Gusli - string musical instrument, most common in Russia. It is the most ancient Russian stringed musical instrument.

Distinguish pterygoid And helmet-shaped gusli. The first, in later samples, have a triangular shape and from 5 to 14 strings, tuned in steps of the diatonic scale, helmet-shaped - 10-30 strings of the same tuning.

On winged harps (they are also called voiced ) are played, as a rule, by rattling all the strings and muffling unnecessary sounds with the fingers

and with the left hand, on helmet-shaped or psalter-shaped strings, the strings are plucked with both hands. Musicians who play the harp are calledguslars.

History of the gusli

Gusli is a musical instrument, a variety of which isharp. Also similar to the harp are the ancient Greekkithara (there is a hypothesis that she is the ancestor of the gusli), Armenian canon and Iranian santur; these include: Chuvash gusli, Cheremis gusli, clavier-shaped gusli and gusli, which are similar to the Finnish kantele, Latvian kokles and Lithuanian kankles.

The first reliable mentions of the use of Russian gusli are found in Byzantine sources of the 5th century. The heroes of the epic played the gusli: Sadko, Dobrynya Nikitich, Boyan. In the great monument ancient Russian literature, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (XI - XII centuries), the image of the guslar-storyteller is poetically sung:

" Boyan, brethren, is not 10 falcons for a flock of swans in the forest, but his own things and fingers for living strings; they themselves are the prince, glory to the roar".

The Chuvash and Cheremis gusli have a striking resemblance to images of this instrument preserved in the monuments of our antiquity, for example, in a handwritten service book of the 14th century, where in the capital letterDa man playing the harp is represented in the Makaryevskaya Chetye-Mineia of 1542.

In all of these images, the performers hold the harp on their knees and pluck the strings with their fingers. The Chuvash and Cheremis play the harp in exactly the same way. The strings of their harps are intestinal;their number is not always the same. Psalter-shaped harps were brought to Russia by the Greeks; The Chuvash and Cheremis borrowed this instrument from the Russians.

The clavier-shaped gusli, which is still found today, mainly among the Russian clergy, is nothing more than an improved type of psalter-shaped gusli. This instrument consists of a rectangular resonance box with a lid, which rests on a table. Several round cutouts are made on the resonance board (voices), and two concave wooden bars.

On one of them there are screwed iron pegs, on which are wound metal strings; the other beam plays the role of a stringer, that is, it serves to attach the strings. The keyboard-shaped psaltery has a piano tuning, with the strings corresponding to the black keys placed below those corresponding to the white keys.

For clavier-shaped gusli there are notes and a school compiled by Kushenov-Dmitrevsky. In addition to the psaltery-shaped gusli, there are kantele, similar to the Finnish instrument. This type of gusli has almost completely disappeared. It is very likely that it was borrowed by the Russians from the Finns.

Modern names come from this word:gusle- among the Serbs and Bulgarians,gusle, guzla, gusli- among the Croats, gosle- among the Slovenians, guslić- among the Poles, houseley Czechs and harps from Russians. These instruments are quite diverse and many of them are bowed, for exampleguzla, which has only one horsehair string.

...The bowstring rang,
An arrow flew...

Gusli is an ancient musical instrument. Thousands of years of human history have hidden from us both the age and place of their birth. IN different countries and at different nations this instrument was called by different names. Among the Slavs, the name of this instrument, I think, is associated with the sound of the bowstring. The same string that was pulled onto the bow.

In ancient times, the elastic string of a bow was called differently - “gusla”. Here is one of the hypotheses for the origin of the name of the instrument. And by attaching a hollow vessel to a string, we get a primitive musical instrument. So: strings and a resonator that enhances their sound are the basic principle of this plucked instrument.

IN Old Russian manuscript, “Tales of the Belorized Man and Monasticism,” the miniaturist depicted in the initial letter “D” the figure of a king (possibly the psalmist David) playing the harp. Their shape corresponds to the instrument that existed in Rus' at that time. These are the so-called “helmet-shaped” harps. The shape of their body really resembles a helmet. Subsequently, the shape of the flat resonator box changed. A trapezoidal harp appeared. The number of strings on the instrument has decreased, and the shape of the body has also changed. This is how winged harps appeared.

