Product Code Database
The Shahrud (, from , DMG šāh-rūd or šāh-i-rūd) was a short-necked lute, illustrated in the Surname-i Hümayun, resembling an oud or barbat, but being much larger. The larger size gave the instrument added resonance and a deeper (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 angular 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.
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.Adrian McNeil, Inventing the Sarod: A Cultural History . Seagull Books , London 2004, p. 27, ISBN 978-81-7046-213-2
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.Ersu Pekin, The Sounds of Istanbul: Music in Istanbul in the Ottoman Period. History of Istanbul, 2019 The extent to which this instrument was widespread in Arabic music is unclear.Owen Wright, Arab music. 7. Musical instruments. (i) Pre-1918. In: Grove Music Online , 2001 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 komuz, the bowed lute kemânçe, the pan flute mıskal, the long flute ney and the frame drum daf.Hans de Zeeuw: The Ottoman Tanbûr. The Long-Necked Lute of Ottoman Art Music. Archaeopress, Oxford 2022, p. 22
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.Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 299
The musicologist and orientalist Rodolphe d'Erlanger (1872-1932), whose six-volume work edition La musique arabe contains a translation of al-Fārābī's Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr in the first two volumes, classified the šāh-rūd as a zither in 1935. Henry George Farmer (1882–1965) previously called it an 'archlute or zither' in A History of Arabian Music (1929), adding that it was "certainly an archlute by the early 15th century," twice the length of a lute. Influenced by d'Erlanger, others wanted to see a harp or psaltery, which is why Farmer in The Sources of Arabian Music (1940) turned it into a "Harp Psaltery". In the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1934), Farmer had mentioned the šāh-rūd in the article ʿŪd, i.e. with the oriental lute instruments. This Farmers section was included unchanged in the 2000 reissue, as Farmer later reverted to his original view. Accordingly, one set of strings should be thought of as melody strings over a fretboard and the other set of strings as drone strings leading to separate pegs. This view is reinforced by al-Fārābī, who distinguished this particular instrument from the angular harps (Persian čang, Arabic ǧank) and from the lyres (Arabic miʿzafa).Henry George Farmer, Islam. Musikgeschichte in Bildern. p. 96 Pavel Kurfürst agreed with Farmer's interpretation as a “Harp Psaltery”.Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 306 The kanun player and music historian George Dimitri Sawa, on the other hand, speaks of a zither.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 Al-Fārābī gave a pitch range of four octaves in the 10th century.Ellen Hickmann: Musica instrumentalis. Studien zur Klassifikation des Musikinstrumentariums im Mittelalter. (Sammlung musikwissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen. Volume 55) Valentin Koerner, Baden-Baden 1971, p. 61 According to Abd al-Qadir, the šāh-rūd had ten double strings in the 15th century and was twice as long as the oud .Henry George Farmer, Henry George Farmer: Islam. Musikgeschichte in Bildern, p. 116
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 Johannes Duns Scotus. The incunable is in the Ethnographic Museum in Brno kept in the Czech Republic and probably originated in Brno. The stringed instrument, depicted as a colored pen drawing in a decorative border between plant ornaments, is held in the hand of a standing musician. This instrument with a different body shape, but also with inwardly curved edges and without sound holes, as in the Arabic manuscripts, is shown in perspective in the playing position and thus allows an estimation of its size. On the other hand, the number of strings remains unclear here, since only as many strings were drawn in parallel as was possible in the 25 millimeter long illustration. In the Arabic drawings, the corpus has six edges, in the Brno depiction there is one more, which may be due to inaccuracy. Judging by the coloring, parchment would have been possible as a soundboard.Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, S. 301–303
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 angular 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.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. 149-151Henry George Farmer, A History of Arabian Music , p. 155
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.Pavel Kurfürst, 1984, p. 308
|
|
