RE: Cheng, bukharian hammered dulcimer

[Gifford, Paul <pgifford...>]

From: r l reid [mailto:ro (at) panix(dot)com] wrote:

>Paul Gifford's extensive book "The Hammered Dulcimer" (Scarecrow
Press, 2001)
>makes scant mention of the "chang" of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan- I
beleive 
>that's the rough area  Bukhara is found in.  

>Apparently there was a pre-Soviet version and a Soviet version.
Assuming
>you have the Soviet version, they were standardized into 4 sizes and
>"incorporated in 1938 into a state orchestra for playing Western
pieces".

>Tsimbls, cymbali, etc are notorious for thier lack of uniformity in
>design, construction, and tuning.  Apparentl the chang is no
exception.
>Gifford  quotes 4 different sources with 4 different setups, and none
of them
>have any indication of tuning.

Right---as I recall, the book by Tamara Vyzgo and A. Petrosyants,
_Uzbekskii
orkestr narodnykh instrumentov_ (Tashkent: Gosudarstvennoe
Izdatel'stvo 
Khudozhestvennoi Literatury UzSSR, 1962), pp. 30-31, gives the ranges
of the
four sizes, but not the specific tunings. Probably the instrument is
taught at
the conservatory in Tashkent, though who knows whether it is still
being
manufactured. I have a tuning for the older chang in the book, showing
that
it was basically "diatonic" (this is from Belaiev's 1933 book). Likely
the
post-1938 instruments had a chromatic tuning.  Anybody experienced
with the
instrument could figure out a likely tuning, though, but you'd have to
find
someone familiar with string tensions.  You've got a real rarity.

Paul Gifford

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+