The unique feature of Indian instruments, the wide flat bridge, was present in this Seniya rabab, but the Persian and Afghani rababs had the thin violin-type bridge. Seniya rabab did not have sympathetic strings whereas the Afghani rabab did. Also it had gut strings, whereas the other rababs are described having silk strings. Other rababs had gut frets, but the Seniya rabab was fretless. The Seniya rabab was a plucked instrument whereas the Persian rabab, or the other varieties prevalent in middle Asian countries, were bowed. Except the Afghani rabab, all the other rababs played outside India are bowed. This type of rabab is still prevalent in Kashmir! folk music. The important thing about this is that this Afghani rabab is plucked instead of bowed. There is another rabab called Afghani rabab or Kabuli rabab, features of which are mentioned as having a small body, and six to seven sympathetic strings. The features of this Persian and Arabic rabab are quite similar to the Indian sarangi. This short lute when travelled westwards, became rebec and paved the way for the invention of the violin. Commonly five frets and sometimes more on the tambur of Hurasan were fixed, the others remained movable. Al-Farabi says that this rabab is similar to the tanbur of Hurasan, a long- necked lute with a small bulging body, several frets on the fingerboard and two strings of the same thickness, which were plucked by means of a plectrum. With the emergence of the sursingar and surbahar in the beginning of the nineteenth century, rabab and rudra veena were marginalised, and after the emergence and popularisation of the sarod and sitar in the twentieth century, both these instruments faded into oblivion.Īs far as we are aware, the earliest description of a musical instrument termed rabab has been given in the Kitab- al-Musiqi Al Kabir of Al-Farabi (AD 872-950). It rose to the zenith of fame in the sixteenth century and remained there as the most popular string instrument along with the rudra veena till the eighteenth century. Rabab was introduced to the Indian classical music scene around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The text is taken from an excerpt of Suneera Kasliwal, Classical Musical Instruments, Delhi 2001 Rabab The material used to make the bass drum of tabla is metal, where for the Jori both drums are made of Dhunn wood which is classed as the best quality wood for musical instruments.Small encyclopedia with Indian instruments To apply and remove fresh dough for each sitting required a lot more effort and maintenance, therefore the table removed this effort as both drums for the tabla have ink on the skin. The Jori requires the use of fresh dough on the bass drum (dhama) and the treble drum (dhaiya) has ink (shahee) on the skin. The world famous Tabla evolved from the Jori during the microphone era and was commonly used to accompany playback singing as it has a considerably softer sound to that of the Jori. The Jori is a prime example of the acoustic art required to play in an outdoor sitting without technical aids, sadly this instrument is not commonly used in the modern day sittings to sing Kirtan. If you think about the atmosphere 300 years ago before microphones and technology existed, you would have thousands of people sitting to listen to kirtan outdoors, therefore you will need versatile instruments which carry the sound. The sound generated from this instrument is much louder and deeper to that of tabla. The Jori emerged from the Mardang which is a one barrel drum, they cut this one piece instrument into two seperate pieces to create the Jori which means 'pair'. The Jori also known as Panjabi Pakhawaj is an instrument which was created in the court of the Fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjan Dev Ji by two musicians of the court, Sata & Balwand.
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