The four instruments discuss in this article comprise what is currently the typical "folk orchestra" of Macedonia and Bulgaria, with one or two variations such as the addition of a second tambura in Macedonia, or of a gudulka in Bulgaria. It is a commonly held opinion that all these instruments were somehow brought into the Balkans by the Turks and that therefore they must be Turkish instruments in form and name. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the genesis of an instrument type and of an instrument's name are not necessarily parallel. The material presented here, especially concerning etymology, is based partially on the available literature and to a great extent on original research. From the outset it is necessary to keep the ideas of etymology and typology in their proper perspective. It would be a mistake to assume, as many have done in the past, that the oldest known literary reference to an instrument also indicates the oldest possible physical existence of that instrument. It is with this idea in mind that the discussion of each instrument will focus on the relationship between the history of each instrument and the derivation of the word used in Macedonian to refer it it.
KAVAL
The kaval is a representative of the end-blown, vertical flute family, for which there is ample documentation since antiquity. The oldest known example of this instrument is the stone figurine of a woman playing this flute type, dating from the Akkadian Period of Asia Minor (2370-2110 B.C.). It is now housed in teh British Museum in London. Other examples are found in Egyptian wall paintings from the periods of the Old Kingdom (2613-2133 B.C.) and the Middle Kingdom (2133-1600 B.C.). Although it is not possible to trace a direct path of transmission, it has been established that cultural influences from Egypt and Mesopotamia, both for customs and material artifacts, traveled along trade routes going east to the Persian heartland and north to Greece, often via Crete. It is the opinion of various scholars that the musical culture of ancient Greece was one of the least original aspects of that civilization, so that the musical traditions and instruments that were eventually passed on to the Western and Eastern Roman Empires were actually of an older, Near Eastern heritage. The first Iconographic evidence of the kaval in the Balkans comes from a bas relief found near Nova Zagora, in Bulgaria, and dates from the 9th century. The value of this evidence is to show that the end-blown flute was present in Thrace at least five centuries before the advent of Turkish domination, to which so many musical phenomena have been ascribed.
"Kaval" is a very good example of the divergent paths of an instrument's etymology and typology. The Macedonian and Bulgarian dictionaries give the word a Turkish derivation, but neither the Ottoman nor modern Turkish dictionaries give the word's etymology at all. The process by which I have arrived at the etymology of this term requires some understanding of Arabic grammar, which I will explain as simple as possible insofar as it pertains to the problem at hand. Ottoman Turkish (used from the 14th-20th centuries, including the period of the Turkish occupation of the Balkans) is written in Arabic script; it also contains an enormous proportion of borrowed Arabic vocabulary. Much musical terminology in Turkish comes from Arabic, therefore making it the logical, first place to look. The Redhouse Ottoman Dictionary gives two variant spellings for "kaval": QAWAL & Q(a)WAL. In the first there are five letters, where the two vowels are both long "A", represented by an Arabic "alif". In the second there are four letters where the first vowel is a short "a", written by putting a vowel sign over the consonant "Q" and where the second vowel is a long "A", again represented by an "alif".The second spelling in Ottoman then actually appears as QWAL, written in Arabic script. Most Arabic words are based on a three letter stem. However, as shown above, the Ottoman spelling has at least four. The word "QWAL" divides into four parts (radicals): "Q" (consonant), "W" (consonant w, "waw"), "A" (long vowel), "L" (consonant). Arabic has a category of words stemming from roots with either "W" or "A" as the middle radical so that the word QWAL could either be QWL or QAL (pronounced Qawala and QALa). As it happens, QaWaLa is the present tense transformation of the root QALa, which in Arabic means to speak, voice, emit sound. Since Turkish does not include the sound "w", all Arabic words with this sound become Turkicized to "v". Therefore, QALa generates QaWaLa, which in turn generates the Turkish "kaval". Ottoman Turkish orthography is highly irregular due to the incompatibility of the script of the sounds of the language. It was therefore left to the individual author or scribe whether to include or omit certain vowels. The spelling of "kaval" in Ottoman can therefore be reduced to the three, basic radical QWL (since "A" is a vowel and need not be written and since in this word, "W" is a consonant and not a long vowel as it can sometimes be). QSL is exactly the form under which the root for "to speak" can be found in an Arabic dictionary.
Thus it is very clear that care must be taken not to confuse etymology and typology since, as in the case of the kaval, the actual instrument may antedate its current nomenclature by hundreds and possibly even thousands of years.
