Oud

node · earth · Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean

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.