Nafir
Nafir, also nfīr, plural anfār, Turkish nefir, is a slender shrill-sounding straight natural trumpet with a cylindrical tube and a conical metal bell, producing one or two notes. It was used as a military signaling instrument and as a ceremonial instrument in countries shaped by Islamic culture in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In Ottoman, Persian and Mugulin miniatures, the nafīr is depicted in battle scenes. In Christian culture, it displaced or was played alongside of the curved tuba or horn, as seen in artwork of about the 14th century A.D.
Similar straight signal trumpets have been known since ancient Egyptian times and among the Assyrians and Etruscans. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the straight-tubed Roman tuba continued to flourish in the Middle East among the Sassanids and their Arabic successors. The Saracens, whose long metal trumpets greatly impressed the Christian armies at the time of the Crusades, were ultimately responsible for reintroducing the instrument to Europe after a lapse of six hundred years. The straight trumpet type, called añafil in Spanish, also entered medieval Europe via medieval al-Andalus.
From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, the nafīr and the straight or S-curved, conical metal trumpet kārna belonged to the Persian military bands and representative orchestras, which were played in Iran, India and were common as far as the Malay Archipelago. In the later Ottoman military bands, the straight nafīr was distinguished from the twisted trumpet boru in which the straight tube was bent into a loop, influenced by such European instruments as the clarion.
The instruments retain ceremonial functions today in Morocco, Nigeria, and Malaysia. Its cousin the Karnay is similarly used in Iran, Tajikistan Uzbekistan and Rajistan, and the Karnal in Nepal.
Nafir versus karnay
The nafir has been compared to another trumpet, the karnay. The two may possibly have been the same instrument. However, today a difference can be stated in terms of the instruments' dimensions. The karnay in Tajikistan which reaches 190–210 cm in length tends to have a larger diameter, about 3.3 centimeters.The nafir in Morocco averages 150 centimeters in length and a diameter of 1.6 cm on the outside of the tube. According to the Persian music theorist Abd al-Qadir Maraghi, the nafīr was 168 centimeters long.
The difference is visible in miniatures, with artists depicting some instruments thinner. Also visible in miniatures is the gradually increasing the bore size, which some karnays have in the same way a Tibetan horn does.
The Arabic nafīr was probably mostly a long, cylindrical metal trumpet with a high-pitched sound better suited to signaling than the deeper, duller sound of the conical trumpets such as the karna. The tonal difference was illustrated in the vocabulary of the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Tiqtaqa, according to which the nafīr player "shouted out" the trumpet, while the player of the conical trumpet, here referred to as a būq, "blew". A writer in 1606, Nicot, said the trumpet was treble when compared with other trumpets that only played tenor and bass.
Another confused point about karna versus nafirs concerns S-curved trumpets. Abd al-Qadir al-Maraghi described the karnā as curved in an S-shape out of two semicircles which are turned towards each other in the middle - like today's sringa in India. However, unlike the sringa, the S-curve karna could be very long.
The S-curved instrument was identified as a karrahnāy by ʿAbdalqādir ibn Ġaibī. It is often paired with a slender straight trumpet in miniatures. Miniatures that show the karrahnāy and nafir together show that the karrahnāy was also slim, unlike the sringa.
Origin
In Arabic, būq is a term used for conical horns, whether curved or straight and regardless of the construction material, including shell, bone, ivory, wood and metal. This is important because in Islamic areas, būq could mean a number of different instruments, including the būq al-nafir.Conical horns have been common across many unassociated cultures, but the straight cylindrical tubed instruments had a narrow range of users who had ties to one another; the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans interacted, as did the Egyptians and Assyrians and the Arabs, Persians, Turkmen and Indians all of whom had the cylindrical straight tubed trumpet, before it was further developed by medieval and early Renaissance Europeans.
Earliest trumpets and horns
Trumpet instruments originally consisted either of relatively short animal horns, bones and snail horns or of long, rather cylindrical tubes of wood and bamboo.The former and their later replicas made of wood or metal are attributed to the natural horns, while Curt Sachs suspected the origin of today's trumpets and trombones to be the straight natural trumpets made of bamboo or wood.
Egypt, Assyria, Rome, Greece, Israel
The simple straight trumpets are called tuba-shaped, derived from the tuba used in the Roman Empire. Other straight trumpets in antiquity were the Etruscan-Roman lituus and the Greek salpinx.Tuba-shaped trumpets have been around since the mid-3rd millennium BC. known from illustrations from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. According to written records, they were blown as signaling instruments in a military context or as ritual instruments in religious cults. As has been demonstrated with the ancient Egyptian sheneb, of which two specimens survive in good condition from the tomb of Tutankhamen, the long trumpets produced only one or two notes and were not built to sustain the pressure that a very high third note would produce.
Among the early ritual instruments mentioned in the Old Testament is the curved ram's horn, the shofar, and the straight metal trumpet chazozra made of hammered silver sheet. In the Hebrew Bible, qeren also stands for an animal horn, which is used in different ways, but only in one place for a horn blown to produce sound. Queren is rendered in the Aramaic translations of the Bible with the etymologically derived qarnā, which later appears in the Book of Daniel as a musical instrument. In the Greek Bible, the original animal horn qarnā is rendered salpinx and in the Latin Vulgate tuba, thus reinterpreting it as a straight metal trumpet. The word qarnā becomes karnā in the medieval Arabic texts for a straight or curved trumpet with a conical tube.
