Mike's Oud Forums

Oud Newbie Questions

cdroms - 3-8-2023 at 09:14 AM

No, not oud nawba, though I'm interested in that too...

Firstly, what do the knowledgeable people of this forum recommend as a beginner Turkish-style oud, or what should I look for in an oud? I don't want to break the bank, but even with a cap of, say, $400-500 I'm finding a ton of seemingly equal options, and don't know what direction to go.

Second, in the long run I'm interested in exploring a more '19th-century style' of 'domestic' Ottoman oud-playing. I'm reading that until the early 20th century the oud was strongly associated with women rather than men, and at least in Cairo (but probably Istanbul too) the size of ouds increased significantly in the late 19th century. Do contemporary "women's ouds" possibly resemble what used to be 'default' oud construction? Does the smaller size produce a noticeably different sound? Are women's ouds easier or harder to learn on, or just different?

Thirdly, if anyone has information about local amateur oud meetups, oud teachers, oud community etc in Philadelphia, PA, USA, I would much appreciate it.

Thanks!

Brian Prunka - 3-8-2023 at 02:29 PM

Quote: Originally posted by cdroms  


Second, in the long run I'm interested in exploring a more '19th-century style' of 'domestic' Ottoman oud-playing. I'm reading that until the early 20th century the oud was strongly associated with women rather than men, and at least in Cairo (but probably Istanbul too) the size of ouds increased significantly in the late 19th century. Do contemporary "women's ouds" possibly resemble what used to be 'default' oud construction? Does the smaller size produce a noticeably different sound? Are women's ouds easier or harder to learn on, or just different?


I'm curious what your sources are for this.
It's my understanding that the modern oud that most people play nowadays, particularly Turkish ouds, are rather smaller than those played in the late 19th and very early 20th century.

Surviving examples and literature suggest that ouds routinely used to be in the 63cm scale range and nowadays 58.5-61cm is more typical (and Turkish ouds are all in the smaller end of this range). So contemporary ouds are already smaller than what you would likely have encountered in the late 19th century.

Women's ouds are not usually smaller in the scale of the oud, rather they typically have a shallower bowl to make it easier to hold. This generally has a rather negative impact on the sound and projection of the oud.

From what I've understood, the oud has never been a particularly important instrument in Turkish/Ottoman music, it's more of an Arab instrument that has been adopted (and modified to suit). Not sure if this has something to do with being associated with women, possibly specifically in Turkey. I don't think such an association has been the case in Arab countries, or at least I've never heard that suggested. The oldest famous oud player of course was Zeryab (a man) and he is practically synomous with oud.

https://oudmigrations.com is an excellent resource regarding historical ouds.

cdroms - 3-9-2023 at 07:03 AM

Quote: Originally posted by Brian Prunka  


I'm curious what your sources are for this.
It's my understanding that the modern oud that most people play nowadays, particularly Turkish ouds, are rather smaller than those played in the late 19th and very early 20th century.    

Surviving examples and literature suggest that ouds routinely used to be in the 63cm scale range and nowadays 58.5-61cm is more typical (and Turkish ouds are all in the smaller end of this range).  So contemporary ouds are already smaller than what you would likely have encountered in the late 19th century.  

Women's ouds are not usually smaller in the scale of the oud, rather they typically have a shallower bowl to make it easier to hold.  This generally has a rather negative impact on the sound and projection of the oud.  

From what I've understood, the oud has never been a particularly important instrument in Turkish/Ottoman music, it's more of an Arab instrument that has been adopted (and modified to suit).   Not sure if this has something to do with being associated with women, possibly specifically in Turkey.  I don't think such an association has been the case in Arab countries, or at least I've never heard that suggested.  The oldest famous oud player of course was Zeryab (a man) and he is practically synomous with oud.

https://oudmigrations.com is an excellent resource regarding historical ouds.


Well I certainly made some wildly unsupportable leaps based on scant evidence! So thanks for setting me straight on changing size of Turkish ouds (I wonder why the shift smaller?) and the shape of the "women's oud".

As for the history of oud and gender, I first read it in the intro to this post https://sheshreds.com/in-the-hands-of-women/ , but then found a much more thorough article here on, yes, oudmigrations https://oudmigrations.com/2017/02/06/nostalgia-for-the-female-oud-pl... . And see here for changing size of Egyptian ouds https://oudmigrations.com/2016/11/14/how-large-were-egyptian-ouds/ .

Walter Feldman in his many articles on Ottoman music history says that the oud disappeared from the Ottoman court in the 1500s, replaced by tanbur, and then reappears in the 1850s. But it's much harder to find conclusive record of the oud's life outside aristocracy. Very possibly re-adapted from Arab areas as you say. I could swear also I read about a profession of women in urban 1800s Egypt hired to play oud and sing at weddings and parties (but I can't find now so take with grain of salt!). In any case the upshot of the article I sent is that roughly 1850-1950 in Turkish-speaking areas, 'playing oud' was like 'playing piano' used to be in the west, a key skill for any marriageable young woman of middle or upper class. Whereas men were free to play either oud or 'unladylike' instruments violin, clarinet, tanbur etc. (though there is some irony here with the tanbur during this period only gradually dissociating from repertoire of 'köçek' effeminate dancing boys, see Mehmet Ali Sanlikol's 2023 book...)

As for Zeryab - Scott Marcus' "The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus" has a lot on medieval Islamic music in general and Zeryab in particular before heading over to Al-Andalus. Certainly it seems oud was the most prestigious instrument for art music and therefore available to men, but court records devote much more space to a class of highly-trained and literate singing-and-oud-playing slave-girls/women. In any case their and Zeryab's instrument had frets and was probably constructed more along the lines of European lute, so to me it seems unclear whether we can consider it the same instrument, despite the name.