Back in the 9th century, the Slavs amazed the kings of Byzantium by playing the harp. In those distant times, harps were made from hollowed-out dry spruce or maple boards. Maple "Yavor" is especially loved by music professionals. This is where the name of the gusli comes from - “Yarochnye”. / And as soon as the strings began to be pulled from metal, the gusli began to ring and began to be called “ringing”.

The fate of this instrument has long been associated with folk song and epic traditions. Master craftsmen have been passing on the secrets of making gusli for centuries. Gusel tunes, songs of singers, were loved by both the people and the kings. But often folk singers sang unflatteringly about the authorities.

These persecutions of gusli players (as this word sounds correctly), or, as they were disparagingly called guslars, did a disservice to the fate of the instrument. The interest in its improvement was not the same as it was in the fate of the violin. But time has changed this ancient instrument. Its design, body shape, wood processing technology, varnishes, decorative finishing - all this has long removed the harp from the category of an archaic, purely folk instrument, turning it into a professional stage instrument with a rich, unique sound.

Today, every orchestra of folk instruments includes plucked psalteries - table-shaped psalteries and keyboard psalteries. The sound of these instruments gives the orchestra a unique flavor of ancient psaltery ringing.

Currently, interest in the gusli has grown significantly. Modern guslars appeared - storytellers who set out to recreate the ancient tradition of both playing the gusli and singing to the gusli. Along with three types of plucked psaltery, the main playing technique of which is plucking and strumming, keyboard psalteries also appeared. The mechanics installed on them, when you press the keys, opens the strings and makes it possible to select the desired chord. This significantly simplifies playing the gusli as an accompanying instrument.

Unfortunately, if you want to purchase an instrument, you have to talk about small workshops in Russia where harps are very rarely made as individual copies. In the whole world, it seems to me, there is not a single factory where this unique instrument. The money goes for anything: wild entertainment, wars, pleasures... Diversion of funds for the production of at least one surface-to-air combat missile would be more than enough to build a small music factory. How sad and painful it is to realize all this today. But... the harp sounds and will sound forever!

A report on music about the gusli will briefly help you prepare for the lesson, and you will learn a lot useful information about it the oldest instrument. The report about the harp can be supplemented with interesting facts.

A short message about the harp

What is a gusli?

Gusli is the oldest plucked string musical instrument. In Russia, they mean a kind of recumbent harp. They existed on the territory of Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Poland, Estonia, Finland and others European countries(where they had their own original name). And in each country they had their own characteristics. They were similar to each other in terms of a fan of strings, a tailpiece, a row of tuning pegs and a resonator under the strings along the entire length.

Gusli: a story for children

It is impossible to say exactly who invented the harp and when it happened. In the history of the Finnish kantele, Slavic gusli, Latvian kokle, Estonian kanneli, Lithuanian kankles there are only guesses and assumptions. There are opinions that this string instrument came to us from China, where the guqin string instrument was known long before the birth of Christ. According to another version, lyre-like instruments were brought to their colonies by the Romans.

The Finns claim that the first kantele gusli were made by Weimemöinen, in Russia and Belarus, and that the gusli is a modernized “musical bow”. Therefore, the confusion with assumptions is incredible.

In the Old Russian manuscript “The Tale of the Belorized Man and Monasticism,” the author depicted in the initial letter “D” the figure of a king playing the harp. The shape of the body resembles a helmet. Subsequently, the shape of the resonator flat box changed: a trapezoidal shape appeared. With a decrease in the number of strings, wing-shaped harps also developed.

Back in the 9th century, they were made from hollowed-out dry maple or spruce boards. With the appearance of metal strings, the harp began to ring. Craftsmen have been passing on the secret of making instruments to their students for centuries. Not only ordinary residents and peasants, but also kings loved to listen to gusle tunes and songs. However, guslars often spoke unflatteringly about the rulers in their songs. Therefore, persecution of the guslars arose. Over time this plucked instrument from archaic has turned into a professional stage instrument with a unique sound.