In ancient times, war and ritual trumpets were widespread throughout the Mediterranean region and from Mesopotamia to South Asia. Like the chazozra of the Hebrews, these trumpets could only be blown by priests or by a select group of people. The Romans knew from the Etruscans the circularly curved horn cornu with a cup-shaped mouthpiece made of cast bronze and a stabilizing rod running across the middle. In the Roman Empire, the Romans introduced a variant of the cornu with a narrower tube in the shape of a G in the military bands. This is pictured as a relief on Trajan's Column. The length of the tube could be up to 330 centimeters. The straight cylindrical tuba, which is around 120 centimeters long in the depictions, had a greater influence on posterity than this curved wind instrument. In the Loire Valley, which belonged to Roman Gaul, two celtic long trumpets with cylindrical bronze tubes that could be dismantled into several parts were excavated.
In late Roman times, a trumpet bent in a circle like the cornu was called a bucina. The difference between the straight and curved trumpets was presumably less in form than in use. While cornu and tuba were blown on the battlefield, the bucina presumably served as a signal trumpet in the camp, for example at the changing of the guard.
Curved trumpets and horns and hornpipes may fit into a horn tradition, with the instruments curving as animal horns, much as the Roman bucina. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tubular trumpet was lost to Europe. The technology to bend metal tubes was also lost until the problem was re-addressed by Europeans in about the early 15th century, when illustrations began to appear of trumpets with curves.
After the reinvention of a metal-tube-bending technology, European trumpets began to use it, and instruments were able to have longer and thinner tubes, creating a huge line of brass instruments, including the clarion trumpet. The bent tube instruments moved into Persian and Turkish countries and to India, becoming the boru in Turkish, showing up in artwork in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Latin bucina has been connected to the names used for a variety of unrelated horns and trumpets, including the albogue, buki in Georgia and bankia in India.
Persians, Arabs, Islam
The history of mounted military musicians begins with the Persian Sassanids, who banged kettledrums on elephants imported from India. Apart from little reliable evidence for the use of war elephants in the 3rd century, the sources indicate that the Sassanids used elephants in the fight against the Roman army and against the Armenians from the 4th century under Shapur II. The Sassanids also used trumpets to call the start of battle and the troops to order. In the Persian national epic Shahnameh, trumpet players and drummers are mentioned who acted in the battles against the Arabs at the beginning of the 7th century on the backs of elephants. Possibly Firdausi took over the situation in his time, for which mounted war musicians are otherwise documented, in the historical account.The Fatimids maintained huge representative orchestras with trumpet players and drummers. The Fatimid Caliph al-ʿAzīz invaded Syria from Egypt in 978 with 500 musicians blowing bugles. In 1171 Saladin resigned the successor of the last Fatimid caliph. During his time as Sultan of Egypt, the historian Ibn at-Tuwair wrote about the parade of a representative Fatimid orchestra at the end of the 11th century, which included trumpeters and 20 drummers on mules. Each drummer played three double-headed cylinder drums mounted on the animals' backs, while the musicians marched in pairs. The musical instruments of these orchestras are listed by the Persian poet Nāsir-i Chusrau : trumpet būq, double - piped ball instrument surnā, drum tabl, tubular drum duhul, kettledrum kūs, and cymbals kāsa. According to the Arab historian Ibn Chaldūn, the musical instruments mentioned were still unknown in early Islamic times. Instead, the square frame drum duff and the reed instrument mizmar were used in military. During the rule of the Abbasids larger military orchestras were introduced, which also had ceremonial functions and performed alongside surna and tabl contained the long metal trumpet būq an-nafīr, the kettle drum dabdāb, the flat kettle drum qas'a and the cymbals sunūj. Arabic authors in the late Abbasid period distinguished brass instruments between the coiled trumpet būq and the straight nafīr. The woodwind instruments of the time included the reed instrument mizmar, the doubled reed instrument zummara, the cone oboe surnā, the longitudinal flutes made of reed as well as the fission flute qasaba.
A miniature illustrated by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti for the Maqāmāt by the Arabic poet al-Hariri in a manuscript from 1237 shows an Arabic military band with flags and standards in the depiction of the 7th Maqāma. Typical of similar paintings from the 13th century are the paired, largely cylindrical long trumpets nafīr and the pair of kettledrums naqqāra. The size of the military orchestra subordinate to them was measured according to the ruler's power. A typical large orchestra consisted of about 40 musicians, who, in addition to kettle drums, cylinder drums, cylindrical trumpets and conical trumpets, cymbals, gongs and bells.
Another type of trumpet, with a short cylindrical tube, is shown in a Persian miniature in a late fourteenth-century manuscript. The manuscript contains the cosmography ja'ib al-machlūqāt written by Zakariya al-Qazwini. The Muslim angel Isrāfīl, who appears as a herald of the Day of Resurrection similar to the Christian archangel Gabriel, blows his trumpet for the Last Judgment. The two spherical ridges on the trumpet are the junctions of the mouthpiece, tube and funnel-shaped bell. They resemble the thickenings on the pipe in Germany and France introduced in the military trumpet busine in the 13th century. As a possible early precursor of this nafīr type, Joachim Braun mentions the depiction of two short wind instruments with funnel-shaped bells on an Israelite bar kokhba coin minted between 132 and 135 AD. According to Braun, the unclearly designed thickenings at the upper end of these instruments could also refer to reed instruments.