Oud has been man’s companion in his journey through thousands of years, adapting to … They’ve seen use … What is electric or steel stringed guitar? Who invented it? Five Stringed c. Six Stringed (modern) Electric Guitar A. The trick, of course, was to modernize and urbanize that exotic staple, the oud, and give it a New York verve that it’s never had before. 4. If you’re conversant with the English song tradition and its American offshoots, this will be a familiar theme: there are similarly plenty of songs where female corpses are made into fiddles, harps and banjos. Most accounts trace The Oud’s entrance into Europe through North Africa and into the Iberian peninsula with the Umayyad Caliphate of Al-Andalus in 711 AD. ), you’ll see basically the same layout: punter in front, enclosed area or important passenger in the middle, rudder man at the back, in the same posture. The oud is one of the oldest stringed instruments, dating back to the era of Akad (2350 BCE). He was a fervent patriot who believed that physical education was the cornerstone of national health and strength and important in strengthening character and national By between 1300 and 1340 the oud had become modified enough by Europeans to become a different and distinct instrument, the medieval lute. It belongs to what we may loosely call a ‘family’ of similar instruments, but tracing the relationships between different branches of a putative and disputable family tree is fraught with difficulties, and we should beware of assumptive claims which lack clear evidence. musings on medieval, renaissance and traditional music. This has proven to be an historically informed practice. Written by Jacopo Prisco, CNN. I cover the troubadours a little in my article on the vielle, which you may have seen. Yes, it will be great to see you at Lewes Folk Club. He also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba. How did western musicians come to play an eastern instrument? Most scholars agree, the two instruments that played the biggest part in the history of the guitar were the European lute and an Arabic instrument called an oud. In 1965 Stephanie Kwolek created the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness. Design of the Oud. It made its debut in the Islamic world during the Golden Age. The Cantigas, written c. 1257–1283, are richly illustrated with pictures of musicians, giving us much information about the instruments of the day. © Ian Pittaway. As I understand Shah (it’s some years since I read the book) TRB OUD R became “trobador” in Spanish also meaning “finder” and spread to Provencal, where the verbal connection to the lute was lost and the finder use was transliterated directly from Langue d’Oc to “trouvere” in Langue d’Oil. There were four courses until the 15. The best-known member is Kevlar, a material used in protective vests as well as in boats, airplanes, ropes, cables, and much more—in total about 200 applications. When Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji in 1999, he had to work within a grid measuring 12 by 12 pixels. He … For most of its history and in most places, the oud has been fretless and, even in Iran, the abandonment of frets started to take place in the 16th century. Prices and offers are subject to change. Abu l-Hasan 'Ali Ibn Nafi', better known as Ziryab or Zeryab was a singer, oud player, composer, poet, and teacher who lived and worked in Iraq, Northern Africa, and Andalusia of the medieval Islamic period. I wonder what you make of that. Mesopotamian royal barges are well outside my area of knowledge! The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings.It is held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing the strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. This instrument was the same with the one that ancient Egyptians used in Pharaoh times. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the German “father of gymnastics” who founded the turnverein (gymnastics club) movement in Germany. It is strung in courses (pairs of strings) made of gut, processed from the small intestines of sheep, as most instrument strings were in the medieval period. The different colours of the vertical lines on the neck of her instrument indicate fingerboard decoration rather than frets. The instrument eventually grew frets and became le-oud, the French definite article, resulting in lute. The oud or, in Arabic, al-ʿūd, is probably best known in the west for being the predecessor of the European lute; but it does have an independent life of its own in the history of early music, rooted in medieval cultural exchange between east and west. 17.5+or+make_set+22.2+7.66+7.66+abd+rose+reed, 17.29+or+make_set+2852+70.5+7.66+abd+reed+rose, Professional Mahogany Special Turkish Oud #D1171, Professional Turkish Electric Oud with Equalizer and Guitar Pegs #025, Premium Turkish Oud Maple & Mahogany #D1157. I’ve been doing my PhD on long neck lutes and spent my first year researching the ancient Mesopotamian images, and I’m convinced that that figure is not playing a lute of any kind! The bray harp: getting a buzz from early music. The word oud in Arabic, al-ʿūd, means literally the wood. Mythic genesis stories of The Oud go back to the Bible, where the oud is traced back to Lamech, the sixth grandson of Adam who mourned for his dead son by suspended his body in a tree and the shape of his skeleton became the model for the shape of The Oud. By a little after c. 1400, western lutes were increasingly fretted and by 1481 the medieval lute had developed into the, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window). He was supposedly inspired to create the instrument after hanging the body of his dead son from a tree. After uncertain origins, the popularity of the oud spread across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and north and east Africa, where it remains popular to this day. OUD is defined in the DSM-5 as a problematic pattern of opioid use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress. Edit. We see a woman in Arab clothes on the left of the board, with henna-decorated fingers, a woman in Christian clothes on the right of the board and, on the far left of the picture, a Christian oud player, playing with a quill. In the 8th century AD, the Moors entered Hispania from the south. