Tuila

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A tuila lying behind an upright bowling oboe mohori . Both are played as accompaniment in the dance drama Chhau in Odisha .

Tuila , also ṭuila, ṭuhila, ṭohilā and toila , is the simplest form of a single-stringed plucked rod zither without frets . The accompanying instrument for entertainment songs, which is seldom and only played by men in rural areas of the Indian state of Odisha, allows conclusions to be drawn about the form and playing style of the ancient Indian rod zither alapini vina .

Design

A straight, rigid string carrier with one or more strings stretched between both ends is called a stick zither or music stick. The strings can usually be shortened with the fingers on the string holder serving as a fingerboard. In contrast, a musical bow consists of a curved and flexible string carrier. Both basic forms of a stringed instrument need at least one resonance body connected to the string support to amplify the sound .

The Tuila consists of a three feet long bamboo tube ( Mundari pani Bansu ) of about 2.5 centimeters in diameter. At one end there is a sticking up piece of wood ( ghoda ), to which the string ( sutha ) made of twisted cotton yarn, gut or silk is tied with a small distance from the string carrier. The material is selected as it is seasonally available. There is no additional bridge . The string does not run parallel from the wooden spacer, but at an acute angle to just before the other end of the tube, where it is fixed directly to the tube with a loop and several windings. Each player makes his own instrument. He measures the length of the string so that his fingers can grip the string at both ends with forearms stretched forward at a right angle to each other. A few centimeters in front of the cord winding, the half-shell of an elongated calabash ( tumba ) is attached below the string support with the opening facing down. Tumba is the Hindi word for "calabash" and is derived from a regional name for the plucking drum ektara . The resonator is screwed to the string support via a short tubular link ( chimki ) from another calabash using a string made of horsehair that is attached to short pieces of wood inside. As a result, the string is pulled to the string carrier and connected to the resonator for sound transmission.

Style of play

The player holds the tuila while standing vertically downwards and diagonally in front of his upper body with the calabash against the left upper chest area. With the thumb of his left hand on the intermediate piece of the calabash, he shortens the string with the rest of the fingers on the string holder that serves as a fingerboard ( dandi ). Holding his right arm down, he fixes the bamboo tube from below with his thumb and plucks the string with his middle finger. The string is stretched at will, there is no fixed pitch. Since a bridge is missing and thus a bridge widening ( jivari ) attached next to it , the tuila does not produce the sound spectrum rich in overtones characteristic of the tanpura and many other stringed instruments of Indian music . The fine sound modulation can instead be achieved by bringing the calabash opening rhythmically closer to the chest or occasionally placing it on it. Volume, tone and pitch change in this way. The sound of African musical bows, the mvet bridge harp in Cameroon, some African lamellophones and the rare stem drum sahfa in Yemen is influenced in a similar way.

The deepest tetrachord is tapped with three fingers . The empty string produces the root key ( tonic ), according to the notation of the Ragas Sa . The second, third and fourth notes ( Ri, Ga, ma ) are pressed down with the index finger, ring finger and little finger . For the next higher four notes, the fingers remain in an unchanged position in an unusual playing technique. Instead of sliding the fingers of the left hand to a higher position, the index finger of the right hand is placed lightly on the string while the right middle finger plucks the string. Both happen almost simultaneously. As a result, the open string sounds in the fifth note Pa . If the three fingers of the left hand grasp the string as before, the additional notes Da, Ni and Sa 'result . The range of an octave is achieved with just three finger positions. The tone scale used is similar to the Doric mode .

The tuila is common among the Adivasi group of the Munda in the Mayurbhanj district in the northeast of Odisha and in the adjacent Jharkhand . Basically, it is only played by men who accompany their own singing or a choir performing wedding songs. The repertoire includes dance songs, but the tuila is not played with drums to accompany dances. The tuila is respected as a time-honored instrument of the Munda tradition , even if it has become rare today. Lyrics speak of the tuila in connection with the kendra . The Munda understand kendra as a single-string plucked lute of the ektara type , which is used as a drone instrument in songs and dances . Elsewhere in Odisha, tuila is such a lute instrument .

origin

The stringed instruments called vina or vipanci in the Vedas were bow harps . The string instruments mentioned under several names in the ancient Indian main work on music, the Natyashastra , which was written around the turn of the times, are all likely to have been bow harps. Around this time, stone reliefs at Buddhist cult sites show harp-playing Gandharvas and other heavenly beings. In the Mahabharata , one of the two great Indian epics, which acquired its known form around the 4th century AD, a tumba vina is mentioned together with the bamboo flute vamsha , although it is unclear whether a bow harp with a calabash resonator or a rod zither is meant here is. In the 7th century the bow harps had largely disappeared from India, instead stick zithers and lute instruments are depicted. The oldest known images of stick zithers can be found on the wall paintings of the Buddhist caves of Ajanta . In cave 7 one of the flying Gandharvas wears a stick zither over his shoulder, in cave 16 the stick zither is shown together with an arch harp. The figure of a stick zither on the relief "Descent of the Ganga" in Mamallapuram (top row with Gandharvas and Kinnaras , left side) comes from the 7th century , another relief of a stick zither belongs to a stone slab near the local coastal temple. In all of the above images, a male musician holds the zither in the same way as the tuila at an angle in front of his upper body. The handling of the tuila obviously corresponds to the ancient Indian alapini vina , which is described in Sanskrit literature as a vina with a fingerboard ( danda ) of approximately nine hand's widths and a calabash resonator of around 20 centimeters in diameter. It had one or, more rarely, three strings.

