Torban

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Teorban)

The torban or teorban is an Eastern European musical instrument that combined features of the Baroque Lute with those of the psaltery. It was invented ca. 1700, probably influenced by the central European Theorbo and Angelique which Cossack mercenaries would have encountered in the Thirty Years' War, although there is a distinct possibility that a paulite monk Tuliglowski was its inventor. The Torban was manufactured and used mainly in Ukraine, but occasionally also in Poland and Russia. There are about two dozen torbans in museums around the world, with the largest group of 14 instruments in St. Petersburg.

The surviving printed musical literature for torban is extremely limited, notwithstanding widespread use of the instrument in Eastern Europe. It was an integral part of urban oral culture in Ukraine, in both parts of the country split between Poland (later Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Russia. The term "torban" was also commonly misapplied in Western Ukraine to any instrument of a Baroque Lute type.

The multi-strung, expensive to manufacture, and technically-difficult fretted torban was considered an instrument of Ukrainian gentry, although most of its practitioners were Jews and Ukrainians of low birth, with a few aristocratic exceptions (Mazepa, Razumovsky, Padura, Rzevucki). This sealed the instrument's fate in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: is was discouraged, as it was deemed insufficiently proletarian. A predecessor of the torban called kobza (also known as bandura) was the instrument of the common folk. It differed from the torban by the absence of the bass strings, and was closely related in its organology to central European Mandora and Pandora (see Lute).

Later in the 19th century banduras were often manufactured (in Lviv) to imitate the look of torbans, leading to some misidentification.