The Bandura / Бандура

The bandura is a Ukrainian string-plucked folk music instrument and is seen as a symbol of Ukrainian music. This is one of the oldest Ukrainian folk music instruments. It has a calm, gentle, and vibrant sound.

The bandura, in its construction, resembles a lute or kobza. The instrument has a pear-shaped, asymmetrical shape; its right side is wider and rounder than the left. Due to this, the longest strings are placed on the bandura, which provides the greatest volume of sound. Usually, there are 55 strings, but the number may vary. The length of the strings is gradually reduced to the edge of the instrument so they produce a uniform sound in the entire diapason. Bandura consists of a body and a neck (handle). The basis of the body is a skirt (lower deck), which is most often made of a whole piece of hardwood (pear, maple). The top is glued to the skirt with a thin-layer spruce soundboard.

The difference between kobza and bandura. The kobza is related to the lute, guitar, and other plucked stringed instruments, where the strings are pressed on the neck. Therefore, the kobza can be easily distinguished by the presence of a pad on the neck - with or without frets. The kobza, like a guitar, allows you to emit sounds by pressing the strings on the neck against the body, and in a bandura, each individual sound is a separate string. That's why these two instruments are held differently: the kobza is held slightly obliquely, like a guitar, and the folk bandura is held vertically, pressed to the chest, and played on all the strings with both hands (Bandurka).

The oldest record of a bandura-like instrument in Ukraine is an 11th-century fresco of court musicians (skomorokhy) in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. This lute-like instrument is probably the ancestor of the bandura and the kobza. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the bandura was very popular at the Zaporozhian Sich (military and administrative unit of Ukrainian Cossaks), among the ordinary people, and at the gentry manors. In the 18th century, the bandura displaced the kobza, and both names are now used synonymously. Old banduras were symmetrical. Their shape limited the number of strings and, thus, the range of the instrument. In 1894, Hnat Khotkevych, the prominent bandurist, designed an asymmetrical bandura, thus increasing its range. Bandurists such as V. Herasymenko, O. Korniievsky, Ivan Skliar, S. Snihyriov, V. Tuzychenko, and others have contributed to the technical improvement of the instrument. For larger ensembles, banduras of different ranges have been designed—the pryma (piccolo), alto, bass, and contrabass. Owing to the efforts of Mykola Lysenko, Hnat Khotkevych, and others, bandura playing began to be studied in the 20th century at music schools and other educational institutions in Ukraine (Encyclopedia of Ukraine).