A Virtuoso Player
The name is variously transliterated from the original Persian. Santir appears to represent the American consensus. The New Grove Dictionary gives santur, with permissible alternatives of santur and sant'ur. The original French publication of this record (it is part of the Arion "Art of the Younameit" series) offered centhour, which is, of course, pronounced much the same but conjures up the image of one of those man-horse critters of mythology.
However spelled, the name of the instrument, we are told on impeccable authority, is derived from the Greek psalterion, itself from the verb psallein, meaning "to pull," "to twitch," "to pluck," and distantly related to our verb feel. A psalterion was therefore a plucked-string instrument, and the Old Testament psaltery was almost certainly a harp such as King David was supposed to have played.
By the Middle Ages, however, the name (in whatever form) came increasingly to designate zithers, usually of rectangular or trapezoidal shape. The Persian (Iranian) zither was the quanun, an instrument widely popular in Moslem cultures, though now virtually obsolete in Iran (unless the Ayatollah has ordered its reinstatement). Its basic shape is rectangular, the left end cut off diagonally to provide for the gradation of the (gut) strings. It was cradled against the player's chest with the left arm and plucked with the right hand.
The split may have come in the 10th century when metal strings became practicable, according to Sibyl Marcuse's A Survey of Musical Instruments (New York, 1975). At any rate, the santir as we know it is trapezoidal, metal-strung, and played with little "hammers." In short, it is a dulcimer, and apparently the common ancestor of dulcimers from the Far East to Western Europe. It seems to have reached Europe, through contact with the Arabs, in the 12th century, and Korea and China in the 18th.
The modern Iranian instrument played by Djalal Akhbari appears to be about a yard at the widest end of the trapezoid. The player sits cross-legged on the floor with that end nearest his knees. The strings are therefore horizontally ranked with reference to the player, the highest farthest from him.
Hormoz Farhat (Grove) tells us that it has "two layers of quadruple strings (four strings are tuned to each pitch) passing over independent bridges" (each of which is movable). The four strings in each set are attached to a single tuning nut, the nuts projecting from the end of the instrument to the player's right. The hammers are delicate curved beaters of hardwood, the strings being struck with the curved part, not the tip. (All this information is according to standard up-to-date Western reference books. The liner notes for the Arion record, by JeanPierre Faure, say that the instrument has 100 strings and first appeared in Persia ca. 300 A. D., that it was banned by invading Moslems in the 7th century and was later revived, and that Mr. Akhbari [ who holds a doctorate in child psychology) is, in his performances, attempting to return to the music of the preIslamic period. They also say that the Ayatollah has banned the instrument again.)
Iranian "classical" music is based on modes called dastgah-ha or "organizations." M. Faure informs us that there are seven of them, one for each day of the week, whereas Mr. Farhat speaks of 12. Later, however, Farhat accounts for the discrepancy when he says that five of the 12 are derived from two of the original seven. Under each dastgah there are subsumed a number of gusheh-ha, which, if I understand correctly, are melodic patterns. In theory these materials make up a standard repertoire or radif, but its precise limitations have apparently provided material for centuries of unresolved argument among Iranian musicians.
In traditional performances, the musician begins by preludizing on the chosen dastgah, which action he follows with a number of gusheh-ha, which, as I get it, he decorates, modulates, etc., or upon which he improvises. The first dastgah played by Mr. Akhbari is called nava; Farhat's scheme shows an upward scale of D to C, the B being flat and the E flat by approximately a quarter tone, and the "final" ranging from D to B-flat. Nava is one of the seven original dastgah-ha. Akhbari's other choice is bayat-e-Esfahan, a derivative mode, identical with nava except that the F is slightly sharped.
It is not clear from the material at hand whether Akhbari subscribes exactly to the procedures outlined above, but there is no escaping the fact that he is a virtuoso player. He was grand prizewinner in a national competition (pre-Khomeini) and is said to perform with either hand operating independently of the other. In the opening and closing movements he is accompanied on the tombak, a gobletshaped drum, by Reza Torchizi.
