The bandura and its repertoire

The bandura is usually presented as a symbol. It is more interesting as an object: a plucked instrument with a large number of strings, some running over a fingerboard and many more stretched across the soundboard itself.

What the construction is for

That arrangement gives the player a very wide range of pitches available without stopping strings, which is exactly what you want if your job is to accompany yourself while singing at length. The instrument was built around the requirement of a solo singer-narrator.

The repertoire

The core of it is the dumy — long sung narratives, formally unusual: irregular line lengths, no fixed stanza, a recitative delivery that follows the sense of the text rather than a metrical pattern. They are closer to sung epic than to song.

Their subjects are historical: captivity, escape, the steppe, the sea, loss, and return. Many are told from the position of someone far from home.

Who performed them

The kobzari, traditionally itinerant and very often blind, who were trained through long apprenticeships, belonged to guild-like associations with their own rules and internal code, and travelled between markets and fairs.

It was a profession with an entrance, a training and a hierarchy, not simply a folk practice.

The twentieth century

The tradition was severely disrupted in the 1930s, and the accounts of what happened to the kobzari are among the darker episodes of that decade.

What exists today is partly continuous and partly reconstruction — scholars and performers working from recordings, transcriptions and surviving lineages. That reconstruction is careful and it is ongoing, and the instrument is played by more people now than at any point in living memory.

Reading an instrument as a technology built for a particular job is the frame I understand most comfortably: form follows function. A device made to carry long narrative is over-engineered for a short song. What happened to it in the twentieth century is not a technical matter, and I will not offer a view there.