Bandura - Development

Development

The invention of an instrument combining organological elements of lute and psaltery is sometimes credited to Francesco Landini, an Italian lutenist-composer of trecento. Filippo Villani writes in his Liber de civitatis Florentiae, "... invented a new sort of instrument, a cross between lute and psaltery, which he called the serena serenarum, an instrument that produces an exquisite sound when its strings are struck." Rare iconographic evidence (by artists such as Alessandro Magnasco) reveals that such instruments were still in use in Italy ca. 1700. Similar instruments have been documented as having existed in Ukraine in the preceding century.

In the hands of the Zaporozhian cossacks, the bandura underwent significant transformations, due to the development of a specific repertoire. Because of the primary role as an instrument for the accompaniment of the voice, the construction and playing technique was adapted in order to better accommodate these functions. At the Zaporozhian Sich, special schools for blind bards were established, setting the foundation for a class of itinerant musicians known as the kobzars. By the 18th century, the instrument had developed into a form with approximately four to six stoppable strings strung along the neck (with or without frets) and up to sixteen treble strings known as prystrunky strung in a diatonic scale across the soundboard. The bandura existed in this form relatively unchanged until the end of the 19th century.

The development of the bandura without stopped strings on the neck was thought to have happened later, some time before 1800. This type of bandura superseded the fretted type, and became the forerunner of the modern-day bandura.

The bandura underwent significant changes in the 20th century, paralleling the development of Ukrainian ethnic awareness. Sanctions introduced by the Russian government in 1876 (Ems ukaz) severely restricting the use of Ukrainian language which also restricted the use of the bandura on the concert stage as virtually all of the repertoire was sung in Ukrainian.

Because of these restrictions and the rapid disappearance of kobzars and bandurists the topic of the minstrel art of the itinerant blind bandura players was again brought up for discussion at the XIIth Archeological Conference held in Kharkiv in 1902. It had been believed that the last blind kobzar, (Ostap Veresai) had died in 1890, however upon investigation six blind traditional kobzars were found to be alive and performed on stage at the conference. Thenafter, the rise in Ukrainian self-awareness the bandura became very popular particularly among young students and intellectuals. Gut strings were replaced by metal strings (standard after 1902). The number of strings and size of the instrument also began to grow to accommodate the sound production required for stage performances and to accommodate a new repertoire of urban folkloric song.

Subsequent developments included metal tuning pegs (introduced in 1912), additional chromatic strings (introduced in 1925) and a mechanical lever system for rapid retuning of the instrument (first introduced in 1931).

Although workshops for the serial manufacture of banduras had been established earlier outside of Ukraine (in Moscow (1908), and Prague (1924)), continuous serial manufacture of banduras was started in Ukraine in sometime in 1930. After World War II, two factories dominated the manufacturing of banduras: the Chernihiv Musical Instrument Factory (which produced 120 instruments a month, over 30,000 instruments from 1954 to 1991) and the Trembita Musical Instrument Factory in Lviv (which has produced over 3,000 instruments since 1964).