Berber Musical Instruments
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
From: 1906 C.E. To: 1906 C.E.
Location: Morocco
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
Stringed Instruments
In the manufacture of musical instruments, rude though most of them are, it may be said that the Moors show more skill than in their performances on them.
The most common is the ginbri, a diminutive two or three stringed guitar, so simple in its construction of rough wood and skin that many rustic players make their own, and may be encountered droning languidly beside their flocks with monotonous accompaniment on this instrument.
Much more important looking is the full-sized 'aud (lute) or mandoline, closely resembling that of Spain, with four pairs of strings, tuned to the g, d, a, and d of the treble clef, which is played with a plectrum of whale-bone or horn.
A third stringed instrument—the rabab, played chiefly by Jewish musicians—is a clumsy sort of fiddle of two strings tuned to the c and a of the treble clef; the effect produced on it is excruciating.
The European variety of the violin, an imitation of it, is known as the kamanjah.
Wind Instruments
Of wind instruments the Moors make most use of the oboe or ghaïtah, players on which, with distended cheeks, lead most religious processions. A cane flute, shaba-bah or shiffarah (whistler), is also used, and in Ramadan a long horn (nafeer) is blown from the mosque towers during the night.
The Rifis and others also make rude cane pipes of two reeds in which are inserted two smaller ones split at the side, and a picturesque instrument (zummárah), constructed of two curving horns, side by side, fitted to reeds, sometimes attached to of a bag-pipe.
Skin Instruments
But the most popular instruments are of the drum class, headed by the drum proper (tabil), beaten on one side with a thick nobbed stick, and on the other with a switch.
Then there is the plain tambourine, bindar or dif, with two strings across the centre against the skin, such as are also introduced in other instruments of this class. Tambourines, called tar, of a more elaborate make, with cymbals in the rim, are used by the Jews, and story-tellers favour a kind of double tambourine, square, with skin on both sides, the bandir.
The most common instrument of this class, however, is the agwal or darbukkah, a short clay cylinder of varying size, often gaily decorated, with skin and perhaps strings. Great numbers of these are sold to the women and children at feast times, as also are tin castanets, karakab. Many original patterns come from Guinea, and the genuine negro minstrel is a common object in Morocco, decked with cowrie shells, buckles, brace-buttons and other European "curios," and armed with formidable mandoline or castanets. Nothing pleases a Moor so much as to tap rhythmically with his finger-tips upon a tambourine or drum, as he hums or intones a nasal air of a few indefinite, wavering notes.
Moorish Music
His music is based, like that of the Orient generally, on the pentatonic scale, which it is necessary for the untrained European to practise before being able to appreciate the native intervals and divisions. Without this key it is as idle to discuss eastern music, as foolish to condemn it.
The use of this scale appears to have been almost universal at one time, and it is that which lends the ancient Scotch and Irish airs their peculiar charm. It is similar to the modern diatonic major scale with fourth and seventh omitted, sometimes called the "Scotch scale," and to produce it instruments of five and ten strings were invented. Its subdivisions are impossible on our mechanical instruments, so eastern tunes should be reproduced by the voice or on a violin.
Meakin, Budgett. The Moors: A Comprehensive Description. Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1906.
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