Since then, the chuur fiddle has been separated from general huqin till now. In Northern Song dynasty, when the Mongols are forming, horse-tail huqin (馬尾胡琴) appears. In Tang dynasty (600s~800s), when the ethnic Mongols were still a branch of Shiwei people, there appeared to be records of huqin. The Wikipedia entry for the Morin Khuur (see image above) statesĮven though the morin huur does not own a long history, its direct predecessor Chuurqin has a long history. Also, while the range of most of these world fiddles fits either into the violin or viola registers, the tuning is more often than not closer to the viola or cello. It is only in the European countries that a vertical rather than horizontal arrangement evolved. What’s most remarkable about a majority of the world’s bowed string instruments is the fact that nearly all are played upright, like the cello. As Kalhor explains, he was a master and played kamancheh all his life and never switched to violin–he “held on”–essentially becoming the link between the old tradition and rising generations of younger kamancheh players (this has also happened with the Swedish Nyckelharpa). He started on the violin as there were no kamancheh masters where he lived but after hearing Ostad Bahari (on the television) he bought his own kamancheh as started learning on his own until he could find teachers to teach him. Things like the introduction of the fourth string and steel strings (rather than silk ones) in imitation of the Western violin and how with the introduction of the violin at the end of the 19th century nearly everyone who would have otherwise become kamancheh players chose the violin instead as it was “fashionable, it was Western, it was chic.” Kayhan Kalhor (a member of Yo-Yo Ma‘s Silk Road Project) talks a little bit about the history of the kamancheh(video below), especially into the 20th century and some of the issues surrounding the influence of Western music and Western instruments.

The irony being that after the Cairo Congress in 1932 (as well as the subsequent follow ups) the formal re-introduction of Western bowed strings have resulted in the replacement of many of the native instruments with European violins, violas, cellos and basses. Meaning that there are bowed string traditions in the world that predate the Western traditions by a few centuries. The xiqin is believed to have originated from the Xi people of Central Asia, and have come to China in the 10th century.īowed strings seemed to have originated as a whole in the Middle East and/or Central Asia–regions of the world that share a lot of overlapping cultural ties–and then spread West and East into Europe and Asia. book of music), an encyclopedic work on music written by music theorist Chen Yang in the Northern Song Dynasty. It is believed to have evolved from the xiqin ( 奚琴), which was described as a foreign, two-stringed lute in Yue Shu (樂書, yuèshū, lit. The erhu can be traced back to instruments introduced into China more than a thousand years ago. The entry for the Chinese erhu states that: Being adequately sourced helps, obviously. While it’s never a good idea to take Wikipedia as the final say about any topic, it’s usually a great starting point for research.

A notable example is the Italian lira da braccio, a 15th-century bowed string instrument which is considered by many as the predecessor of the contemporary violin. In the meantime, the rabāb, the bowed string instrument of the Arabic world, was introduced to Western Europe possibly through the Iberian Peninsula and both instruments spread widely throughout Europe giving birth to various European bowed instruments such as the medieval rebec, the Scandinavian and Icelandic talharpa, and the Celtic crwth. The lyra spread widely via the Byzantine trade routes that linked the three continents in the 11th and 12th centuries European writers use the terms fiddle and lira interchangeably when referring to bowed instruments. 911) in his lexicographical discussion of instruments he cited the lyra (lūrā) as the typical instrument of the Byzantines along with the urghun ( organ), shilyani (probably a type of harp or lyre) and the salandj (probably a bagpipe). The first recorded reference to the bowed lyra was in the 9th century by the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. The Wikipedia entry for the Byzantine lyra states this about its history: Sambuugiin Pürevjav of Altai Khairkhan playing a morin khuur near Centre Georges Pompidou in 2005.

2 stringed instrument