The ''domra'' (Cyrillic: до́мра, ) is a long-necked

Belarus Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...

ian,

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

n, and Ukrainian folk

string instrument In musical instrument classification, string instruments, or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer strums, plucks, strikes or sounds the strings in varying manners. Musicians play some ...

of the

lute A lute ( or ) is any plucked string instrument with a neck (music), neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. It may be either fretted or unfretted. More specifically, the term "lu ...

family with a round body and three or four metal strings.

History

The first known mention of domra is in ''Admonitions of Metropolitan Daniel'' (1530). This musical instrument gained great popularity in the 16th–17th centuries, replacing

gusli The ''gusli'' (, , , ''husla'') is the oldest East Slavic multi-string plucked instrument, belonging to the zither family, due to its strings being parallel to its resonance board. Its roots lie in Veliky Novgorod in the Novgorodian Republic. ...

. There are numerous mentions of domra in historic documents of this period. In addition, medieval Russian illuminated manuscripts of the

Psalter A psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints. Until the emergence of the book of hours in the Late Middle Ages, psalters were ...

contain images of musicians with necked plucked-string instruments, and some of those miniatures are clearly captioned «depiction of domras». Judging by those images, late medieval Russian domras can be divided into two types: lute-shaped, which had five to six strings, a large body and а pegbox angled back, and tanbur-shaped, which had three to four strings, a small body and a straight pegbox. After the pious Tsar

Alexis of Russia Alexei Mikhailovich (, ; – ), also known as Alexis, was Tsar of all Russia from 1645 until his death in 1676. He was the second Russian tsar from the House of Romanov. He was the first tsar to sign laws on his own authority and his council ...

issued an edict ordering the persecution of

Russian folk musicians Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

and destruction of their instruments (1648), domra gradually came into disuse and was replaced by

balalaika The balalaika (, ) is a Russian string instrument, stringed musical instrument with a characteristic triangular wooden, hollow body, fretted neck, and three strings. Two strings are usually tuned to the same note and the third string is a perf ...

, which was much easier to make and play. In 1896, a student of Vasily Vasilievich Andreyev found a broken instrument in a stable in rural Russia. It was thought that this instrument may have been an example of a domra, although at that time no illustrations or examples of the traditional domra were known to exist (the traditional domra was only known through numerous mentions in folklore, though examples existed of the '' dombra'', a related Turkic instrument). A three-stringed version of this instrument was later redesigned in 1896, patented, and introduced into the orchestra of Russian folk instruments.

Orchestral instruments

The basic domra is tuned as follows: * Three strings: EAD tuning. * Four strings: GDAE tuning (like the

mandolin A mandolin (, ; literally "small mandola") is a Chordophone, stringed musical instrument in the lute family and is generally Plucked string instrument, plucked with a plectrum, pick. It most commonly has four Course (music), courses of doubled St ...

or the

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

) Instruments are made in various sizes including piccolo, prima, alto, tenor, bass, and contrabass. * Piccolo: b1 e2 a2 * Prima: e1 a1 d2 * Mezzo-Soprano: b e1 a1 * Alto: e a d1 * Tenor: B e a * Bass: E A d * Contrabass (minor): 1E 1A D * Contrabass (major): 1A D G

Performers

Tamara Volskaya is considered to be one of the leading contemporary performers on the 4 string domra. Aleksandr Tsygankov is considered to be one of the leading contemporary performers, teachers, and composers of the 3 string domra.

References

Bibliography

External links