Today, every folk instrument orchestra has plucked psalteries: keyboards and table-shaped ones. Their sound gives the orchestra the flavor of ancient ringing.

Gusli: types of instruments

The following types of gusli are distinguished:

• Voiced. These are the simplest and most ancient harps. A trapezoidal or triangular box was placed on the knees when playing. The number of strings varied from 7 to 13. When the ringed harp became part of symphony orchestra, then the flocks immediately see their shortcomings: small range. Then it was decided to build harps of different sizes.
• Plucked. Equipped with 60 strings that cover 5 full octaves. The musician plays the harp with both hands, simultaneously playing the melody on thin and bass strings. They can reproduce complex multi-voice works.
• Keyboards. This is the youngest type of gusli, which appeared in the twentieth century. They are created in 4 sizes: piccolo, prima, alto, bass. They produce a full, rich, pleasant sound.

What do harps sound like?

This original instrument can produce a melodic and gentle voice, can convey the murmur of a stream and birdsong, and depict the ringing of a bell. The sound source is flexible, stretched strings. Each of them is tuned to the desired sound pitch. It is removed with a pick or fingertips. Different harps use their own sound production techniques: arpeggio, rattling, pizzicato, glissando, tremolo.

Gusli interesting facts

• A gusli player is called a guslist.
• Tsar Ivan the Terrible had a guslist ensemble at his court, which amused him.
• Patriarch of All Rus' Nikon ordered in 1654 to burn all the harps in the state.
• The first song that was recorded with gusli notes was the Ukrainian folk song“Oh, eat the cherry.” It was recorded in St. Petersburg French composer F. Bualde in 1803.
• In May 1945, the guslist ensemble performed on the steps of the defeated Reichstag in Berlin with a concert in honor of the victory.

Russian gusli. History and mythology Bazlov Grigory Nikolaevich

3.1. Gusli through the prism of Russian history. Ancient poetic symbolism of Rus' (mainly in the gusel tradition)

“Russian gusli belongs to the history of culture not only as a fact musical art, folklore traditions our days, but are included as an independent content element, a “plot motif”, in the system of especially significant phenomena, images, initial ideas, legends relating to the periods of formation of the mythological views of the peoples of the early historical eras. As an image-symbol, the harp correlates with the fundamental concepts of culture. Knowledge of life, as a path of enlightenment, connecting the spheres of the material and spiritual in the human consciousness” 125.

Quoting the words of an outstanding Russian ethnomusicologist, an expert on Russian traditional culture, researcher of the gusel tradition Anatoly Mikhailovich Mekhnetsov, we draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the gusli and the gusel tradition bear the imprint of the most ancient ideas of the Slavs about the world order and symbolically express an archaic view of the world.

It is obvious that in ancient times the guslar was something more than just a musician. Although, of course, the harp and gusli playing were also used in a utilitarian, not sacred, capacity. A number of features preserved in fairy-tale folklore, in epic works, allows us to assert that according to those performed in the ancient Slavic culture The functions of the guslar can be compared with the Celtic bard or the Scandinavian eril 126.

“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign...” paints us with the image of the Prophetic Bayan - an epic singer, a guslar, who not only plays and sings, but goes on a mental flight into the past, jumps with an imaginary squirrel across "mental tree" gray wolf crosses vast spaces and soars above the clouds like an eagle historical events. Obviously, this is not a simple musician, but a person who has some esoteric professional knowledge.

In comparative poetic images, used by the author of “The Word...”, a stable semiotic tradition is visible, those images and symbols with which ancient Russian epic poets thought and with which they conveyed semantic correspondences between the phenomena of the material world and spiritual categories.

“Boyan, brethren, not 10 falcons for a flock of swan forest, but your own in? Shya prasty on living strings in stock; They themselves are the prince, glory to the roar.”