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. We usually take early music to mean medieval, renaissance and baroque. The oud was most likely introduced to Western Europe by the Arabs who established the Umayyad Caliphate of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the year 711 AD. Two of these ouds are at the head of this article, the third is below. 160 AH/777 CE; d. 238 AH/852 CE), who was the head of singers in Andalusia, the sheikh of oud players and one of the main inventors of this instrument. Required fields are marked *. But far from just being an important stepping stone, the Oud was a significant instrument in its own right that bridged the cultural divide between the East and West during the middle ages. The complete history of the development of the lute family is not fully compiled at this date, but archaeomusicologists have worked to piece together a lute family history. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. This important musical influence goes back to Ziryab (b. Either are possible, but Sayeed Idris Shah’s assertion seems a little like special pleading to me and the Provençal connection seems more natural linguistically and geographically. I’d need to be convinced that the French ‘troubadour’ derives from the Arabic ‘play wood’. Following this line of reasoning, the oud, considered the precursor to t… At the rear of the boat is this guy, and what he’s the rudder man using an oar to guide the barge in the right direction. Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with being the inventor of the telephone since he was awarded the first successful patent. The Mythic genesis stories of The Oud go back to the Bible, where the oud is traced back to Lamech, the sixth grandson of Adam who mourned for his dead son by suspended his body in a tree and the shape of his skeleton became the model for the shape of The Oud. By a little after c. 1400, western lutes were increasingly fretted and by 1481 the medieval lute had developed into the renaissance lute, the most important western instrument of the period, by then mirro… It is strung in courses (pairs of strings) made of gut, processed from the small intestines of sheep, as most instrument strings were in the medieval period. In 1965 Stephanie Kwolek created the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness. Alfonso X, “The Wise”, 1221-1284, was King of Castile and other regions in modern day Spain and Portugal, and nothing illustrates the spread of the oud from east to west better than his reign – quite literally, Though some parts of the oud-playing world, such as Iran, had fretted ouds all the way from the 10, In 1283, Alfonso X commissioned a book of chess endgame problems, from which the illustration on the left comes. No one knows for sure how far the oud dates back, and whether its origins are in Persia, Arabia, or elsewhere. It would be interesting to know if he has any evidence for the connection, factual or conjectural, or if he can trace cultural and musical connections as well as linguistic ones. A paradox, to be sure. There is a traditional story that Lamak, sixth grandson of Adam (the very first one), hung the remains of his son in a tree and used the desiccated skeleton to form the world’s first oud. The oud is believed to have been first introduced to Spain after the Moorish conquest of the 9th century and descends from the earlier tanbur. In the middle ages, easterners and westeners were not only knocking seven bells out of each other in the Crusades, they were also trading and engaging in fruitful cultural exchange. The whole cylinder seal depicts a royal barge called a maghur that kings of the time would use to travel from city to city in their domains via the canals that provided irrigation and served as ‘roadways’–maintaining these was one of the king’s main tasks in that rather arid region. When playing Western style medieval music with an Oud, I prefer to tie on frets. Oud-like instruments such as the Ancient Greek Pandoura and the Roman Pandura likely made their way to the Iberian Peninsula much earlier than the oud. In common with all early plucked instruments, the oud has a rosette or rose, a decorative carved sound hole. The first evidence of instruments we can really say are ouds are in the art of the Sassanid era of Iran, the last Iranian empire before the rise of Islam, from CE 224 to 651. Oud Wood. This instrument was named by the Arabs Al Oud, which means wood and specifically thin wood. