Shahrud

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For other uses, see Shahrud (disambiguation).
Shahrud
A man plays an Ottoman shahrud, from a 1582 A.D., from an illustration in the Surname-i Hümayun.
String instrument
Classification
DevelopedAntiquity
Related instruments

The Shahrud (

bass) range, like the modern mandobass, mandolone or Algerian mandole
.

The word also referred to a type of zither written about by

Al Farabi and illustrated in his book Kitāb al-mūsīqī al kabīr. That illustration has led scholars to speculate the instrument was a box-zither, or a harp combined with a psaltery
. The šāh-rūd was introduced to Samarkand in the early 10th century and spread to Middle Eastern Arabic music.

Another writer who referred to the instrument was

Abd al-Qadir in his work Maqasid al-Alhan (Persian for: purports of Music)(مقاصد الحان). al-Qadir was interested in the restoration and improvement of stringed musical instruments, and his work provides information about numerous musical instruments, including the shahrud.[2]

Etymology

The Persian word šāh-rūd is made up of šāh , "king" (

Maragha in northwestern Iran mentioned the lute rūd chātī (also rūd chānī) alongside rūdak and rūḍa. Two centuries later, the Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi (1611 – after 1683) described the lute rūḍa as similar to the čahārtār, a nominal four-stringed instrument. The Arab historian al-Maqqari (c. 1577–1632) refers to a 13th-century source that the rūḍa was found in Andalusia.[3]

The šāh-rūd, "the king of the lutes", may have given its name to the North Indian shell-necked sarod lute developed in the 1860s from the Afghan rubāb. However, the Persian word sarod in several spelling variants has been used for much longer to describe lute instruments and generally stands for "music". In Balochistan, the bowed sounds surod and sorud, which are similar to the Indian sarinda, are known.[4]

A stringed instrument called şehrud in the Ottoman period, which frequently appears in 15th and 16th century Ottoman miniature paintings and Persian miniatures during the Timurid Empire (1370–1507) as an oversized pot-bellied variant of the short-necked lute Oud, is named with the medieval šāh- rūd-, but obviously not related in form.[5] The extent to which this instrument was widespread in Arabic music is unclear.[6] Miniatures of the 1582 Ottoman manuscript Surname-i Hümayun show court musicians playing alongside the şehrud, which according to its oversized depiction was probably a bass lute, playing the historical angle harp çeng, the plucked lute kopuz, the bowed lute kemânçe, the pan flute mıskal, the long flute ney and the frame drum daf.[7]

Design

Illustration from Al-Fārābī (about 870-950): Kitāb al-mūsīqī al kabīr Drawing of a musical instrument, called ""šāh-rūd"")

A published account of the šāh-rūd comes from a 13th-century manuscript preserved in the National Library in Cairo, the only other from what is believed to be a 12th-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid.[8] The Madrid depiction is more closely surrounded by writing, executed less carefully and without compasses; structurally, the two do not differ. The Cairo drawing, on the other hand, is carefully constructed with compass and ruler. It is unclear whether both drawings are based on the same or a different template, or whether the later Cairo drawing was copied from the earlier one in Madrid. From archaeologically excavated clay figures, Sassanid rock-reliefs or Persian book miniatures often give a rough idea of the appearance of historical musical instruments, only the number of strings is usually adapted to artistic requirements and is rarely realistic. This also applies to the generally more reliable representations in musicological works. For example, the ornamental embellishments of an angular harp (čang) in a 13th-century drawing belong more to artistic license than to actual appearance. Harps are often depicted without any strings at all or with strings leading out into the void. Sometimes the musician might not be able to hold his instrument in the manner shown or he might not be able to grip the strings.

In the illustration of the šāh-rūd, the parallel strings run across the top like a box zither, but end somewhere outside on the right side. The six shorter (highest) strings are snapped off at their ends. A second bundle of strings leading upwards at right angles to it is enclosed in a curved wooden frame resembling the yokes of a lyre or the frame of a harp. These strings also end outside the construction. One explanation for why both string systems protrude beyond the instrument could be that the draftsman continued to draw the string ends, which hang down after their point of attachment and were often provided with an appendage and left for decoration, as a straight line. The Madrid instrument has 40 strings, 27 of which run across the closed body and 13 perpendicular to the frame; the drawing from Cairo shows a šāh-rūd with 48 strings, 29 strings across the body and 19 to the frame.[9]

The musicologist and orientalist

Abd al-Qadir, the šāh-rūd had ten double strings in the 15th century and was twice as long as the oud .[14]

In addition to the two depictions of the Kitāb al-Mūsīqā, a differently drawn šāh-rūd is depicted in the incunabula from 1474 of the work Quaestiones in librum II sententiarum written by

soundboard.[15]

Distribution

The šāh-rūd goes back to a musician named Ḫulaiṣ ibn al-Aḥwaṣ (also called Ḥakīm ibn Aḥwaṣ al-Suġdī), who introduced this instrument to Samarkand in 918/19 A.D. and traveled with it in Central Asian Sogdia. It later spread to Iraq, Syria and Egypt.

