تنبور

What it means

تنبور (tanbur) is a long-necked lute, older than the setar, with a larger pear-shaped body and usually three strings (two doubled, one single). Unlike the setar, the tanbur is not a secular concert instrument. It belongs to the religious music of the Ahl-e Haqq (also called Yarsan), a Kurdish-speaking esoteric tradition concentrated in Kermanshah province and the wider Kurdish region of western Iran. The tanbur is the sacred instrument of their ceremonies, the carrier of their hymns (kalam-e haqq, the word of truth).

You strike it with the right hand using all four fingers, a flutter that is unlike the single-finger technique of the setar.

How to use it

tanbur saz-e moqaddas-e ahl-e haqq ast.

The tanbur is the sacred instrument of the Ahl-e Haqq.

تنبور ساز مقدس اهل حق است.

seda-ye tanbur ba seda-ye setar khili farq mikonad, sangin-tar ast.

The sound of the tanbur is very different from the setar, it is heavier.

صدای تنبور با صدای سه‌تار خیلی فرق می‌کند، سنگین‌تر است.

The sacred context

In an Ahl-e Haqq jam (the religious gathering), a tanbur player leads the singing of the kalam. The instrument itself is considered sacred; some players keep theirs wrapped in cloth between uses and treat it the way a Sufi treats his rosary. Ali Akbar Moradi is the master who brought the tanbur repertoire into wider hearing through recordings on Buda Musique and concert tours in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s.

Where it comes from

The word tanbur is ancient. Sumerian cuneiform references to a long-necked lute called pan-tur (small bow) date to the third millennium BCE, and the word traveled across the Iranian plateau and into Arabic, Turkish, and the Caucasus. In Persian musicology the tanbur is usually treated as the ancestor of the setar and the tar, the older form from which the newer family branched.

Where to find one

Kermanshah is the heartland. Workshops in the city and in the surrounding villages still build them by hand from mulberry wood. In Tehran, specialty shops on Lalehzar Street stock them, though the serious players go to Kermanshah for a maker they know.

In our voice

The tanbur is not the instrument you pick up to learn Persian classical music. It is the instrument you pick up if you want to enter a specific religious tradition that has kept its music alive for a thousand years against every kind of pressure. Respect it accordingly.

References

• Dehkhoda, تنبور
• Vajehyab, تنبور