Koboz/cobsa (long)

[Robert Cohen <zaelic...>]

I bought Jeff?s koboz for him in Hungary at the Pro-Folk shop, corner of Osvat 
utca nad Dohany utca in Pest (Blaha Lujza ter). They get them from the factory 
in Reghin, Romania, where you have to order them ahead of time ? a friend of 
mine in Marosvasarhely handles this ? you have to know the maker  i.e., a 
little gifty helps) in order to get one that is actually playable. The ones 
made in Hungary these days are pretty clunky, faux-medeival jobs. In Romania I 
always ask musicians about them, but they are getting rare and are usually 
pretty beat up. There aren?t any hard cases for them, so they would be pretty 
difficult to ship.

Koboz is the Hungarian word for them, cobsa in Romanian, and they are very 
popular in the Csango dance scene in Hungary, groups like Tatros, Karpatia, and 
Zurgo use them (check out their CDs!!) There are still about seven or eight 
active folk players in Moldavian Romania, and most sources say that it was on 
the way out in Muntenia and Oltenia by the 1950s, giving way to the accordion, 
cimbalom, and guitar. Stu Brotman tells me that Mihai Lacatus, the cobzar on 
the Argus 1960s record was making them out of mandolins when Stu met Lacatus in 
Cimpulung Moldovesc in 1970. Today the band from Cimpulung uses a factory 
model, but you can?t hear it over the din of their electric keyboards and miked 
fiddles?

The koboz/copbsa of today is probably a Romanian adaption of the Turkish oud - 
it looks like an oud that shrunk in the dryer after washing. The word is from 
Kipchak Turkish ? basically any stringed instrument can be named kopuz. In 
Turkey today it means a small skin headed saz-like instrument. It was the main 
bardic instrument in medeival Hungary, but probably was longer necked with 
fewer strings oin its early form. 

The tuning used in Moldavia and by extension, in Hungary, is GDGc or AEAd with 
all kinds of combinations for the octaves. I have seen a couple of  mandolin 
tuned ones among city musicians, but you can?t really do the tipturi patterns 
well on them. There is a good article in a 1980s edition of the Hungarian 
journal Ethnografia about koboz.

Tudor Gheorghe has a great cassette on Electrecord of ballads accompanied by 
classic old style cobsa, He?s an actor living in Sibiu. There is also another 
band in Sibiu that uses cobsa in old orchestral style very well ? hopefully I 
will get to Sibiu and meet them this year.

As for Jewish cobsa, there was mention of it in early writings, but my hunch is 
that Jews used it only occaisionally, preffering the tsimbl for accompaniment. 
The fact that it remained a folk instrument in Moldavia but was elevated to 
?café? instrument (and subsequently died out as fashion switched to 
cimbalom/accordion)  in southern Romania may be due to the fact that Jewish 
musicians were predominant in Moldavia and rarer in Bucharest - You don?t find 
any ?Kobzar? klezmer family names, although it is common in Romanian (The Gypsy 
composer Barbu Lautauru?s father?s name was Kobzaru, for example). Di Naye 
Kapelye used koboz on our Cd by the advice of Itsilk Svarts, who wrote about 
hearing bands like this in Podu Illoiae in the 1920s. Viktor Ghilas, a 
folklorist at the Academy of Sciences in Kishinev told me of three Moldavian 
Jewish cobsa plaers ? one wrote the book on orchestral cobsa, the other two 
moved to Israel in the early 1990s. 

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