Postcard from Bishkek

One of the best known legends of the Kyrgyz is about the hunter Kambar, the Komuz and the first Kyrgyz tune.

Kambar was a hunter who lived in the mountains. He was, true to his calling, a brave and strong man – on one occasion encountering a snow leopard whilst on a hunting expedition and overcoming it single handedly.

He traveled far and wide throughout the mountains and knew even the smallest paths through them. He knew all the animals and birds and could easily distinguish them by the calls. Despite being a hunter, he never killed a single bird. He was particularly fond of them because he liked to sit and listen to them singing. He knew all of their individual songs and could name them all from the tunes they sang.

One day he was out hunting in the thick forest and he heard a new sound. One he had never heard before. A high pitched sound. It seemed to him that maybe it was a new species of bird. He looked around but could see no-one, nor any strange new animal that he had never encountered before. He found that the sound emanated from a particular tree, and he circled it, looking for some sign of who – or what – was the source.

If it was bird, he decided, then he would try to disturb it so that he could see as it flew away. He whistled. But the sound continued uninterrupted.

And then a gust of wind blew. The branches of the tree swayed in the wind – and the sound changed. A melody seemed to emerge. Transfixed by the beauty of the sounds he was hearing, Kambar decided to climb the tree to explore further.

Throwing off his outer garments he started to clamber up the tree. When he got to the top he found that the sound was coming from a thread which was stretched between two branches. As it was caught in the breeze, at rocked and rang, producing the wonderful sounds. On closer inspection he discovered that the thread was the gut of an animal – maybe a squirrel which had misjudged the distance between two branches and skewered itself.

Fascinated, he collected the thread, rolled it up carefully and took it back home to his yurt.

That evening he unwound the thread, but try as he might he could not produce the enchanting sound that had so caught his attention in the forest. So he returned to the forest, back to the apricot tree where he had found the thread, and cut some wood from it. From this he fashioned a komuz so that he could stretch the thread taut as it had been stretched between the branches.  There was enough thread for three strings.

As he touched each string on his new instrument he discovered they produced different sounds. He tried to recreate the melody that he heard in the forest glade.

For many years he played that komuz and people came to listen to the music. They also made instruments for themselves and learned to play the melody – which is today known as Kambarkan … in honour of the first Kyrgyz musician.

 

Here is a clip with Asylbek Nasirdirov playing a melody on the Komuz: 

 

Tags: For_the_Record, Kyrgyzstan, Legends, Traditional_Culture