Kazakh musical instruments

Kazakh musical instruments are objects made to extract various musical and non-musical sounds. They were made for practical purposes (hunting, signals), religious purposes (bucks, shamans), and for aesthetic purposes, entertainment, expression of feelings, etc. Some musical instruments are endowed with magical properties. For example, kobyz , which is the progenitor of many stringed musical instruments such as violin. Kobyz was decorated with owl feathers, pieces of mirrors. Another musical instrument, a double one , was used for military purposes to emit various signals, including alarm and danger signals.

The Kazakhs did not have a division according to the status of male or female musical instruments. The use of musical instruments was massive, especially with dombra . However, kobyz was considered magical and far from all used it. The most famous Kazakh musical instruments are dombra , kobyz and zhetygen . The ancestors are older than 4,000 years. Thus, in the Almaty region of Kazakhstan, a cave painting was found depicting a musical instrument and four dancing people in various poses. According to the studies of the famous archeologist K. Akishev, this drawing, which depicts a musical instrument like a dombra, dates from the Neolithic period. This dombra prototype is one of the first plucked instruments. Ethnic Kazakh Bolatbek Karimkhanuly made the smallest dombra in the world, for which he entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2012. The dimensions of the tool are amazing: length - 45 mm, width - 14 mm.