Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds

A gusle!

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Jubal:
So, uh, I impulse purchased a gusle because someone was selling one on Willhaben for a very affordable sum.

What is a gusle? Well, it's a this:


They're single-string, bowed instruments from the Balkans, traditionally used in storytelling and epic poetic singing. The note can be varied by touch-harmonics, which is by all accounts difficult as hell but is a very interesting system. There isn't a lot of variation available that way - there's only one string after all - but that's what the instrument can do. It's quite a heavy instrument - the back is wood, traditionally maple is apparently most common though I wouldn't know how to tell if this one actually is. The neck is very heavy, solid wood, and the body I think has a thicker wooden block than, say, a guitar, meaning the whole thing is probably about the same weight as my full size guitar despite being physically a bit smaller. The front has a hide covering, and the bridge isn't fixed to the cover (meaning you can shift the bridge a little bit as part of the tuning process).

I've not been able to try doing more than plucking the main string so far, because whilst I have the bow and the bow is strung, the bow isn't rosined - that is, coated with resin from a resin block. This is necessary to give the bow purchase on the string: without it, the bow just slides, it's just horsehair on horsehair (or synthetic equivalents). The rosin gives the bow grip, meaning that as it's drawn across the main string it grips and releases it again and again and again, far too fast for us to hear the gaps - and thus essentially repeatedly plucking the string which makes the resulting note.

Interesting side note, I discovered that rosin for instrument bows is also known as colophony. This looked very a word I was familiar with as the term colophon is used in manuscript studies, referring to a copyist's note at the end of a handwritten document which gives the name of the writer and sometimes details of the circumstances around the copying. Colophons often used to be passed over but are of increasing interest to scholars, especially in the Armenian traditions where they often contain a LOT of historical detail. How on earth are these things related? Well, via the original Greek term colophon, which means the top of a hill. From this came the colophon of a manuscript, which is in a literal-etymological sense thus its summit, its capping-off at the end of the document being written. There was however another use of colophon, more literally as Colophon, a town in Asia Minor. One of the products it was famous for producing? Tree resin, or as it sometimes became known, colophony. (Here endeth the lesson: this just interested me).

Here's a close up of the head section, which is absolutely wild - a fish eating/spewing a goat's head with a human head sticking out of it to hold the string:


The mountain goat bit of the emblem at least is apparently traditional (it looks like this one once had much larger horns that have now been lost).

Will update with playing attempts sometime if anyone's interested :)

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