Tagelharpe

The jouhikko is a traditional, two- or three-stringed bowed lyre, from Finland and Russia. Its strings are traditionally of horsehair. The playing of this instrument never died. There was at least one player who carries this tradition in Finland..

The Jouhikko is also called jouhikannel or jouhikantele, meaning a bowed kantele. In English, the usual modern designation is 'bowed lyre' though the earlier preferred term 'bowed harp' is also met with. There are different names for the instrument in different languages.

18th-century writers in Latin mention instruments that seem to be a jouhikko, but the first illustration comes from c. 1830 CE. Folk music collectors in the late 19th and early 20th century visited players in Finland and Karelia, and collected instruments, noted tunes, made field recordings and took photographs.

The jouhikko repertory was mostly collected in the field by A. O. Väisänen from 1913 to 1961. The jouhikko was used for playing dance music, and the collected tunes are very short, and were largely improvised. The scale of the jouhikko is only 6 notes, with a constantly sounding drone.

In a three-string jouhikko, the middle string, or in a two-string instrument, the lower or left hand string, is the drone string. Absolute pitch is not fixed, but in Nieminen's charts this is given the note d. The upper or right hand string, passing over the finger-hole, is fingered to give a scale, and this scale typically runs upwards from the note a 4th above the drone, or in Nieminen's charts, g a b c d e. The third or left hand string can be tuned down to a lower drone, or up to provide one of the melody notes.

The strings are stopped by touching them with the back of the fingers (the knuckles or nails), as there is no fingerboard to press the strings against. This fingering method is rather similar to the igil or the sarangi which also lack fingerboards. To touch the melody string the hand is inserted through a hole in the flat wooden board that makes up the top third of the instrument.

On a 3-string instrument tuned g-d-a, the first note of the scale is played on the g string, which cannot be fingered as it lies on the far side of the drone and out of reach of the hand hole. The second note is the a string played open. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth notes of the scale are played with the backs of the four fingers, stopping the a string. Whilst it is possible to play higher notes by moving the hand further up the string all the traditional melodies are within a compass of six notes, the first six notes of either a major or minor scale.

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Wikipedia