Well, I hope this wasn't too much of an 'infodump'. I'm an amateur music history researcher long before I'm an amateur musician...

Brian Prunka - 3-9-2023 at 09:23 AM

I'm note sure I'm setting anyone straight! I'm no kind of historian, not even an amateur one, just a player and interested observer.

I had actually read all of those articles but came away with different impressions. I'm hesitant to say "conclusions" because there doesn't seem to be enough information to really know much with any certainty.

I think what got me was the statement "until the early 20th century the oud was strongly associated with women rather than men" is really bold when the oud is played not only in Turkey and Armenia, but Greece, Macedonia, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Moroccco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Sudan, and Somalia, among others. That's a lot of different cultures and it would be quite suprising if they were all the same in any particular respect. Also suggesting that "pre-20th century" was a single cultural norm also seems historically suspect. In short, the oud has been played a long time, through many enormous cultural shifts in many countries. I doubt we can generalize in this way.

It may be that the oud was at one point somewhat more associated with women in Istanbul or Turkey more generally - but even the article above seems skeptical of that claim, which is mainly sourced to a single Turkish writer from the 1950s. Certainly there seems to be evidence that women were much more likely to play the oud at some point in the past, but I think it's a leap to think of it as a "women's instrument" or something a long those lines. Perhaps it was! But evidence seems scant. Also, it seems possible that the period during which women were expected to play the oud may have itself been a relatively recent development that came and went - the period suggested seems to be somewhere 1800-1920 primarily, but the oud has been around much longer than that. The 1950s source seems nostalgic for the bygone era, not the distant past. As you note, the oud fell out of favor in Ottoman court music for a few centuries - we don't know what was happening in non-official circles.

The comparison to the piano is apt: educated/cultured women were expected at one point to entertain/charm their husbands with music, and that a particular instrument was the accepted norm for that. But that doesn't mean that the oud (or the piano) was associated with women, it means that women were associated with the oud (or piano). These are not the same thing. An expectation that women play oud doesn't equal an expectation that the oud be played by women. At the time most women in the West were expected to play the piano, the vast majority of professional pianists were still men.

I suspect the shift likely has more to do with the rise of recording than anything having to do with gender expectations - making your own music fell out of favor around the world as recordings became easily accessible. It was no longer necessary for women to entertain their husbands with music by playing, they could just put on a record.

Regarding the size of ouds, I didn't see where the article above indicated that ouds became larger. It's just categorizing the ouds that we know about and some historical sources about the sizes of ouds - the evidence we have is that they were larger than now, but we mostly don't have surviving ouds from before the late 19th century so we don't really know what the sizes were before that. The oldest known oud appears to be this one, from the early 19th century, and the VSL is almost 64cm: https://oudmigrations.com/2016/03/02/alexandria-to-brussels-1839/

Most of this is related to Arabic ouds, I'm not sure how much you can generalize about Turkish ouds. All we really can glean from this is that many, possibly most, ouds used to be a fair bit larger than they are now, and that modern ouds are around the size of the "medium" ouds of the past or even slightly smaller. In Turkey, the designs of Manol came to predominate the modern Turkish oud design and so the modern size of the Turkish oud probably has to do with that - why Manol chose 58-59 cm as the ideal size I don't know. Maybe it was to accomodate women? That would certainly be interesting if true.

Arabic ouds seem to have slowly gotten smaller on average over the course of the 20th century. While the Turkish oud is standardized at 58.5cm, Arabic ouds have no standard size and range from 57cm to 63cm. Most Arabic ouds seem to be between 58.5 and 61.5cm. Even as recently as the 1990s, most Arabic ouds tended to be ~61-62cm, whereas now I'd say the typical Arabic oud is probably about ~59-61cm. My hypothesis about this is that "concert pitch" was not standardized in Arabic music until roughly the 1970s, old ouds were frequently tuned 0.5-1.5 steps lower than "C". As the standard pitch rose, the size of the oud followed suit. I don't have any real evidence for this, it's simply an interesting correlation that would make sense.

The oud of Zeryab and those described by Farabi, etc. we don't know much about other than that they were fretted and played with a plectrum mostly. The lute, of course, came from the oud, and the many European lutes are descendants of whatever intrument Zeryab was playing. The modern oud is likewise descended from the earlier instrument. I suspect that both the 'lute' and the modern 'oud' are significantly removed from the original oud that Zeryab played. Regardless of how far removed either instrument is from their common ancestor, from the standpoint of "association" Zeryab remained emblematic of oud playing in the Arab world. The facts of whether instrument he played is "really" the same as a modern oud are irrelevant to this point I would think.

Anyway, it's an interesting question and perhaps there will be more information and evidence unearthed by future researchers. I don't doubt that their is a large tradition of female musicians that have been generally unrecognized, and that this is true of many cultures/traditions.

cdroms - 3-9-2023 at 10:09 AM

Quote: Originally posted by Brian Prunka  

Anyway, it's an interesting question and perhaps there will be more information and evidence unearthed by future researchers. I don't doubt that their is a large tradition of female musicians that have been generally unrecognized, and that this is true of many cultures/traditions.


Thank you for taking the time to answer!

Upon re-skimming the articles I sent I agree with basically all your conclusions or rather impressions.

I had gotten the sense that the modern Egyptian oud reflected a kind of 'grand-piano-ization' of the oud, more sound and more bass for a more extrovert, public-concert-oriented performance culture, reflecting the introduction of western-style concert venues in Egypt already in the 1870s if I remember right. But I guess this narrative is altogether too pat, too one-to-one and doesn't really match up to available information. In any case I'm surprised how difficult it is to find information about even the relatively recent histories of most nonwestern instruments. Though maybe my not understanding Arabic or Turkish or any other relevant language is a contributing factor in this case...