Bouzouki: Cyrus musical instrument

The bouzouki is a Greek musical instrument that was brought into the Greece in the 1900s by the immigrants from the Asian minor and the musical instrument quickly became the central instrument to the rembetika genre of music branches. A mainstay of the contemporary Greek music, the front of the instrument’s body is flat and is often heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The musical instrument is performed with the use of a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound that is analogous to the mandolin but the pitch is lower. The bouzouki is of two main types; the trichordo has three pairs of strings on it and the tetrachordo has four pairs of musical strings on it.

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The name of the instrument, ‘bouzouki’ comes from the Turkish word ‘bozuk’, which means ‘broken’ or ‘modified’, and it comes from a specific re-entrant tuning that is known as ‘bozuk duzen’ that was commonly used on its Turkish cousin known as the ‘saz-bozuk’. It belongs to the same music instrumental family with the mandolin and the lute. Formally, the body of the musical instrument is constructed from a solid block of wood, analogous to the saz, but upon its arrival in the Greece empire in the 1910s, the musical instrument was modified by the addition of a staved back that was borrowed from the Neapolitan mandola and the top angle in the way of a Neapolitan mandolins just to increase the strength of the instrument’s body to withstand thicker steel strings on it. The type of musical instrument used in Rembetika music was a three-stringed version of the musical instrument, but in the 1950s, a four stringed version of the musical instrument was introduced.

The Greek bouzouki is a plucked musical instrument that is of the lute family, known as the thabouras or the tambouras family. This family name of the musical instruments have existed in the ancient Greece as ‘pandoura’ and can be found in different sizes, different shapes, depth of the body, length of the neck and the number of strings. The bouzouki and the baglama are the direct descendant from this category. The Greek Mable relief that is known as Mantineia Base, which has been traced back to the 330 to 320 BC, portrays a muse performing the version of the pandoura. From the byzantine times, it was known as pandouras and then tambouras. On display in the national historical museum of Greece is the tamboura of a popular hero of the Greek revolution of the 1821, General Makriviannis.

Other sizes of the musical instrument showed up and include the Greek musical instrument ‘tzouras, a musical instrument that is smaller in size than the standard version of the bouzouki.

Following the 1919 to 1922 war in Asia Minor and the later exchange of populations between Greece and turkey, the ethnic Greek fled to Greece. The early versions of the musical instrument were mostly three strings, with three courses and were tuned in various ways, as to the scale the player wanted to play. At the end of the 1950s, four stringed version of the musical instrument was introduced and it started to gain popularity. The four-course version of the musical instrument was made popular by Manolis Chiotis, who was as well using a tuning like a standard guitar tuning that made it easier for players of guitar to perform this musical instrument as well, even as it angered purist.

The Irish version of the bouzouki with four courses, a flatter back and differently tuned from the greek version of the instrument, is a more recent development on the instrument, stemming from the introduction of the greek musical instrument into the Irish music by Johnny Moynihan around the year 1965 and its later adoption by Andy Irvine, Alec Finn and many others.

The three-course version of the bouzouki is known as the trichordo. It is a classical type of this musical instrument that was the mainstay of most Rebetiko music. The instrument has fixed frets and it has 6 strings in three pairs. In the lower-pitched course, the pair is made up of a thick wound string and a thin string that is tuned an octave apart. The conventional contemporary tuning of this version of the musical instrument is Dd-aa-dd. Markos Vamvakaris called this tuning the European tuning’ as he described many other tunings in his autobiography.

The four-course version of the musical instrument is known as tetrachordo. This version of the musical instrument has eight metal strings that are arranged in four pairs called courses. It is typically tuned Cc-Ff-aa-dd. In the two higher-pitched courses, the two strings of the pairs can be tuned to the same note. In the two lower-pitched courses, the pair is made up of a thick wound string and a thin string that is tuned an octave apart. These octave strings add to the fullness of the musical sound and are used in chords and bass drone. The tuning of the musical instrument in an analogous way as the guitar was introduced by composer and soloist Manolis Chiotis, who found it better suited to the type of virtuoso playing he was good for.

The Greek baglama is very different from the Turkish baglama. The treble bouzouki is pitched an octave higher, with unison pairs on the four highest strings and an octave pairs on the lower D. musically, the baglama is usually found as an accompaniment instrument to the bouzouki in the Piraeus style of rembetika.