Oud

Assembled from 19 blocks · 2 evidence · 23 related

1. Story
2. The short-necked, fretless, pear-bodied plucked lute of the Arab musical world, built from thin ribs bent over a mould into a deep bowl, with a bent-back pegbox and courses of paired gut strings. Its own ancestry runs back through the Persian barbat and, further and less securely, to the long and short lutes of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt; by the ninth century it was the central art instrument of the Abbasid courts and the object on which Arabic music theory was worked out, its strings and stopping positions serving as the physical model for writing about mode and interval. Two construction facts carry the diffusion argument that follows. It has no frets, so pitch is continuous and the ear rather than the fingerboard decides where a note sits; and its bowl is assembled from ribs rather than carved, a technique that has to be taught rather than guessed. The name is the Arabic al-ʿūd, "the wood" — the word travelled with the object into Spanish laúd, Italian liuto, German Laute and English lute, which is the plainest surviving evidence of the route.
3. Knowledge
4. Oud
5. Ngoni
6. Connections
7. Ngoni
8. European lute
9. The Andalusi nūba
10. Ziryāb arrives at the Umayyad court of Córdoba
11. A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
12. Granada falls and the Andalusi repertoire crosses to the Maghreb
13. Oud
14. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
15. West Africa
16. Banjo
17. Evidence
18. The medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud, takes its name from the Arabic al-ʿūd, cannot be distinguished from the ʿūd in Western iconography until about the thirteenth century, and appears in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed c. 1283; European players added frets. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary with the substance attributed to this Met essay; the essay page itself was not opened, and no plate, accession number or footnote in it was read.
19. The Andalusi nūba tradition developed in al-Andalus between the ninth and fifteenth centuries and survives in the Maghreb as ala in Morocco, ṣanʿa in Algeria and maʾlūf in Tunisia and Libya, carried there by musicians and families displaced after 1492. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary blending this interview with encyclopaedic reference entries; the interview was not listened to or read in full and the attribution of each element to Reynolds specifically is not established.