Tarhu

Peter Biffin’s tarhu is one of the most unique and highly developed acoustic instruments to be built in Australia. The long-neck tarhu, a new form of spike fiddle employing a cone resonator, draws on a wide array of instrument designs, in particular Turkish and Indian string instruments.

The tarhu embodies Peter Biffin’s passion for bowed instruments, his highly developed skills in acoustic instrument design and innovation, and a long-standing interest in creating new acoustic instruments for articulating melodies in just intonation tunings.

The tarhu has a long slender neck with 4 playing strings and 8 sympathetic strings that are located in a channel that runs down the middle of the neck. The long neck, with over two and a half octaves of easily playable notes, facilitates techniques using movement along-the-strings as found in many eastern long-neck instruments. The use of 4 playing strings also allows for movement across-the-strings with similar string crossing techniques used by the violin family. The tarhu’s use of both these left-hand principals, combined with its ability to be played with bow, plectra, or fingers make a large range of musical styles available.

Similar to the playing position of most spike-fiddles, the tarhu is held upright between the knees, and when bowed usually employs an underhand bow hold.

The tarhu body is a slightly flattened wooden sphere that encloses a very thin wooden cone. The cone is connected to the bridge and serves a similar function as a soundboard in other stringed instruments.

When compared to a violin soundboard, the wooden cone in a tarhu is approximately the same surface area and stiffness, but is less than one tenth the weight. When compared to the Turkish skin-topped bowed tanbur, the tarhu cone is a similar surface area, a similar weight, but is significantly stiffer.

The tarhu’s distinctive relationships between surface area, stiffness, and mass have a significant bearing on the sound. The dynamic range is very large, as is the range of tone-colour variations, depending on either the bow position or the plucking angle.

Biffin has also successfully applied the tarhu’s acoustic design to several traditional forms of eastern bowed instruments, including the kemanche and the lyra.

The tarhu’s round body / long neck configuration owes much to the long-neck plucked and bowed lutes of the Middle East and Central Asia. So too the use of microtonal frets.

As Biffin points out however ‘the connection to the world of experimental instruments and microtones began with Western rather than Eastern influences, particularly through the work of American theorist/composer/builder Harry Partch.’

Biffin first came across Partch in 1974 and in the following few years made versions of several of his instruments including Quadrangularis Reversum, Harmonic Canon, adapted guitars, adapted viola, and various of the bamboo instruments.

Biffin’s practical application of Partch’s work left Biffin with ‘enormous respect for Partch as a Just Intonation theorist… [however] a year or two with Partch’s instruments left me musically frustrated and I longed for something that could play graceful melodies in Just Intonation. I found the Eastern use of Just Intonation much more to my liking and began two separate ongoing series of experiments around 1976.’

The first of Biffin’s experiments focused on microtonal fretting for guitars. The use of frets however proved to be too cumbersome for the purpose of playing Just Intuned melodies. Abandoning frets altogether Biffin continued experimenting with oud, sarod, fretless guitar, and fretless banjo.

This work has continued in parallel with the development of the tarhu, and has seen the use of wooden cones in place of soundboards or skins. Biffin expects that the results of this work will come to fruition shortly, in the form of another new instrument design (see below).

Biffin’s second series of experiments have focused on bowed instruments, drawing on traditional examples from many parts of the world. The Turkish tanbur proved to be a good starting point, the extremely long neck providing an unequalled tool for the study of Just Intonation systems. These experiments eventually culminated in the development of the tarhu in 1995.

Biffin manages to make his living almost entirely from producing new tarhus for musicians around the world, while still continuing to experiment with new instrument designs, such as a new wooden-coned fretless plucked instrument.

Head over to Peter Biffin’s site