cobza/koboz solos http://www.campin.me.uk/Music/Cobza/ for a description and pictures of the instrument. http://www.hora.ro/pages/mandolins.htm for nice picture. two solos: http://www.alansondheim.org/cobza.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/koboz.mp3 traded in dotar and tambur and some books for the cobza, which sounds amazing and is interesting to play - a fretless five-inch neck. i have it tuned eee/aa/dd/ggg, somewhat between a tiple and guitar. it's incredibly resonant. bit of phenomenology follows: local spots on yayli tanbur given the irregular positioning of the frets, there are local intensities, strange attractors, often preceded (i.e. lower down i the scale) by a series of quarter-tones. the result is a psycho-geography of the neck which refuses cartesion/tensor mathesis; this universe is hardly homo- geneous, much less isomorphic. think of it as a one-dimensional vector heading towards a hyperbolic geometry at the higher end - the asymptotic gathering of octave after octave, endless. local memory plays a role here - not a finger/chord-positioning demanding equality everywhere on the fingerboard, but a local cluster-population to which the fingers respond. here the medieval (i.e. not equally-tempered, assembly-line) meets the universe (pythagorean 'natural intervals); you can literally sense the tension between industry/artifice and craft/physics. capital in this regard is hardly natural; instead, it is at odds with the order of things that in fact is ungainly, local, inelegant. there's no room for the abject on the western fingerboard (no wonder so many bent notes); there's room for everything on the yayli tanbur - except for chordal vagaries, trans/ positions... _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