The plot of an attack on swans is typical for the Slavic song tradition, especially for lyrical and wedding songs. In them, the eagle “breaking” the “swan with its cubs, with its young and children” is a symbol of the groom, and the swan is the symbol of the bride. Thus, in the poetic picture of the hunt for swans (during the playing of the gusle), the shade of the description of the mystical marriage of the mind of the guslar, who sent a falcon (fingers) on the “flock of strings”, with the epic swans (strings) is obvious.

Continuing to consider this analogy, we will inevitably notice that a flock of swans forms an orderly formation in flight, which again resembles strings and a musical scale. That when falcons strike, swans should cry out, creating melodic harmony like strings.

Academician B.A. Rybakov pointed out the mythological connection of the gusli with the element of water and its ruler - the king of the underwater kingdom.

From Russian mythology we know that the Sea King has daughters who are identified with mermaids, visible to humans in the form of rivers, sea waves or swans. In other words, for the archaic mythological consciousness, rivers and sea waves are the daughters of the water king.

In Russian fairy tales, a widespread plot is about swan princesses, daughters of the Sea King, who fly to the river to swim in the form of a flock of swans:

“The swans flew to Onega, shed their plumage, turned into girls and began to swim. A guy who happened to be nearby grabbed one of the skins and its owner, a mermaid, became his wife." 127

Among these swan sisters there is the eldest Swan Princess, who was so vividly described by A.S. Pushkin in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”. According to the spiritual verse about the Dove Book and a number of Belarusian legends, this swan is called Ostrafil - the mother of all birds 128. Ostrafil "holds the whole world under his wing." “When the Straphilus bird flutters, the whole blue sea will shake. She sinks parlor ships with precious goods" 129.

What kind of element does this swan live in? From the Dove Book we learn: “She drinks and eats from the blue sea and leads children from the blue sea.”

The sea in the gussel symbolic tradition is identified with sound, with music:

“Bezdolny began to approach his state and decided to play a joke: he opened the harp, pulled one string - the sea became blue, pulled another - the ships approached the capital city, pulled the third - cannon fire began from all the ships” 130.

In the above passage, the first sound of the harp is created by the sea. The next sound is identical to ships sailing out to sea, firing all their cannons, that is, they also make a sound.

The sea is obviously the general sound background characteristic of playing the harp. This is how A.M. writes about this phenomenon. Mekhnetsov on page 20 in the book “Russian gusli and gusli playing”:

“Special methods of forming a sound environment (a kind of “sound field”) include a technique on the basis of which the character and quality of the “pedal” (the overall sound open strings full range of the instrument) with the simultaneous use of a specific “glissando” stroke. On 7-9 string instruments, the upper and lower strings can also constantly sound as a pedal - a “bourdon”. This technique is used everywhere in the territory of the Russian gusli.”

The fairy-tale ships that appear when the strings of the gusli are struck are most likely the player’s hands. And “shots from ships” are wrist strikes right hand along the strings, a method of playing the gusel - the so-called “knocking out”. The hands of the guslar glide over the strings like ships over sea ​​waves, and when colliding with waves, sound appears. I wonder if that one "capital city" under which the ships - hands "came" - is also in reality some kind of game technique, part of an instrument or fragment fairy tale plot, not directly related to the practice of gusel playing?

In the epic about Sadko, in the part where Sea king dances to the harp and because of this dance waves appear that break the “black ships”, the poetic parallelism is even more clear. A real player who strikes the strings loudly and for a long time often breaks his fingers, sometimes even bleeding. Every person who is a little familiar with string instruments, this analogy will seem obvious.

In the epic, the psaltery player cannot stop playing of his own free will, because the Sea King himself is dancing! The length of Sadko's game at the feast of the Sea King suggests that this part of the epic may also be about the initiation test of the hero, who needs to demonstrate skill and patience by playing continuously for a long time. To stop the dancing, you have to, on the advice of Nikola Mozhaisky, break the strings and break the pegs.

In the system of describing the gusel game from “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign...” the terminology of the musicians is somewhat different: the “shooting ships” there are the blows of falcons striking swans.