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. Middle and right are two very clear oud players on a metal cup in the Sassanid era of Iran, CE 224–651. Douglas Alton Smith argues the long-necked variety should not be called lute at all because it existed for at least a millennium before the appearance of the short-necked instrument that eventually evolved into … The roots, of the musical instrument Oud, can be found through time, 3500 years ago in Persia, where it was called Barbat (oud). Now Western perfumers are paying attention to its wild and intense aroma, be it derived from real or synthetic sources. There is normally no fingerboard, the strings being stopped by the player’s fingers. Thanks to him, it was possible for the art of oud to spread and develop. I’m not a scholar of historical philology, either, but that’s an intriguing theory. In ancient times, ouds of both fretted and un-fretted types were in use. Depending on what you are prepared to believe, the oud may first have appeared between 3500 and 3200 BCE, but they’re such vague depictions that they could be almost anything. Thank you. Though the oud is an eastern instrument, entering Europe in the 9th century via Moorish rule in Iberia, one striking feature of the depiction of the three ouds in the Cantigas is that they are all played by western Christian musicians. It was the 11th-century Muslim musician Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham who provided the first description of the oud. Ian, Your email address will not be published. Both the oud and the cithara were played with a pick, although the oud could also be played by slide and vibrato. C. The first acoustic guitars a. The oud is similar to a lute, short-neck and pear-shaped stringed instrument. Often the most straightforward answer is the right one, so I’m more convinced by the simpler and more obvious evolution from ‘trobador’ (Old Provençal) meaning someone who finds or invents musically, itself probably derived from ‘tropare’ (Vulgar Latin), meaning to compose or sing, which is where we get ‘trope’, a figure of speech or motif. The introduction to the oud caused changes to the design of the cithara. The oil is known as oud, and it is made from agarwood, a.k.a. Antoine-Joseph " Adolphe " Sax ( French: [ɑ̃twan ʒɔzɛf adɔlf saks]; 6 November 1814 – 7 February 1894) was a Belgian inventor and musician who created the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846. By between 1300 and 1340 the oud had become modified enough by Europeans to become a different and distinct instrument, the medieval lute. It shared common ancestry with the stringed instruments of Europe, and like the lute, it had a rounded body, though it lacked frets and had a smaller neck. The reed boats used by Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq today use the same setup. We remember the paradigmatic player of Al-Andalus as Ziryab or Zyriab, who founded the first music school of Spain and added the fifth course to the instrument. Looking at the single rose instead of the oud’s multiple roses and the more lute-like pegbox, it is tempting to describe this as a transitional instrument, a proto-lute. The Moors brought an instrument called an oud.The pear-shaped body of the oud was flat on the front, and bowl-shaped on the back, and it usually had more than one sounding hole. Shop Proud Source Water. He also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba.He played the flute and clarinet. Do you have a view on the Sufi specialist Sayeed Idris Shah’s assertion that the original troubadours were from 10th century (Christian calendar) Spain, and that the word Troubadour derives from the Arabic roots TRB (to play) and OUD? A plectrum or individual finger picks may by be used to strike the strings. This instrument was the same with the one that ancient Egyptians used in Pharaoh times. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. The Moorish guitar retained the rounded back, multiple sound holes and wide fingerboard of the oud. An image on the left of something or other from Mesopotamia, 3500–3200 BCE. The oud was most likely introduced to Western Europe by the Arabs who established the Umayyad Caliphate of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the year 711 AD. While some believe the guitar to be an invention of Europe during the middle ages, there is also significant evidence to support the influence of the Arabic ‘oud’ and its contribution to the development of the guitar. Shigetaka Kurita: The man who invented emoji Written by Jacopo Prisco , CNN When Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji in 1999, he had to work within a grid measuring 12 by 12 pixels. There were four courses until the 15th century, when a fifth course was added; and it was played with a wooden plectrum, later changed to an eagle’s quill. After uncertain origins, the popularity of the oud spread across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and north and east Africa, where it remains popular to this day. The oud is a pear-shaped, stringed instrument similar to a lute used in traditional Middle Eastern music and East African music. During his reign he wrote and commissioned a large number of books, with subjects ranging from art and literature to scientific texts translated into Castillian from Arabic originals. The earliest evidence of the Arab ‘ud in Europe can be found in numerous carvings and depictions dating back to the ninth century, when it was introduced by the Moors to Spain. Hello, Meic. This instrument was named by the Arabs … B. The definite article al was dropped in Turkish and in Turkey the instrument is simply known as oud or ud (a matter of transliteration into English). The highly influential organologist Curt Sachs distinguished between the "long-necked lute" and the short-necked variety. Naturally alkaline spring water rich with minerals and electrolytes. The Oud is considered the precursor to the lute and may play an important role in the evolution of what we now identify as the guitar. Given the pleasure the Moors and Sufis took in punning, the convergence seems pausible to me, and the crossword setter in me finds the idea delightfuil, but I’m not a scholar of historical philology. The shape of the oud, legend suggests, resembled the shape of the son's skeleton. The Xbox game console, released by Microsoft on Nov. 14, 2001, did not have a single inventor but was rather developed by an internal development team. History and Origin of the Mountain Dulcimer / Appalachian Dulcimer. 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