Kobyz

The kobyz or qobyz, also known as the kylkobyz, is an ancient Turkic bowed string instrument, spread among Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Bashkirs, and Tatars. The Kyrgyz variant is called the kyl-kyiak [ky]).

The kobyz has two strings made of horsehair. The resonating cavity is usually covered with goat leather.

Traditionally kobyzes were sacred instruments, owned by shamans and baksıs (traditional spiritual medics). According to legends, the kobyz and its music could banish evil spirits, sickness and death.

In the 1930s, when the first folk instrument orchestras were established in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, a new kind of kobyz came into existence. It now had four metallic strings and thus became closer to a violin. Such a modernized kobyz can be used to play both Kazakh music and the most complicated works of violin literature. One of the few western musicians to use the kobyz is Trefor Goronwy.

While many Kazakh kobyz players and scholars theorize that bards accompanied themselves on the kobyz during recitation of epics, today a mainstay of the Kazakh kobyz repertoire is küi, which are short programmatic pieces composed as instrumental narration or expression of emotion, often employing the purposeful imitation of sounds such as bird calls or horse hooves.

The kobyz is still played today by jyrau (one of the two types of Karakalpak bard), as accompaniment during recitation of epics and dastan. The kobyz punctuates spoken narrative, plays the melodic line in unison with the voice during the sung parts, supports sustained notes in the voice by repeatedly bowing the same note, and plays the melody when the jyrau is not singing.

The jyrau sings with a guttural, raspy timbre, in a style common to many nomadic groups of Central Asia, Mongolia, and Southern Siberia. Although this timbre was in the past associated with shamanic practice, living memory of this has died out, and modern jyrau instead interpret the timbre as a vocal imitation of the kobyz itself.

The art of kobyz flourished before the fall of the Kazan khanate in 1552 among Tatars and some other ethnic groups of Volga region. However, this art was preserved until the end of the 18th century among the Tatar dervishes.