Why is that? Either a falcon or swans? Contradiction... but what about the common Slavic tradition of goslings, what about the antiquity of this culture?

For Slavic mythology Gusel game, in my opinion, there is no contradiction in this. The presence of multivariance in a tradition usually only confirms antiquity. The fact that in one system the strings are called swans, and in another sea waves, is natural, because both of them go back to the same symbolic system- it's simple different images daughters of the water king.

We have already noticed that in the way of describing the gusel game from “The Tale of Igor’s Host...”, where the strings are swans and the fingers are falcons, which can be conditionally attributed to the symbolic tradition of southern Rus' 131, there is wedding symbolism. In the epic about Sadko in the system of description “ship-sea, strings-waves”, which, like the Novgorod one, can be correlated with the northwestern Slavic tradition, in general, the marriage of a guslar with the daughter of the Sea King, the Chernava River, is literally described, not allegorically. In this stable symbol, characteristic of the south and north of Rus', there are echoes of some ancient mysterious Slavic rite, through which the guslar received initiation, entering into a symbolic marriage with the daughter of the water king and becoming his relative - son-in-law. Probably, in the mythopoetic tradition of the ancient Slavs, it was the water king who was the creature who patronized the musical string tradition. And it is no coincidence that his daughters - wave mermaids - were associated with strings in the mythopoetic tradition.

Somewhat distracting from the main topic, by analogy we can assume that the previously performing tradition associated with wind instruments in Slavic mythology was also associated with the king of the winds. Indeed, in popular superstitious beliefs, whistling can cause wind, just as playing the harp creates waves.

The design of the gusli seems to reproduce and model the Slavic legend about the creation of the world.

Briefly it can be paraphrased as follows:

The world looks like an endless sea. Two oak trees grow in the middle of the water. God sends two birds into this world (according to some legends these are pigeons, but more often they are ducks). Sitting on oak trees, the birds consult on how to create the world. After the meeting, they dive to the bottom of the sea and carry sand out of there in their beaks. By scattering this sand to the sides, birds create dry land. Moreover, one “duck” creates a smooth world, and the other makes ravines and mountains on the surface of this world. In this way they create the world.

The most archaic models of gusli did not have a metal bracket on which the strings were placed. The fastening characteristic of antiquity consists of two parallel shaped planks attached to the gusset board with oak pegs. Between these strips there is a wooden rod, a tail holder, onto which the strings are placed.

These planks are called “ducks”; they “sit” on oak pegs, like the mentioned legendary birds. Between the gusel board and the “ducks” towering above it, strings are stretched - the “waves” of the musical sea. By striking the strings, the hands of the guslar symbolically reproduce the sung Slavic legends creation of the world.

It is likely that the persecution of guslars and the destruction of gusli, known from medieval sources, was not a struggle against musicality and Russian performing tradition, but was generated by religious motives, a clash of ideas describing the creation of the universe. After some time, the harp again becomes a sacred, even partly religious instrument. This happens when popular consciousness and in parallel with it, Christian theologians begin to perceive the harp as the instrument of the “chief harpist,” sanctified by the authority of the biblical tradition of the psalmist King David. True, a somewhat different instrument is beginning to be called the harp - the psalter, to which spiritual poems and psalms are sung. The Psalter became widespread mainly among the clergy.

However, people also call it the gusli and transfer some of the ancient ideas associated with the gusli to it. Since the psalmist king David is considered by the people to be a guslar, the ancient Slavic harp is, as it were, sanctified by his spiritual authority and ceases to be perceived as a relic of the pagan religion.

At this time, probably, on the one hand, the churching of the Russian gusli takes place. On the other hand, then in folk culture significantly secularized harp appears, deprived of the previous mythopoetic basis; they become primarily an instrument of dance accompaniment and almost in this capacity (with significantly lost and forgotten sacred symbolism) survive to this day. The conclusion, of course, is not indisputable, but it clearly designates a certain historical milestone in the tradition of the existence of the gusli as a mythopoetic and philosophical instrument.