Qanun: Bulgarian musical instrument
The qanun is a string musical instrument that is most played in the Middle East, central Asia, and Southeastern Europe. It is known to be ...
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The qanun is a string musical
instrument that is most played in the Middle East, central Asia, and
Southeastern Europe. It is known to be derived from the Arabic word “kanun”
which means “rule, norm, or principle”. Qanun’s traditional music is based on
magamat. It is a type of large flat box-shaped instrument with a narrow
soundboard that has a quadrilateral with two parallel sides. Nylon strings are
forcefully extended over a single bridge composed on fish-skin on one end and
attached to the pegs that are meant for tuning on the other end.
source: idoabrav.com
The
qanun used in Turkey, Armenia, Greek, Azerbaijan, Persia and Arab is made up of
26 courses of strings possessing three strings per course. This musical
instrument is known to be played on the lap by pulling the strings with two
tortoise-shell picks that is one in each hand by the finger nails; also it
possesses a range of three and half octaves from A2 to E6. The Turkish qanun is
usually 95 to 100 cm long and 38 to40 cm wide and4 to 6cm high. This musical instrument
also is known to have special latches or lowered quickly by the player while
the instrument is being played.
The qanun used by the Armenians is known to
have half tones and the Arabic qanun has quarter tones. The usual Turkish qanun
divide the equal-tempered semitone of 100 cent into 6 parts producing 72 equal
divisions of the octave. Some qanun makers choose to divide the semitones of
the lower register into 7 parts instead of 6.
According
to Rauf Yekta, Mandals were carried out about 30 years before he submitted his
inventin which is monograph on Turkish music in the 1922 edition of Albert
Lavingnac’s Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatiore. This was
meant to fix the date of mandal usage to 1890s beginning with a few under each
of the courses. Before that time the
qanun had remained unbending to perform on especially in the case of
modulations that a player is required to use thumb fingernail to devaluate on
the strings for on-the-fly alteration that come at intervals. Regardless of
this, the today’s common equidistant 24- to 72- tone tuning of widespread Arab
and Turkish qanun models does not precisely reproduce the traditionally
understood interval rations of Arabic magma scales.
