Maria Pomianowska started learning to play the Indian sarangi as a student of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. While studying in India with her first teacher, the legendary master Ustad Sabir Khan, she met his son, Kamal, who was then her classmate. After returning to Poland, Pomianowska learned about forgotten Polish string instruments, which were played in Poland between the sixteenth and nineteenth century in the same way as knee fiddles are played today in India.
Since then, Maria Pomianowska, together with Professor Ewa Dahlig and luthier Andrzej Kuczkowski, has been involved in reviving the forgotten tradition of Polish knee fiddle, basing on her Indian experience. They reconstructed instruments such as Biłgoraj suka, Płock fiddle and Mielec suka. Concerts in India are a proof that the story has come full circle. Twenty-five years later, Maria Pomianowska and Ustad Kamal Sabri, currently one of the top sarangists in the world, created a unique musical project deriving from Polish and Indian cultures.
During their concerts in India, the artists presented the sounds of Polish fiddles: Biłgoraj suka, Płock fiddle and Mielec suka, combined with the sounds of the Indian sarangi and tabla. Alongside the traditional Polish songs and dances, the musicians also played selected Indian raga and their own compositions, inspired by the traditions of Polish and Indian music. They were accompanied on flute by Paweł Betley.
Information about the instruments:
Sarangi (India)
Indian instrument with fourty strings. Three of them are main playing gut strings, and the remaining thirty-seven - sympathetic steel or brass strings. Sarangi has a wooden corpse built of one block of very heavy and hard wood such as tun (red cedar) or rosewood, covered with a gut-skin membrane. Pins are made of ebony, the bridge and other elements - of buffalo bone, deer horn or ivory. Sarangi is played with the fingernail technique.
Knee fiddles (Poland)
Before the violin became popular in Poland, for centuries particularly widely used instruments had been the knee fiddles. Notes on the so-called "Polish violin" from the mid-sixteenth century work by a German music theorist Martin Agricola titled Musica instrumental deudschof proove their popularity. As typical for Polish musical culture, Agricola describes holding an instrument in an upright position and playing it with so-called "fingernail technique". In this technique the strings were shortened by pushing them to the side by the nail plates of the left hand fingers. The reason why Agricola became interested in the "Polish violin" was different from the Western European playing technique, which made the sound of the instrument exceptionally beautiful.
Płock fiddle (Poland)
This six-stringed instrument was found by archaeologists in 1985 in the city of Płock. It is estimated to date from the 16th to 17th century. It is the only surviving copy of the sixteenth-century folk string instrument.
Biłgoraj suka (Poland)
Four-stringed Biłgoraj suka was reconstructed on the base of Wojciech Gerson’s late nineteenth century watercolour from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, since there was no original instrument surviving. The instrument has a shape similar to violin, with box carved out of one piece of cherry wood.
Mielec suka (Poland)
Mielec suka was reconstructed on the base of a mid-nineteenth century watercolour by Stanisław Putiatycki from the the collection of the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. This instrument is a hybrid of violin, which was already known at those times, and a knee chordophones from the past.
Schedule of concerts in India:
12th February, 2015 – concert in the Azad Bhavan Auditorium ICCR Indraprastha Estate, New Delhi
13th February, 2015 – concert at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival w Mumbai
14th February, 2015 – concert in the CV Raman Auditorium, Pune
16th February, 2015 – concert in the Chandigarh Randhawa Auditorium
19th February, 2015 – concert and workshops in the Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi, New Delhi
The band:
Professor Maria Pomianowska - suka
Ustad Kamal Sabri - sarangi
Paweł Betley - flute
Rafiuddin - tabla (concerts in New Delhi and Chandigarh)
Ustad Fazal Qureshi - tabla (concerts in Mumbai and Pune)
See also: