The development of stringed instruments

The harp

Some scholars have suggested that the harp evolved from the musical bow (usually classified as a type of zither), which must have been in existence prior to the establishment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. Although the musical bow is virtually identical in shape to the hunter’s bow, it is uncertain whether the musical instrument might be derived from the weapon; indeed, there is no way of knowing whether humans hunted with a bow-shaped implement before they made musical sound with a bow. Among the early harps found in the burial chambers at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur (founded in the 4th millennium bce) were bow-shaped (arched) instruments (one with 13 strings); nearly identical instruments were played in Egypt at roughly the same time. Iconographic evidence suggests that in both Egypt and Mesopotamia the harp, often played by women, was used in secular entertainments, although it had sacred uses as well.

Within Asia, the harp family is well known in Myanmar (Burma), and although it was once used in China and India, it is no longer common in these countries; it is, rather, musically important in equatorial regions of Africa, in Europe, and, since European incursions, in the Americas. In contemporary Africa it likely is related to the Egyptian harps, and again it is associated with women. An exception in design and gender is the western African kora, a harp-lute (or bridge harp), which is traditionally played by men.

The harp has maintained its importance in Europe. It is omnipresent in folktales and legends; it is the national symbol of Ireland. The Celtic harp must have been in use as early as the 10th century, and fragments of one were found in the 7th-century Sutton Hoo burial ship unearthed at Suffolk, England. In Gaul, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, the harp was an important and favoured symbol; it was said that there were but three things necessary to a comfortable household—a virtuous wife, a chair cushion, and a harp. By the end of the 18th century, the harp had almost gone out of use in the Celtic realms, but by then the large orchestral harp had made its appearance in other places in Europe.

This basic instrument (with the addition of a set of pedals for instantaneously altering the pitch of a note) is found—usually played by a woman—in the present-day symphony orchestra, but the older European harp tradition flourishes in Mexico and South America, where the harp is a component of various folk ensembles and is often played by men.

The lyre

Greek legend credits the invention of the lyre to Hermes, who had stolen Apollo’s cows and, in order to atone for his transgression, presented the god with the lyre, which he had accidentally discovered when he brushed against a turtle carapace that lay on the ground and, as he did so, heard its sinews begin to vibrate. The tale is interesting for two reasons: first, the turtle shell was, in fact, frequently used as the resonator of the Greek lyra, and, second, the tale makes an explicit relationship between the lyre and cattle. Similarly, in Mesopotamia the lyre was surmounted with a carved bull’s head, and today in East Africa the lyre is most frequently encountered in cattle cultures.

A famous lyre from Ur (now at the Penn Museum, Philadelphia) is one of nine dug up at the burial ground; these and similar instruments seem to have been used both to accompany bardic recitations and for religious purposes. In view of the importance of the bull in the worship ceremonies of Crete and Mycenae, it is not surprising to find lyres among the stringed instruments of these peoples. In Celtic society depictions of lyres are found on the coins of pre-Christian Gaul. These instruments, which were U-shaped, may have come to western Europe from southwestern Asia with groups of Indo-European peoples who spread across Europe. Other types of lyres were found in Europe too, and it is possible that these variously shaped but still related instruments might be analogous to the various Indo-European languages in that they are basically closely related but quite different in detail.

In medieval Germany and Scandinavia long, narrow lyres with four to seven strings were played. Similar lyres (the Finnish jouhikantele, the Finnish and Swedish-Estonian stråkharpa, the Welsh crwth) were played with a bow in parts of Europe until the early 20th century; revivals of these instruments and the creation of new types of lyres began in the late 20th century. The lyre has continued to flourish in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and South Sudan, in parts of East Africa, and among the fishermen of the Persian Gulf.

