Hamza El Din ‎– Escalay / The Water Wheel

Subtitled: Oud Music from Nubia

Label: Nonesuch Explorer Series ‎– H-72041

Format: Vinyl, LP 

Country: US

Released: 1971

Genre: Folk, World, & Country

 

Vinyl is EX almost near mint with a glossy shine. No scratches. Clean labels. Sleeve is VG+ with a small price sticker scuff on the front, and a small, hard to discern tape repair along the bottom edge. Otherwise clean, no ring wear, no splitting edges.

Tracklist:

 

A

Escalay / The Water Wheel

21:30

B1

I Remember

Written-By – Mohammed Abdul Wahab

11:55

B2

Song With Tar

4:45

 

Credits

Vocals, Oud – Hamza El Din

Cover Art – George Guzzi

Engineer [Recording] – Daniel C. Grinstead

Produced with the cooperation of the Archives of Ethnic Music and Dance, University of Washington, Seattle.

 

>>>> 

 

The oud is a short-neck lute-type, pear-shaped stringed instrument (a chordophone in the Hornbostel-Sachs classification of instruments) with 11 or 13 strings grouped in 5 or 6 courses, commonly used in Egyptian, Syrian, Sudanese, 

Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Kurdish, Arabian Yemeni, Arabian, Jewish, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, North African (Chaabi, Classical, and Spanish Andalusian), Somali, and various other forms of Middle Eastern and North African music. The oud is very similar to modern lutes, and also to Western lutes. The modern oud is most likely derived from the Persian barbat. Similar instruments have been used in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia for thousands of years, including from Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, the Caucasus, and the Levant; there may even be prehistoric antecedents of the lute. The oud, as a fundamental difference with the western lute, has no frets and a smaller neck. It is the direct ancestor of the European lute. The oldest surviving oud is thought to be in Brussels, at the Museum of Musical Instruments.

 

In Pre-Islamic Arabia and Mesopotamia, the oud had only three strings, with a small musical box and a long neck without any tuning pegs. But during the Islamic era the musical box was enlarged, a fourth string was added, and the base for the tuning pegs (Bunjuk) or peg box was added. In the first centuries of (pre-Islamic) Arabian civilisation, the oud had four courses (one string per course — double-strings came later), tuned in successive fourths. Curt Sachs said they were called (from lowest to highest pitch) bamm, maṭlaṭ, maṭnā and zīr. "As early as the ninth century" a fifth string ḥād ("sharp") was sometimes added "to make the range of two octaves complete". It was highest in pitch, placed lowest in its positioning in relation to other strings. Modern tuning preserves the ancient succession of fourths, with adjunctions (lowest or highest courses) which may be tuned differently following regional or personal preferences. Sachs gives one tuning for this arrangement of five pairs of strings, d, e, a, d', g'. Historical sources indicate that Ziryab (789–857) added a fifth string to his oud. He was well-known for founding a school of music in Andalusia, one of the places where the oud or lute entered Europe. Another mention of the fifth string was made by Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham in Ḥāwī al-Funūn wa Salwat al-Maḥzūn.