Sarod: India musical instrument

The sarod is a lute-like stringed musical instrument of India. The musical instrument is used primarily in Indian classical music. Together with the sitar, the instrument is among the popular musical instrument and famous instruments in the Hindustani classical music. This musical instrument is known for a deep, weighty and introspective sound, when compared with the fragrant, overtone-rich texture of the sitar, with sympathetic strings that provide the instrument with a resonant, reverberant timbre. The musical instrument is a fretless instrument that is able to manufacture the continuous slides between notes called meend that is crucial to the music of India.

source of picture: culturalsindia.blogspo...

The sarod is said by some people to have descended feom the Afghan rubab, an analogous musical instrument originating from the central Asia and Afghanistan. The name of the instrument, ‘sarod’, roughly translated to ‘beautiful sound’ or ‘melody’ in the Persian language. Although the musical instrument has been said to be the bass version of the rubab, the tonal bandwidth of the instrument is actually considerably greater than that of the rubab, specifically in the middle and high registers. Lalmani Misra states in his Bharatiya Sangeet Vadya that the sarod is a combination of the ancient chitra veena, the medieval rubab and present day sursingar. Also there is a speculation that the oud may be of the origin of this musical instrument. Jafar Khan, a brother to Pyar Khan and Basit Khan fabricated the sarod at the court of Wajid Ali Shah.

Among the several conflicting and contested histories of the musical instrument, there is only one that connects the invention of the instrument to the ancestors of the modern day sarod maestro, Amjad Ali Khan’s ancestor, Mohammad Hashmi Khan Bangash, a musician and a trader of horse, came into India with the Afghan rubab in the mid-18^th century and he became a court musician to the Maharajah of Rewa. It was his descendants, specifically his grandson Ghulam Ali Khan Bangash, who was also a court musician in Gwalior, who altered the rubab and made it a sarod that is known today. The present form of the musical instrument perhaps has been traced back to the year 1820, when the instrument began to gain recognition as a serious musical instrument in Rewa, Shahjahanpur, Gwalior and Lucknow. In the 20^th century, this instrument received some finishing touches from Allauddin Khan, the player-pedagogue from Maihar that is popularly known as sitarist Ravi Shankar's guru. Meanwhile, as it is with most young, developing musical instruments, much work need to be performed in the area of sarod luthiery in order to gain a reliable customization and exact reproduction of successful musical instrument. This reflects the overall state of Indian musical instrument production today.

The design of the sarod depends very much on the school of playing. There are three distinguishable kinds of the sarod.

The conventional version of the instrument is a 17 to 25-stringed lute-like musical instrument; 4 to 5 strings of the instrument is used for playing the melody, 1 or 2 strings of the instrument is for the drone, 2 chikari strings and 9 to 11 sympathetic strings. The design of this early version is commonlyb credited to Niyamattullah Khan of the Lucknow Gharana and also Ghulam Ali Khan of the Gwalior-Bangash Gharana. Among the modern day players of the sarod, this main design is kept in one piece by two streams of performing the instrument. Amjad Ali Khan and his followers perform this version of the sarod, as do the disciples of Radhika Mohan Maitra. Both Amjad Ali and Buddhadev Dasgupta have introduced little changes to their respective sarods that have become the version templates for their disciples. The both musicians use the instrument produced of teak wood and a sound board produce of the goat skin spread across the face of the resonator.

Another more technically sophisticated and acoustically superior version of the instrument is the one designed by Allauddin Khan and his brother Ayet Ali Khan. The sarod referred to by David Trasoff as the 1934 Maihar prototype. This version is bigger and longer than the conventional version of the sarod, but the fingerboard is identical to the traditional version of the instrument. This musical instrument has 25 strings in all. And the strings include 4 main strings, 4 jod strings, 2 chikari strings and 15 tarab strings. The basic strings of the instrument are tuned to Ma ("fa"), Sa ("do"), lower Pa ("so") and lower Sa, giving the musical instrument a range of three octaves. The Maihar instrument lends itself very well to the presentation of alap with 4 jod strings giving a backdrop for the ambiance of the raga. This version of the instrument is however not perfect to the performance of clean right-hand picking on the individual strings. The sarod is tuned to C. the strings of the musical instrument are produced of steel or phosphor bronze. Most modern players of the musical instrument use the German-made strings or American-made strings like Roslau, Pyramid and Precision. The strings of the sarod are plucked with a triangular plectrum that is produced of polished coconut shell, ebony cocobolo, wood, horn cow bone or such other materials. Early players of the musical instrument used plain wire plectrums that produce soft ringing tone.

The absence of fret and the tension of the instrument’s strings make the musical instrument a very demanding one to play, as the strings of the instrument must be preesed hard against the fingerboard of the instrument. There are two ways of stopping the strings of the musical instrument. One involves the tip of one fingernails to stop the strings of the sarod, and others uses a mixture of the nail and the fingertip to halt the strings against the fingerboard of the sarod.

Fingering methods and how they are taught depends on the personal preference of the musicians instead of the basis of school affiliation. For example, Radhika Mohan Maitra, used the index finger, the middle finger and the ring finger of his hand to stop the strings of the sarod, just like the disciple of Allauddin Khan did.