The zither

Several different types of instruments are classified as zithers; they are used today in all continents. The long zithers of China, Japan, and Korea, which have a curved surface and a long, narrow shape, display a possible link to the idiochordic bamboo zithers of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and southeastern Africa. The importance of bamboo to music in Asia is literally legendary; in Java, music is thought to have been first produced by the accidental admission of air into a bamboo tube. In China musical instruments are classified according to their constructional material; one of the eight substances in the system is bamboo, which the Chinese relate to the direction East, the season Spring, and the phenomenon Mountain. The Chinese zheng, a zither, includes the radical meaning “bamboo” in its ideograph. The ideographs of the older zithers—the qin and the se—are more difficult to interpret, however. Zithers of this type are known to have existed in the Shang period (c. 1600–1046 bce); the zheng was first documented during the Qin period (221–207 bce). By the 8th century, this instrument had been introduced to Japan, where, as the 13-string koto, it flourishes today. The koto, like the zheng, is played frequently by women, though the head of a koto guild is usually a man.

A relative newcomer to the spectrum of Chinese zithers is the yangqin (“foreign zither”), the prototype of which reached China from Persia sometime during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); it is the only representative of the box zither in East Asia. Sundanese chamber music of Indonesia often uses a kacapi, a box zither, usually with 18–20 strings and movable bridges. The history of this type of chordophone is obscure indeed, but two instruments of this general shape that may be very old are the African raft and board zithers. The raft zither is constructed on the idiochordic principle, but it uses a number of canes about half an inch (1.5 cm) in diameter; each of these has one string raised out of its own surface, and all of the canes are then lashed together. The board zither is made from a hollowed-out board over which a number of strings are attached. This latter instrument is found most notably in certain areas of East Africa; it is possible that its principle of construction was carried to the Middle East by traders.

Medieval Arab authors (including Ibn Khaldūn) mention a plucked trapezoidal zither, the qānūn (derived from Greek kanōn, “rule”). The present-day instrument has a range of three octaves with three strings to each pitch, and a complex system of levers by which its many strings may be finely and quickly retuned to the various Arab scales. Closely related is the Persian-derived sanṭūr, another trapezoidal zither that is struck by two light hammers. Versions of this zither are found in China (yangqin), Greece (santouri), and eastern Europe (cimbalom). These trapezoidal zithers are the prototypes for the later keyboard instruments of western Europe: the qānūn, which is played with two plectra, became, with the addition of a keyboard, the harpsichord; the cimbalom, with the addition of a keyboard, became the piano. In the Middle Ages the keyboard was attached to a number of instruments, including the lute, the hurdy-gurdy, and the various Scandinavian keyed fiddles, of which the Swedish nyckelharpa survives. The experiment was truly successful, however, only on the clavichord, harpsichord, and later the piano; on the fiddle it always remained of peripheral importance.

Plucked lutes

The first surviving evidence of the existence of the plucked lute comes from Mesopotamia and Egypt. One of the earliest Babylonian delineations (c. 2500 bce) shows a shepherd with a long-necked, small-bodied lute; this instrument, which was likely skin-bellied, had a rounded back that might well have been made from a turtle carapace (as in modern North Africa) or a gourd (as in Puerto Rico). A similar instrument is also found in Egypt, and from specimens surviving from ancient times it is known that the stick forming the neck passed through the body of the instrument, ending at the sound hole, where it served as a fastener for the ends of the strings. This instrument, like the harp, survives in West Africa and in North Africa (as the gimbrī).

The Greeks of old seem to have made rather sparing use of the lute, but it was commonly encountered in Rome. Though the skin-bellied plucked lute predominated in the ancient Mediterranean, wood-bellied instruments have been more typical of Europe; indeed (with the exception of the African-derived banjo), most currently used European lutes have wood bellies. The model for the European lute was the classical Arab lute, or al-ʿūd (“the wood”), which has been the most important instrument of classical Arab music for some 1,000 years. The instrument, with its characteristic pear-shaped body and bent-back pegbox, probably entered Europe through a number of different gateways, including Sicily, Andalusia, and Palestine with the Crusaders. Though European and Arab lutes are very similar in general construction, the Arab lute is not fretted as is the European lute, and the European lute little by little acquired additional courses of strings during the Renaissance, when it became a standard instrument for solo playing and the accompaniment of singers. The many courses of strings caused numerous problems: “When a lute-player is 80 years old,” wrote the 18th-century German theorist Johann Mattheson sarcastically, “he has spent 60 years tuning his instruments.”

The many lutelike instruments of modern India (tambura, vina, sitar, and sarod) are, technically speaking, lute-zithers, since their fingerboards are hollow; in appearance and playing technique, however, they are indistinguishable from lutes. They seem to represent a special, and quite recent, subfamily of chordophones.