Until the 9th century, the simple stick zithers were depicted unchanged with a calabash of the tuila type , later only rarely. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, the transition to the now common form of vinas as stick zithers took place. These are characterized by a much thicker string carrier and a second resonance box at the lower end. Since the string carrier now apparently also functions as a resonance body, the playing position changes. The upper calabash hangs back over the left shoulder. It is still shown flat, so it is open at the bottom. Gradually the number of strings increases. The rudra vina , which is played in classical music in northern India today, has two large, round calabashes as a resonance body. The original vina sank to a regional folk musical instrument that has almost disappeared from the lower class of the population. In Odisha it was preserved in the form of the tuila ; especially in a region in which, as in Bhubaneswar and Konarak , stick zithers are depicted at a particularly large number of medieval Hindu temples .

distribution

In Odisha, another simple stick zither of the Adivasi group Erikala, who traditionally work as basket makers, is known under the name sodi burra . The string runs parallel between two pins at the ends of the bamboo stick. A large calabash is attached in the middle under the string support and connected to the string by a cord. The santals of Odisha use the stick zither buang as a rhythm instrument . A basket woven from bamboo and covered with paper serves as the resonator in the middle. The string further away from the carrier is not connected to the basket resonator. Two or more dancers hold buangs in their hands in group dances and produce a snarling noise when plucking the string. In South India, several musicians in the folk song tradition Villu Pattu strike the musical bow villadi vadyam with wooden sticks on the string and on the resonator made of a large clay pot , also for rhythmic accompaniment . Otherwise, musical arcs have only survived in folk music in a few remote areas. More widespread are the regional variants of one- and two-string spit lute belonging to the ektaras , which are plucked or bowed with a bow: banam in Odisha, tumbi in Punjab , ravanahattha in Rajasthan or the pena in Manipur .

The tuila- like stick zithers in Southeast Asia, which are probably due to Indian cultural influence, include the phin nam tao with calabash in Thailand , dunde, santung and falundo in Sulawesi , the jungga on the East Indonesian island of Sumba and the sulepe on Halmahera . A two- to five-string zither with a resonator made from a coconut shell is known as phin phia by the Lanna speakers in northern Thailand ; The Jarai, who belong to the Vietnamese hill tribe in the Gia Lai province, play the brŏ stick zither with two metal strings and four or six frets . Your calabash half-shell is also held against your breast to modulate the sound. In Cambodia , the two-string sadiu, a rod zither with a resonator half - shell, is retained, which, like the tuila and the African musical bows, is pressed to the chest for sound modulation. The single-string Cambodian kse diev (also sadiev, sadiu ), which is plucked with two fingers and sounds like an African lamellophone, is most closely related to the tuila in terms of shape and playing position . Early representations of these stick zithers can be found on a bas-relief at Angkor Wat from the beginning of the 12th century and on reliefs at the Bayon , which was built in the beginning of the 13th century. The Indian cultural influence extends across Southeast Asia to East Africa, where allegedly Malay seafarers from Indonesia brought the tuila in shape and style of playing similar flat zithers, which are known there as zeze .

literature

  • Carol M. Babiracki: Ṭuila. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 3. Macmillan Press, London 1984, ISBN 0-943818-05-2 , p. 673.
  • Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments . National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, pp. 87f. (1987: Musical Instruments of India. ISBN 81-215-0048-6 )
  • Ferdinand J. de Hen: A Case of Sunk Cultural Property: The Toila. In: The Galpin Society Journal. Volume 29, May 1976, pp. 84-90.
  • Monika Zin : The ancient Indian vīṇās. In: Ellen Hickmann, Ricardo Eichmann (Hrsg.): Studies on music archeology IV. Music archaeological source groups: soil documents, oral tradition, record. Lectures of the 3rd symposium of the International Study Group Music Archeology in the Michaelstein Monastery, 9. – 16. June 2002, pp. 321-362.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments of India. Calcutta 1978, pp. 156-158, cit. in: Monika Zin, p. 334f.
  2. Babiracki, p. 673.
  3. ^ Geneviève Dournon, Carol M. Babiracki: Kendra. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 2. Macmillan Press, London 1984, p. 375.
  4. Walter Kaufmann : Old India. Music history in pictures. Volume II. Ancient Music. Delivery 8. Ed. Werner Bachmann. VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1981, p. 180.
  5. Monika Zin, p. 333.
  6. ^ Deva: Musical Instruments. P. 88.
  7. Monika Zin, p. 335; de Hen, p. 89.
  8. ^ De Hen, pp. 86f.
  9. ^ Deva: Musical Instruments. P. 75.
  10. ^ De Hen, p. 88.
  11. ^ Andrew McGraw: The Pia's Subtle Sustain: Contemporary Ethnic Identity and the Revitalization of the Lanna “Heart Harp”. In: Asian Music. Vol. 38, No. 2, University of Texas Press, Summer-Fall 2007, pp. 115-142.
  12. ^ Music and song of the Jörai. Production by Patrick Kersalé. PEO CD-1051, Paris 2001, tracks 15, 16
  13. Sadiu . The Metropolitan Museum of Art (illustration)
  14. matthewwakem.photoshelter.com (picture of a kse diev )
  15. Terry E. Miller: Say diev. In: Grove Music Online, May 28, 2015
  16. ^ Roger Blench: Musical instruments of South Asian origin depicted on the reliefs at Angkor, Cambodia. EURASEAA, Bougon, September 26, 2006