The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #165109   Message #3958267
Posted By: Jack Campin
25-Oct-18 - 07:01 AM
Thread Name: Traditional Irish Didgeridoo
Subject: RE: Traditional Irish Didgeridoo
All the old images of frame drums I know of show them being played fingerstyle, as it still is by cultures that never forgot it. The most spectacular is the Pompeii mosaic which shows the drummer bashing it from underneath, as is still done by Iranian and Kurdish daf players - the drum is kept floating in the air by a fusillade of finger impacts.

The bouzouki is a Greek hybrid of the Turkish baglama and the Greek lavta (which dates back to when Greece was a province of the Ottoman Empire). The word is Turkish, but an odd "false friend" - the Turkish word was "bozuk", which means "broken", but the actual root was Persian "bozorg", which means "large" - it was the largest size of its family.

The bark trumpet, like the present-day didgeridoo-sized Romanian "bucinium", probably predated the Western European bronze horns, but identifying the remains of one in an Irish bog isn't all that likely.