Background and Development

Here are some of the people and instruments who were important in the tarhu's development.

Erhan Alptekin; master yayli tanbur player, singer and composer.

I saw Erhan perform in 1976, and as a result changed direction completely - started making spikefiddles, began learning Turkish music. No single person is more central to the creation of the tarhu than Erhan.

Habil Aliev; greatest living exponent of Azerbaijani Classical Music, master of the kamancha.

Habil has a depth and range in his use of tone colour that stands above all other players of bowed instruments I know of, East or West. I heard a recording of him in 1995 just when the tarhu was coming into existence. Habil's playing helped me to form an image of what bowed sound could be , and this has guided the development of the small tarhus ever since (kamancha tarhu and tarhui).

 

 

Ross Daly; multi instrumentalist, composer and master within several traditions from the Near and Middle East.

It was Ross's interest and ongoing support that encouraged me to start taking orders for tarhus, and to change the focus of my instrument making work towards making only tarhus. The Lyra Tarhu and later the Nak Tarhu came into existence as a direct result of collaboration with Ross.

Greg Smallman: classical guitar maker without equal (his guitars played by John Williams since the early Eighties).

Greg and I both started instrument making in the early Seventies, and we collaborated continually in the early years before eventually becoming partners in guitar making in the late Seventies. Some of the experimental work we did was on the use of wooden cones in plucked instruments, which sowed the seeds for the use of wooden cones in the tarhu some 20 years later.

Harry Partch; Just Intonation exponent, theorist, composer and instrument maker.

Partch's wonderful sculpural instruments pointed me towards developing new instruments when I first heard them in 1974 (the year he died). His work in Just intonation was very influential for me, and has been part of everything I have done since discovering it. One of the Turkish tanbur's initial attractions for me was it's suitability for exploring just intonation - the longneck tarhu has facilitated a further step in that direction.
The Turkish tanbur is a long-neck bowed instrument with 6 strings arranged in pairs, with only the highest pair being played with the bow. It provides the reference pitch for Turkish Classical music with it's 27 tones-to-the-octave fretting system. I had been experimenting with bowed banjo and just-intonation prior to hearing Tanbur, so was very receptive.
The Erhu is the classic 2 string spikefiddle of the Far East, originating in China. The erhu is one of the only bowed instruments in which the addition of a sound-post destroys sound quality rather than enhances it. The bowing angle in the Erhu renders the use of a sound-post superfluous.
The Duduk is a double-reed wind instrument found throughout the Near East, Middle East and Central Asia. The duduk has been a much more important source of inspiration for the sound of the small tarhus than any stringed instrument (except for Habil Aliev's kamancha). The duduk is capable of producing a most wonderful range of vowel-like tone colours.
The kamancha from Persia and Azerbaijan has been one of my favourite instrumental design forms since before I started instrument making. Aspects of the kamancha's form where important in developing a body for the tarhu concept to inhabit, and became central once I started making small tarhus.
The North Indian Vina , or Bin, is the most quintessentially Indian of that countries many stringed instruments. It is another of my all-time favourite forms, and the work I did on Bin over a period of several years in the late seventies/early eighties contributed significantly to the tarhu's final design.
The Double Bass - one of the few instruments that can be played at the highest professional level as either a plucked or bowed instrument. This dual aspect of the Bass was an inspiration for me to develop the Tarhu to be equally adept at bowing and plucking.

 

Perspectives gathered from these many sources gradually formed the desire for an instrument that possessed the greatest possible subtlety in tone colour variations, combined with strong projection. All indications were that this sensitivity and power could only be achieved using a very light-weight soundboard. The solution was provided by the use of a cone made from thin strips of wood, and experiments with bowed cones began in 1993.

In 1995 I brought all of my experimental work together into a new acoustic design, which has been in a process of continuing development since then. The present spherical body was developed in 1998, and has now been used making instruments in a variety of styles and sizes. These instruments have been directed towards any musicians from East or West whose interests involve a subtle exploration of tone colour combined with unprecedented strength and projection.

Stages in the Tarhu’s Evolution.

Yayli Tanbur

This Tanbur is similar to the one I played from 1984 to 1995. It has been adapted a few steps from the traditional Turkish form - the body was redesigned to allow bowing of more than one string, and a sound-post was added within the body. It has three playing strings, and three sympathetic strings in a channel down the middle of the neck.

Erhu with rearranged neck position

I made several adapted erhus in 1992 while working on composer Judy Clingan's opera "Marco" (based on the travels of Marco Polo). I needed the erhu sound, but in a configuration that would allow the instruments to be played by violinists (fingers pressing strings onto a fingerboard, rather than fretting in mid-air, as on the erhu). These experimental erhus provided the opportunity for an up-close look at erhu acoustics, which turned out to be very productive.

 

Bowtar

Experimental Instrument with gourd resonator. Here the Erhu bow direction was maintained, but the neck and body rearranged to allow three playing strings, two of which could be bowed at the same time (normally not possible on the Erhu).

Cone-Erhu

Sculptural-study instrument using Erhu bow direction, this time with a lightweight fibreglass cone instead of a flat skin soundboard.

The Erhu based instruments, while very interesting, all had a limitation imposed by the bowing direction – in order to be able to bow close to the bridge, the soundboard had to be very small. This limited the available pitch range considerably.

Tarhu Prototype

Eventually, the desire to integrate the Tanbur and Erhu threads of research gave birth to the use of a larger cone and a new bridge design. While the Tarhu bridge/cone configuration does not include a sound-post as such, the bridge design performs the same function as a sound-post by transferring vibrations from one plane to another. Made in late 1995.

Tarhui

This was the first Tarhu in which the current aesthetic ideas emerged. The Kamancha and North Indian Vina influenced the initial form inherited from the Tanbur.

This is a small instrument, with the same vibrating-string length as a violin, and tuned around violin pitch range. Made in 1998.

Tenor Tarhu

This was the first tarhu to use a spherical body made up of many strips of wood. The techniques involved came from lute-back construction, and I first applied them to the making of wooden spheres in 1978/9 when I was doing experimental work on the North Indian Vina.