Arabic instrumental music seems to have changed considerably around this time, according to the Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr. In the 19th century the slender, solid form of the barbaṭ developed into the form of the short-necked lute known today with a round body made of glued lathes of wood, which since then has been the most popular Arabic stringed instrument under the name oud. Also developed was the Tuhfat al-'Oudwas, a lute half the size of the oud. The “perfect lute” (ʿūd kāmil) with five double strings was the benchmark. During the rule of the Abbasids , as stated by al-Fārābī, there were two distinct long-necked lutes, the older ṭunbūr al-mīzanī (also ṭunbūr al-baghdādī) and the ṭunbūr al-churasānī, both named after their areas of distribution, Baghdad and Khorasan, respectively. In addition, there were the rarer plucked-stringed instruments, of which the lyre (miʿzafa) was used more frequently than the harp (ǧank), and the trapezoid box-zither (qānūn). Singers accompanied themselves on lute instruments, and no account is known of a singer playing a lyre or harp himself.[16][17]

The šāh-rūd is documented up to the 15th century. For the 16th century its existence is no longer verifiable. A similarly complicated stringed instrument is an archlute built by Wendelin Tieffenbrucker (German luthier, active 1570–1610) with parallel strings attached to the side of a harp-like frame (a harp lute). This exceptional, unique piece, made no later than 1590, had a pitch range of 6.5 octaves and could be a successor to the šāh-rūd, which the lute maker Tiefenbrucker may have known.[18]

Literature

  • Al-Fārābī : Kitāb al-Mūsīqi al-Kabīr. Translated into Persian by A. Azarnush, Tehran 1996, p. 55.
  • Henry George Farmer : Islam. ( Heinrich Besseler , Max Schneider (eds.): History of Music in Pictures. Volume III. Music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Delivery 2). German music publisher, Leipzig 1966, pp. 96, 116.
  • Henry George Farmer: A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century . Luzac, London 1973, p. 154, p. 209; archive.org (1st edition: 1929).
  • Henry George Farmer: ʿŪd. In: The Encyclopedia of Islam. new edition . Volume 10. Brill, Leiden 2000, p. 769.
  • Pavel Kurfürst: The Šáh-rúd. In: Archives for Musicology . Volume 41, issue 4. Steiner, Stuttgart 1984, pp. 295-308.

See also

References

  1. ^ "ŞEHRUD". Retrieved 26 November 2022.
  2. ^ "5.4 - Piecing Together History, String By String - The Reconstruction of Azerbaijan's Medieval Instruments". Azer.com. Retrieved 21 April 2021.
  3. ^ Henry George Farmer, The Encyclopaedia of Islam , p. 769
  4. ^ Adrian McNeil, Inventing the Sarod: A Cultural History . Seagull Books , London 2004, p. 27, ISBN 978-81-7046-213-2
  5. ^ Ersu Pekin, The Sounds of Istanbul: Music in Istanbul in the Ottoman Period. History of Istanbul, 2019
  6. ^ Owen Wright, Arab music. 7. Musical instruments. (i) Pre-1918. In: Grove Music Online , 2001
  7. ^ Hans de Zeeuw: The Ottoman Tanbûr. The Long-Necked Lute of Ottoman Art Music. Archaeopress, Oxford 2022, p. 22
  8. ^ Reproduced as a frontispiece in Henry George Farmer: A History of Arabian Music
  9. ^ Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 299
  10. ^ Henry George Farmer, Islam. Musikgeschichte in Bildern. p. 96
  11. ^ Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 306
  12. ^ George Dimitri Sawa: Classification of Musical Instruments in the Medieval Middle East. In: Virginia Danielson, Scott Marius, Dwight Reynolds (eds): The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 6: The Middle East. Routledge, New York / London 2002, p. 395
  13. ^ Ellen Hickmann: Musica instrumentalis. Studien zur Klassifikation des Musikinstrumentariums im Mittelalter. (Sammlung musikwissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen. Volume 55) Valentin Koerner, Baden-Baden 1971, p. 61
  14. ^ Henry George Farmer, Henry George Farmer: Islam. Musikgeschichte in Bildern, p. 116
  15. ^ Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, S. 301–303
  16. ^ George Dimitri Sawa: Music Performance Practice in the Early ʿAbbāsid Era 132–320 AH / 750–932 AD. The Institute of Mediaeval Music, Ottawa 2004, pp. 149-151
  17. ^ Henry George Farmer, A History of Arabian Music , p. 155
  18. ^ Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 308

External links

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