Background and Development

Peter Biffin’s interest in spike fiddles began in the early 1970’s, with interest turning into life-long passion when he heard Erhan Alptekin playing the Turkish Tanbur in 1977. Peter made several spike fiddles in the following years and took up serious study of the Tanbur in 1984.

Concurrent with playing Tanbur, Peter conducted a study of bowed instruments from many different cultures, including the Chinese Erhu, the Persian Kemence, the Indian Esraj and Sarangi, and the members of the Violin family.

Perspectives gathered from these many quarters 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. Peter had been experimenting with the wooden cone as a form of stringed instrument soundboard since 1977 when he was working in partnership with guitar maker Greg Smallman, and had made a variety of plucked cone-instruments over the subsequent years. He began experiments with bowed cones in 1993.

In 1995 Peter brought all of his 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.

Tanbur

This Tanbur is similar to the one played by Peter 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.

Erhu 

Traditional Chinese instrument. 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.

Bowtar

Experimental Instrument with gourd resonator. Here the Erhu bow direction was maintained, but the neck and body rearranged to allow two strings to 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 itself 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 Kemanche 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 within the violin pitch range. Made in 1998.

Tenor Tarhu

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