels , but more simply with leather strips. The single-stringed Tuareg string lute imzad has a similar structure . Under the bridge there is usually a circular sound hole cut into the membrane, which is called the "eye". It should be about the diameter of a tea glass. The strings are brought together directly behind the bridge, which is a maximum of two centimeters high, and fed into the hole where they are attached to the inside of the wooden bar. The sound ceiling is usually painted black with geometric patterns. The neck is fretless, the strings are plucked with a plate (ḍfer iggīw) that is attached to the thumb with a leather ring.

Style of play

In Mauritania, professional singers and songwriters called Iggāwen ( Sing. Iggīw ) make music in a strongly hierarchical society divided into classes. The general term for this musical caste in West Africa is griot . The Iggāwen traditionally live in large families within the large tent camps in South Mauritania and wander between the camps. They are socially inferior, but still no festival event can do without their musical performances. The men sing and play Tidinit in small music groups, the women sing to Ardin and dance. Music theory knows about 30 different tonal melodic basic components , which are assigned to different modal classes. The musical knowledge is passed on orally . The tidinit is the only instrument with which the complex fundamentals of music are practically passed on. The different modal characters of the music are also shaped by defined playing techniques ( ubit ): Ẓemd denotes a muted tone, areddas (also aseyyar ) is a tone that is created by stronger plucking, azgarit denotes a staccato-like repetition of notes , engayʿ is the name of vibrato with one depressed finger of the left hand. If the vibrato is produced with one immobile finger pressed and a second rapidly moving finger in front of it, it is called edgemgim . Glissando is called nejra (or znīt ).

An urban musical culture with larger orchestras has hardly developed in a country in which a social change to a sedentary way of life did not begin until the 1940s and whose capital was only founded in 1960. Still, the majority of the griot families now live in Nouakchott , a town that houses nearly a third of the country's total population. There the tidinit - in the usual music performances at weddings - has largely been replaced by the electric guitar .

The first international studio recording of Mauritanian music was made by Iggāwen musicians Khalifa Ould Eide and Dimi Mint Abba in 1990. Halfway through the pieces on the CD, the tidinit's electric guitar takes over the vocal accompaniment. Both instruments are played by Khalifa Ould Eide, who was instrumental in introducing the new instrument.

There are no social classes among the Sahrawis, the tidinit can be played by any musician. There are two main instruments in Sahrawi haul music: the melody instrument tidinit with its soft and soft sound is accompanied by the barrel drum T'bal played by women . The civil war over the territory of Western Sahara led to social changes at the end of the 1970s, which brought about an equalization of society, which also made the Iggāwen disappear. At the same time, the tidinit was replaced in large areas of music by the electric guitar, which now ensures music that can be heard from a wide range thanks to the style of playing adopted by the tidinit . It is also better suited to the new music genre of the Polisario revolutionary songs.

literature

  • Wolfgang Creyaufmüller: Nomad culture in the Western Sahara. The material culture of the Moors, their handicraft techniques and basic ornamental structures. Burgfried-Verlag, Hallein (Austria) 1983, pp. 60, 128, 365, 441

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ulrich Wegner: African string instruments. (New part 41. Department of Ethnic Music V.) Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, 1984, p. 136
  2. Creyaufmüller, p. 441
  3. Booklet accompanying the Sahrawi 3 CD box . Intuition Music & Media, 1998, p. 80
  4. ^ Jürgen Elsner: North Africa. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Sachteil 9, 1998, col. 225
  5. Ulrich Wegner, p. 141
  6. ^ Khalifa Ould Eide & Dimi Mint Abba: Moorish Music from Mauretania. World Circuit 1990, WCD 019
  7. Abba, Dimi Mint Benaissi (1958-) . In: Biographical Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa . 2008