The fretless oud is the ancestor that gave Europe its lute
Europe's Renaissance lute began as a Middle Eastern import. The oud, a pear-shaped, short-necked instrument with no frets, travelled west with the Umayyads into Spain in 711, and workshops in Muslim Iberia later sent instruments into Provence, where troubadours took them up. The Arabic word itself hints at wood.
A typical oud carries 11 strings arranged in six courses, most of them doubled, though versions with five or seven courses exist. Unlike the Western lute that grew from it, it has no frets and a shorter neck, which leaves players free to slide between pitches. Strings were once twisted animal gut and are now silk, nylon or metal-wound. Players pluck with a risha, Arabic for feather, traditionally cut from an eagle's quill and today usually plastic.
Its proportions were fixed early. In the ninth century the philosopher al-Kindi gave the first complete description, measuring everything in finger-widths: a body 36 fingers long, a width half the sounding string length, a depth half the width, and a neck one third of the string length, so the back would be rounded as if cut from a sphere drawn with a compass. Ibn al-Haytham later described the modern form in the eleventh century.
The lineage runs further back. Richard Dumbrill traces lute-like instruments in Mesopotamia more than 3,000 years, pointing to a British Museum cylinder seal from around 3100 BC that seems to show a woman playing one. The short-necked branch developed in Bactria and Gandhara, and many see the oud as the direct heir of the Persian barbat, whose name meant short-necked lute in Pahlavi. Early Arabian instruments had four single strings tuned in fourths; the musician Ziryab, who trained in Baghdad and settled in al-Andalus, is credited with adding a fifth and founding one of the first music schools in Córdoba.
Scholars disagree over the name. It may mean wood or stick, or flexible stick as Curt Sachs argued in 1940; it may be borrowed from a Persian word for string, or come from a Syriac word for a wooden stick. Medieval writers offered mythical inventors, from Lamech, descended from Adam and Cain, to the Devil, a story even its own reporter doubted.
Source: Oud
