Today I went to New York and spent some time again at Met. This is the third time that I went to Met, and I went through the musical instrument collection with more attention to detail this time. I was so much more fascinated also because I recently re-discovered my strong interests in the study of musical instruments. For instance, I spent a lot of time in the European collection, from the long neck lute, course stringed guitars (just like the ones in Latin America), harpsichords, organs, to viola de Gamba, the predecessor of the violin family, etc. I got to see what Bach's Sonata for Viola de Gamba was playing on. It is believed that while the bowed string instruments first appeared around 10th century in middle Asia, the modern violin family did not get its shape until early 16th century. Before that, we have all kinds of shape and sized pre-violin family instruments, including viola de Gamba. They are equally fascinating to me as the violin family. There are some finest violins in the exhibition, by the way.
For the world music collection, I found that their Chinese collection is really old, the instruments are old style that are very different from today. They come from a collection of 1889. Looks very authentic. They believed that the huqin originated from Yuan dynasty, brought in by the Mongolian, rather than dating back to Xiqin in Tang Dynasty. They made a reasonable argument that the bow hair in between the strings reflects the need of the Mongolians who plays while riding their horse. The Gamelan instruments, sadly, has very few of them. I was surprised because Gemelan is so popular here in America. But Rebab they do have. The term Rebab(or rebel, rebec,etc.) is seen across the Islamic world from Egypt to Southeast Asia. Thailand seems to have both rebab-like instrument and huqin-like instrument.
A device called the sympathetic strings is seen both in European and Asian instruments, notably, many instruments of India. Sarangi is certainly very complicated looking. The folk forms of Sarangi seems simpler to play. I look forward to look into all these some day in the future.
