The santur ( ; ) is a hammered dulcimer of origin.[--- Rashid, Subhi Anwar (1989). Al-ʼĀlāt al-musīqīyya al-muṣāhiba lil-Maqām al-ʻIrāqī. Baghdad: Matbaʻat al-ʻUmmāl al-Markazīyya.
]
History
The santur was invented and developed in
Iran and its region. The earliest sign of it coming from
Assyrian people and
Babylonia Petroglyph (669 B.C.); it shows the instrument being played while hanging from the player's neck.
This instrument traveled and developed in different regions of the Middle East. Musicians modified the original design over the centuries, yielding a wide array of musical scales and Musical tuning. The first santur were probably made of wood, perhaps with stone elements, and goat gut strings.
According to Habib Hasan Touma, the Babylonian santur was the ancestor of the harp, the yangqin, the harpsichord, the qanun, the cimbalom, and the hammered dulcimers.
Name
The name 'santur' may come from Persian
sanṭīr, a borrowing of the Greek ψαλτήριον 'psalterion'.
[ Oxford English Dictionary, updated December 2022, ''s.v.'' ' santoor'] The
Biblical Aramaic form
psantērīn is found in the Book of Daniel 3:5.
Description
The oval-shaped
mezrabs (mallets) are feather-weight and are held between the thumb, index, and middle fingers. A typical Persian santur has two sets of nine bridges, providing a range of approximately three
Diatonic scale . The mezrabs are made out of wood with tips that may or may not be wrapped with cotton or felt.
The right-hand strings are made of brass or copper, while the left-hand strings are made of steel.
A total of 18 bridges divide the santur into three positions. Over each bridge cross four strings tuned in unison, spanning horizontally across the right and left side of the instrument. There are three sections of nine pitches: each for the bass, middle, and higher octave called behind the left bridges comprising 27 tones altogether. The top "F" note is repeated twice, creating a total of 25 separate tones on the santur. The Persian santur is primarily tuned to a variety of different diatonic scales utilizing 1/4 tones which are designated into 12 modes ( ) of Persian classical music. These 12 Dastgahs are the repertory of Persian classical music known as the Radif.Hormoz Farhat (1990). 052130542X, Cambridge University Press. 052130542X
Derivations
Similar musical instruments have been present since
Middle Ages all over the world, including Armenia, China, Greece, India, etc.
The Indian santoor is wider, more rectangular and has more strings. Its corresponding mallets are also held differently and played with a different technique.
The Eastern Europe version of the santur called the cimbalom, which is much larger and chromatic, is used to accompany Hungarian folk music, Klezmer, and Slavic music, as well as Romani music.
Iraqi santur
The
Iraqi santur (also santour, santoor) () is a hammered dulcimer of Mesopotamian origin.
It is a trapezoid box zither with a walnut body and 92 steel (or bronze) strings. The strings, tuned to the same pitch in groups of four, are struck with two wooden mallets called "
midhrab". The tuning of these 23 sets of strings extends from the lower
yakah (G) up to
jawab jawab husayni (A). The bridges are called
dama ("chessmen" in Iraqi Arabic) because they look like pawns. It is native to Iraq, Syria, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Greece (the Aegean coasts) and Azerbaijan.
It and the Rebab are the main instruments used in the classical Maqam al-iraqi tradition.[
]
The Iraqi santur has, since its inception, been fully chromatic, allowing for full maqam modulations. It uses 12 bridges of steel strings on both sides. Three of these bridges are movable: B half flat qaraar, E half flat, and B half flat jawaab. The non-standard version of the Iraqi santur includes extra bridges so that there's no need to move those three bridges. However, playing it is a bit harder than playing the standard 12-bridge santur.[
]
Notable players
Iran
Iraq
Notable players of the Iraqi santur include:[Al-Hanafi, Jalal (1964). Al-Mughannūn al-Baghdādīyyūn wa al-Maqām al-ʻIrāqī. Baghdad: Wizarat al-Irshad.]
