Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes along the Silk Road and beyond

Hans de Zeeuw

Mar 2019 · Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

About this ebook

‘Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes Along the Silk Road and Beyond’ explores the origin, history, construction, and playing techniques of tanbûrs, a musical instrument widely used over vast territories and over many centuries. The diffusion of the tanbûr into the musical cultures along the Silk Road resulted in a variety of tanbûrs with two or more, occasionally doubled or tripled courses, a varying number and variously tuned frets, each having its own characteristic sound, playing technique, and repertory. Since the last century, tanbûrs spread beyond the Silk Road while new versions continue to appear due to changing musical and tonal demands made on them. Similar or identical instruments are also known by other names, such as saz or bağlama, dotâr or dutâr, setâr, dömbra, and dambura.

About the author

HANS DE ZEEUW began to take bağlama lessons and became interested in its long and fascinating history while working at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and studying at the Open University. This led him to decide to break off his studies and focus, for many years, on research into the Turkish bağlama under the supervision of Dr L.J. Plenckers of the Department of Musicology of the University of Amsterdam and Dr Okan Murat Öztürk of the Devlet Konservatuvarı of the Başkent Üniversitesi in Ankara. In 2009 he published De Turkse Langhalsluit of bağlama (Turkish Long-Necked Lute or Bağlama) with the support of the Dutch Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. His lecture to the Uluslararası Müzik Kongresi in Istanbul in 2006 was published in Türkiyede Müzik Kültürü in 2011. A short article about the Ottoman tanbûr, The Ottoman Tanbûr: Introducing the Long-Necked Lute of Ottoman Classical Music, followed in 2018 in Expedition, a magazine of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthroplogy. He is planning an in-depth study about the Ottoman tanbûr for the near future.