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Greek (tetrachordo) Bouzouki

Click here for a personal encounter with the Bouzouki.

The bouzouki (gr. t? µp???????; pl. ta µp???????a) (plural sometimes transliterated as bouzoukia) is the mainstay of modern Greek music as well as other Balkan folk music, particularly of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is also found in Irish music. It is a stringed instrument with a pear-shaped body and a very long neck. The bouzouki is a member of the 'long neck lute' family and is similar to a mandola. The front of the body is flat and is usually heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The instrument is played with a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound.

There are three main types of bouzouki:

	Trichordo having three pairs of strings (courses).
	Tetrachordo having four pairs of strings.
	Irish having four pairs of strings and a flat back.

History

In Ancient Greece, this instrument was supposedly known as the "pandouris" or "pandourion", also called the "trichord" because it had three strings; it was the first fretted instrument known, forerunner of the various families of lutes worldwide. The source of our supposed knowledge about this instrument is the Mantineia marble (4th century BC, now exhibited at Athens Archaeological Museum), depicting the mythical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, where a pandouris is being played by a muse seated on a rock.

From Byzantine times it was called the tambouras. The modern turkish Tanbur is practically identical to the ancient Greek pandouris. On display in the National Historical Museum of Greece is the tambouras of a hero of the Greek revolution of 1821, General Makriyiannis. This tambouras bears the main morphological characteristics of the bouzouki used by the Rebetes.

The Turkish Saz and the Lebanese Buzuq belong to the same family of instruments as the bouzouki. A middle-sized kind of saz is called a "bozouk saz". Bozouk in Turkish means something like broken. Here it is used in order to specify the size of the instrument. It is concluded, therefore, that the bouzouki has been named after the jargon of the Turkish saz. An alternative popular etymology maintains that the word "Bozouk" was used because different tunings (the Turkish 'düzen') are required for the instrument to play in different musical scales (known as Dromoi in Greek, Maqam (pl. Maqamat) in Arabic). A tuning known as the "bozouk düzeni" (broken tuning) still exists in Greek folk music.

Following the 1919-1922 war in Asia Minor and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the ethnic Greeks fled to Greece. The refugees brought with them the music known as Smyrneika, which made use of the Arabic lute (Oud or "outi" as the Greeks called it). Soon the outi was replaced by the bouzouki and the Smyrneika style fused into the Rembetika.

The early bouzoukia were Trichordo, with three courses (six strings in three pairs) and were generally tuned to D3/D4 A3 D4. This tuning fits in well with the music of the Middle East, as an open chord is neither major nor minor, allowing great flexibility with the melody. Trichordo bouzoukis are still being made, and are very popular with aficionados of Rembetika.

After the Second World War, Tetrachordo (four-course) bouzoukis started to appear. It is not known who first added the fourth course. Possibly Stefanakis or Anastasios Stathopoulos. The tetrachordo was made popular by Manolis Chiotis.

The Irish bouzouki, with four courses, a flatter back, and differently tuned than the Greek bouzouki, is a more recent development, dating back to the 1960s.

The trichordo bouzouki

The trichordo bouzouki was the usual type of bouzouki from around 1920, when it had changed to having fixed frets, rather than movable ones, and it had 6 strings in three pairs, tuned D-a-d (or E-b-e). This was the type of bouzouki that was used for rebetiko. The illustrated bouzouki is a replica of a trichordo bouzouki used by Markos Vamvakaris. It has tuners for eight srings, but has only six strings. The luthiers of the time often used sets of four tuners on trichordo instruments, as these were more easily available, since they were used on mandolins.

 

The tetrachordo bouzouki

This type of bouzouki has 8 metal strings which are arranged in 4 pairs, known as courses. It was conceived and established in the scene by a major Rebetis, Manolis Chiotis, during the early 1940's. In the two higher-pitched (treble) courses, the two strings of the pair are tuned to the same note. These are used for playing melodies, usually with the two courses played together. In the two lower-pitched (bass) courses, the pair consists of a thick wound string and a thin string tuned an octave apart. These 'octave strings' add to the fullness of the sound and are used in chords and bass drones (continuous low notes that are played throughout the music).

The original tuning for the four-course bouzouki is C3 F3 A3 D4 (where C4 is Middle C). In recent times, some players have taken to tuning their bouzoukis up in pitch to D3G3B3E4. This latter tuning is identitical to the tuning of the thinner four strings of a standard Spanish tuned guitar.

 

 Well-known bouzouki players

	Markos Vamvakaris
	Yiorgos Batis
	Vassilis Tsitsanis
	Manolis Chiotis
	Alex Zivojinovich Lifeson

Greek baglama

The baglama (Greek µpa??aµ??) is very different from the Turkish baglama.

It is a half-sized version of the bouzouki. The Greek baglama has a small body, with a bowl, that is either made from staves or carved from solid wood. The neck is fretted, with the fret spacing corresponding to the notes of Western music. It has three pairs of strings, of which the higher two pairs are tuned in unison to D and A, and an octave pair tuned to D. The high pitched sound of the baglama is often very prominent in Pireas style Rembetika.

For additional information, consult the history of Greece over the last hundred years, with particular reference to rembetika (also called rebetika), which was a blend of numerous styles, including Turkish fasil music, derived from the Ottoman classical genre.

For a personal story about the Baglam, click here.