When you play the rebab it must be as if there were no rebab, only a memory.
The Indonesian rebab is a spike fiddle with an almost heart-shaped body made of wood and covered with a thin and
delicate skin taken from the intestine or bladder of a buffalo. The two copper strings are tuned by two exaggeratedly
long and ornate pegs (which would break if gripped anywhere other than close to the neck of the instrument). The
two strings really comprise of a single length of wire wound around the bottom of the stick and ending in the two
pegs. The horsehair bow is as ornate and fragile as the rebab itself. It is held, palm upwards, in such a way that the
third and fourth fingers pull the hair, thereby giving it the required tension. The fingers press the string slightly;
nevertheless, the instrument is capable of making a fairly loud, nasal sound. To soften and sweeten it one may tie the
strings together with cotton an inch or so below the bridge and pinch a rolled leaf between them and the bridge; or
the player wedges a piece of cloth between the strings and the lower part of the skin cover.
Rebab can only be heard in the buka (= opening), the introductory phase to every gamelan piece which is always
performed solo by one of the melody instruments (rebab, suling, or the human voice). Afterwards the rebab’s sound is
almost ‘lost’ in the bronzen ensemble sound although the rebab, voice, and suling are the only true sustained sounds
in the gamelan. The rebab, more than any other member, exploits the potential to bind the sounds of the gamelan
together and create a legato effect which is so aesthetically pleasing in this music.
Sarangi
For a long time, sarangi has been a general term for bowed chordophones on India although it denotes also a specific
fiddle. The sarangi’s origins are unknown, although its history can be traced back for centuries. It is said that it
originated when a weary travelling hakim (doctor) lay down under a tree to rest in a forest. He was startled by a
strange sound from above, which he eventually found to be caused by the wind blowing over the dried-up skin of a
dead monkey, stretched between some branches. With this unlikely event as his inspiration, he proceeded home and
constructed the first sarangi.
Sarangi originally means ’coulourful’ but is often slightly changed to sauarungi = a hundred colours―an indication of
its adaptability to cover a wide range of musical styles, its flexible tunability, and its ability to produce a large
palette of tonal colour and emotional nuance. The sarangi is revered for its uncanny capacity to imitate the timbre
and inflections of the human voice as well as for the intensity of emotional expression to which it lends itself.
Archaic sarangis didn’t have sympathetic strings; in western India (especially in Rajasthan) but also in Nepal sarangis
with only three strings are still being played today. When exactly the sarangi travelled north to Nepal is uncertain;
one the one hand there are hints that it happened as early as in the 13
th
century, on the other hand we only have
documents from the 16
th
century that wandering minstrels started to accompany their devotional songs on the sarangi.
In both places the sarangi is the instrument of a low cast of musicians who are hailed because of their art, because of
the news they bring and the entertainment they deliver, but who are also despised because of their unsteady
lifestyle. Nevertheless, the appreciation they gain in form of grain, money and cloths just about covers their daily
expenses.
A subfamily of the sarangi are the chikara: Kingiriyas, Yogis that travel the Adivasi region of Rajasthan and Madhya
Pradesh use them to accompany their religious songs. A chikara has two melody strings made from bronze and steel,
and seven sympathetic strings; its body looks like a reversed sarinda. Higher-developed chikaras that rather resemble
a sarangi are sometimes named kingri or kingra in Uttar Pradesh.
The classical sarangi is carved out of a single piece of hardwood, usually tun (toona ciliata, syn. Cedrela toona),
covered with goatskin, and is between 64 and 67 cm in length. It has three melody strings which are usually made of
gut and around thirty-five metal sympathetic strings which provide a bright echo: Together with the European lyra
viol, the sarangi is considered to be one of the two oldest instruments with sympathetic strings introduced in Northern
India and (most likely as an import by sailors) in England in the early 17
th
century. The strings pass over and through
an elephant-shaped bridge (surdhari) usually made of bone or ivory. The sarangi’s three melody strings are stopped
not with the pads of the fingers but with the cuticles or the upper nails or the skin above the nails of the left hand.
Practice often leads to prodigious callousing as well as to telltale grooves in the fingernails―the difficulty of sarangi
playing technique is legendary. The bow is usually made of rosewood or ebony and is considerably heavier than
Western violin or cello bows, contributing to the solidity and vocal quality of the sarangi’s sound.
During the 18
th
and 19
th
century, the sarangi entered the world of Hindustani art music as the preferred melodic
accompaniment for songstress-courtesans. It appears to have been the most popular North Indian instrument during
the 19th century at a time when sitar and sarod were relatively rare as well as relatively primitive not having yet
benefited from technical improvements made several decades later. So plentiful were sarangi players that paintings
and photos of singing and dancing girls usually depict a sarangi player on each side of the singer.
The 20
th
century brought hard times for the instrument: The innocuous harmonium largely replaced it as the preferred
accompaniment to vocal music, and the European violin adopted much of the sarangi’s concert repertoire. Besides,
the instrument had difficulties getting rid of its bad image (being associated with the accompaniment of dancing-girls
/ prostitutes). But it managed, even began a second life after being accepted as a solo instrument in Classical
Hindustani music, first upon the initiative of Bundu Khan (1880–1955), and later seconded by the outstanding quality
of musicians such as Ram Narayan, Sultan Khan, and lately Dhruba Ghosh. Especially the name of Pandit Ram Narayan
(* Udaipur 1927) has become almost a synonym for classical sarangi playing―classical not only referring to the
repertoire but also to the purity of the instrument’s use: Fusion, he says with an endearing smile, “is confusion. One
needs to focus all attention on one type of music. The sarangi has a spiritual language and one cannot fuse it with