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Abdallah Ali (1929–1998)
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Akram Al Iraqi
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Amir ElSaffar
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Azhar Kubba
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Bahir Hashem Al Rajab
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Basil al-Jarrah
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Ghazi Mahsub al-Azzawi
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Hugi Salih Rahmain Pataw (1848–1933)
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Hashim Al Rajab
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Hala Bassam
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Hammudi Ali al-Wardi
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Haj Hashim Muhammad Rajab al-Ubaydi (1921–2003)
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Hendrin Hikmat (1974–)
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Heskel Shmuli Ezra (1804–1894)
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Mohamed Abbas
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Muhammad Salih al-Santurchi (18th century)
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Muhammad Zaki Darwish al-Samarra'i (1955–)
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Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Tawfiq
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Qasim Muhammad Abd (1969–)
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Rahmatallah Safa'i
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Sa'ad Abd al-Latif al-Ubaydi
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Sabah Hashim
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Saif Walid al-Ubaydi
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Salman Enwiya
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Salman Sha'ul Dawud Bassun (1900–1950)
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Sha'ul Dawud Bassun (19th century)
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Shummel Salih Shmuli (1837–1915)
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Wesam al-Azzawy (1960–)
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Yusuf Badros Aslan (1844–1929)
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Yusuf Hugi Pataw (1886–1976)
Greece
Players of the Greek Santouri include:
India
Notable players of the santoor include:
Germany
Poland
Turkey
Lebanon
From around the world
Versions of the santur or hammered dulcimer are used throughout the world. In Eastern Europe, a larger descendant of the hammered dulcimer called the cimbalom is played and has been used by a number of Classical music , including Zoltán Kodály, Igor Stravinsky, and Pierre Boulez, and more recently, in a different musical context, by Blue Man Group. The khim is the name of both the Thailand and the Khmer people hammered dulcimer. The Chinese yangqin is a type of hammered dulcimer that originated in Iran. The santur and santoor are found in the Middle East and India, respectively.
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Afghanistan – santur
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Armenian - սանթուր (sant'ur)
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Azerbaijan – santur
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Austria – Hackbrett
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Belarus – Цымбалы (tsymbaly)
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Belgium – hakkebord
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Brazil – saltério
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Cambodia – khim
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Catalonia – saltiri
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China – 扬琴 (yangqin)
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Croatian – cimbal, cimbale
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Czech Republic – cimbál
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Denmark – hakkebræt
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France – tympanon
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Germany – Hackbrett
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Greece – santouri
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Hungary – cimbalom
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India – santoor
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Russia – цимбалы tsymbaly, Дульцимер (dultsimer)
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Serbia – цимбал (tsimbal)
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Slovakia – cimbal
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Slovenia – cimbale, oprekelj
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Spain (and Spanish-speaking countries) – salterio, dulcémele
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Sweden – hackbräde, hammarharpa
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Switzerland – Hackbrett
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Tajikistan – сантур, santur
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Thailand – khim
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Turkey – santur
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Ukraine – Цимбали tsymbaly
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United Kingdom – hammered dulcimer
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United States – hammered dulcimer
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Uzbekistan – chang
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Vietnam – đàn tam thập lục ()
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Yiddish – tsimbl
See also
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Persian traditional music
Gallery
File:Ali Bahrami-Fard performing in Vahdat Hall.jpg|Ali Bahrami-Fard playing in Vahdat Hall
File:Iraqi Santur Player.jpg|Chalghi santur player playing on a non-standard Iraqi santur
File:Santur Hand Position.jpg|Santur hand position
File:Santur Technique Video.theora.ogv|Santur technique
Notes
Bibliography
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Al-Hanafi, Jalal (1964). Al-Mughannūn al-Baghdādīyyūn wa al-Maqām al-ʻIrāqī. Baghdad: Wizarat al-Irshad.
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Touma, Habib Hassan (1996). The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwartz. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press. .
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Children's Book of Music'
Further reading
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Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle (1980). "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite". Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26.
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Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle (1984). A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music, Sources from the Ancient Near East, vol. 2, fasc. 2. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications.
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Fink, Robert (1981). The Origin of Music: A Theory of the Universal Development of Music. Saskatoon: Greenwich-Meridian.
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Gütterbock, Hans (1970). "Musical Notation in Ugarit". Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 64, no. 1 (1970): 45–52.
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Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1971). The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115:131–49.
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Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1974). "The Cult Song with Music from Ancient Ugarit: Another Interpretation". Revue d'Assyriologie 68:69–82.
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Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1997). "Musik, A: philologisch". Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie 8, edited by Dietz Otto Edzard, 463–82. Berlin: De Gruyter. .
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Kilmer, Anne (2001). "Mesopotamia §8(ii)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
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Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn, Richard L. Crocker, and Robert R. Brown (1976). Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music. Berkeley: Bit Enki Publications, 1976. Includes LP record, Bit Enki Records BTNK 101, reissued s.d. as CD.
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Vitale, Raoul (1982). "La Musique suméro-accadienne: gamme et notation musicale". Ugarit-Forschungen 14 (1982): 241–63.
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Wellesz, Egon, ed. (1957). New Oxford History of Music Volume I: Ancient and Oriental Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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West, Martin. Litchfiel. (1994). "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts". Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May): 161–79.
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Wulstan, David (1968). "The Tuning of the Babylonian Harp". Iraq 30:215–28.
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Wulstan, David (1971). "The Earliest Musical Notation". Music and Letters 52 (1971): 365–82.
External links