In East Asia the plucked lute family exists only in a comparatively recent manifestation, but both in a wood-bellied form (as in the Chinese pipa, the Korean tang pip’a and hyang pip’a, and the Japanese biwa) and a skin-bellied version (the Chinese sanxian and the Japanese samisen). In Japan the Shōsō Repository at Nara preserves three biwas used at a great concert held in 752. The biwa-pipa family can be traced ultimately to Persia, where, as the short-necked barbat, it influenced the music of Afghanistan and Turkistan on its way to China, Korea, and Japan. The skin-bellied lute, in China the sanxian, can be traced in China only to the 13th century; from there it was taken to the Ryukyu Islands and thence to Japan (mid-16th century), where it still plays an important musical role as the samisen.

Bowed lutes

The principle of bowing is nearly always applied to stringed instruments of the lute class, though one occasionally finds it used with zithers or lyres. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make a clear-cut distinction between plucking with a plectrum and bowing, since plucking sometimes involves rubbing the string. But bowing, defined as the use of the almost universally encountered horsehair bow, can be traced as far back as the Muslim civilization of the 10th century. The stroked rabāb evidently possessed a long neck and up to four strings. There is no iconographic evidence of such instruments before the 13th century in Islam itself, though an illustration (c. 930) from Christian Spain delineates a bowed instrument with three strings. In Byzantium too the bowed lira (lute) existed by this time, and it seems likely that the principle of bowing originated among the horse cultures of Central Asia, whence it spread quickly through the Muslim world and to the East, so that by 1000 it had almost simultaneously reached China, Java, North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, and other parts of Europe. Research has shown that a word meaning “horse” is given to the bridge of the fiddle throughout Eurasia, from Japan (koma) to western Norway (hest). In China the fiddle (huqin) is acknowledged to have come from the “barbarians” of Central Asia; in those days it was in China an instrument of the people; later, at the time of Kublai Khan, it began to be used in court music. A similar Korean instrument, the haegŭm, is thought also to have come from Central Asia, but it was ultimately associated with the Korean court tradition called tang’ak (Tang and Song Chinese music). In Africa the fiddle seems to have entered the continent with Islam.

In Europe the bow appears first in Spain and shortly thereafter in Italy, and it is suspected that it entered through Muslim Spain and Sicily, though it is possible that other fiddles entered Europe through the Balkans, Hungary, and Scandinavia. Even in early illustrations, evidence is found of the uniquely European method of holding the fiddle against the shoulder. At the same time, other European fiddles were held vertically, the manner in which fiddles are held everywhere else in the world. Early European fiddles were made (by their players) in only two parts: the belly was a thin piece of spruce or fir wood, and the back was hollowed out of one piece of hardwood. These medieval fiddles divide into two types, one of which has a clearly discernible neck and the other of which possesses a neck that merges imperceptibly into the body; this second type, exemplified by the rebec, is equivalent to the North African rabāb and the Byzantine-Greek lira. As the centuries passed, Europe continued to have two distinct types of fiddles: one, relatively square-shaped, held in the arms, became known as the viola da braccio (“arm viol”) family and evolved into the violin; the other, with sloping shoulders and held between the knees, was the viola da gamba (“leg viol”) group. The gambas, which were important and elegant instruments during the Renaissance, eventually lost ground to the louder (and originally less aristocratic) braccio-violin family.

Electronic technology

Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, electronic technology made remarkable changes in the structure and function of many stringed instruments by making amplification and tonal change possible. The best known and most pervasive example is the electric guitar, which, strictly speaking, is a chordophone but is often classified as an electrophone. The electric guitar may be hollow-bodied like a traditional guitar or solid-bodied, but in either case amplification of the strings is provided by a “pickup” (or contact microphone) that creates artificial resonance through its connection to amplifiers and loudspeakers. Pickups are often attached to violins, lutes, and other instruments, as well as to guitars, making these instruments usable in noisy environments and vast amphitheatres. Musicians who use such instruments (especially electric guitars) have developed feedback and other techniques that can alter the timbre beyond recognition. The shapes of newly designed electronic violins and guitars also differ from their acoustic forebears.