GAJDA
Of all the folk instruments found in the Balkans, the gajda has posed the greatest number of questions to which ethnomusicologists have had only limited answers. For reasons that will be examined individually, the study of the gajda has up to now been restricted to a few, narrow channels of investigation and, in the end, what has been learned about the gajda and its etymology has been based on essentially insubstantial data, like rubble without mortar to hold it together. The substance of this article, the mortar, has been drawn from a variety of sources which previous scholars apparently had not considered, intentionally or otherwise. Although some of what is said here must by its very nature be left to the realm of conjecture, as will be demonstrated, in the final analysis the full body of information must lead to significant changes in the ideas about both the instrument and name, "gajda".
It has always been interesting to observe people when they see a gajda being played for the first time, particularly when these people have no familiarity with Balkan music. Almost invariable someone asks, "isn't that like a bagpipe?" The answer is no! It isn't like a bagpipe, it IS a bagpipe. This question and its answer clearly reveal the misconception about bagpipes and their place in the history of musical instruments. The evolution and distribution of bagpipes per se, and of the gajda specifically, have been at times parallel and at times twisted and divergent. This has made it difficult to always distinguish which thread belongs to which instrument and in which direction it leads. In several instances I have found it possible to unravel some of the strands which had become erroneously woven into accepted truths and were consequently built upon. This process permitted the establishment of a solid framework, based on numerous and diverse pieces of information which, given the reliability and accuracy of each individual piece, at least defined the parameter of the question. This parameter as perceived in earlier scholarship consisted primarily of literary and iconographic evidence, delving into its linguistic aspect only to a lesser degree. As stated in the introduction to the entire etymology and typology article, serious pitfalls are encountered when any assumption or premise is not followed as far as it can possibly lead. It is precisely these pitfalls that this article not only hopes to circumnavigate, but hopes to fill to help avoid future injuries.
Bagpipes, of various shapes and sizes and under a variety of names, are found throughout all of Europe, North Africa, the Near East, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. Although their precise origin is unknown, their existence is documented as far back as 100-800 B.C. from which time there is a terra cotta figurine of a bagpipe player from Susa, in Iran. There has also been some debate about several Greek and Latin literary references from the first century A.D., which some scholars contend are references to bagpipes although no final argument has been presented. It is interesting to note that the ancient Jews did not have bagpipes as one of their instruments, even though some of the cultures amidst which they lived, such as the Babylonians, did play them. The evidence for the use of bagpipes in Europe is so spotty that any notion concerning the diffusion or migration of the instrument can only be surmised. It is generally held that the Bagpipe's earliest presence was in the East, being carried westward over trade routes and with migrating populations. The first representation of this instrument in England appears on the "minstrel's gallery" at the Cathedral of Exeter, dating to the 14th century. It is also alluded to by Shakespeare in several places.
Just as for western Europe, the first literary evidence for the gajda in the Balkans is from the Middle Ages, albeit somewhat later. In his diary published in 1592, Samuel Schweiger described a wedding in Bulgaria at which bagpipes were being played; he observed this on his way to Istanbul in 1578. Another German diplomat of the 16th century, a Professor Gerlach, wrote of Bulgarians who were preparing to enter the service of the sultan and who marched into Istanbul to the music of bagpipes. To summarize briefly, the following is known about the history of bagpipes: although they were found in the ancient Near East and may have been played by the Greeks and Romans, they are not documented in Europe until the 14th-16th centuries. This is by no means signified that they were not known there until this late date. Nonetheless, an obstacle to understanding the history of the gajda has been this paucity of readily accessible, concrete information as to where bagpipes were found and what they were called in central, southern and eastern Europe prior to the Ottoman period.
Thus far, the 16th century has been established as the point in time after which (terminus post quem) the bagpipe is known to have been played in the Balkans. The question is, will other kinds of evidence support this supposition? In looking at the linguistic/etymological data concerning the word "gajda", earlier scholars have fallen into a web of errorneous premises, all constructed upon the fundamental mistake fostered sometime at the beginning of this century that "gajda" stems from the Arabic "ghaida", allegedly meaning some kind of oboe or wind instrument. Armed with this information, certain ethnomusicologists and historians of musical instruments proceeded to infer that the Arabs brought both the name and the instrument to Spain when the Umayyad Dynasty was established there in 711. It was also proposed that "gajda" was borrowed from the Arabs by the Turks who introduced the term into the Balkans. Such a theory would jive perfectly with the literary evidence of the 16th century as reported above. However, a lengthy examination of the linguistic data has revealed an entirely different picture!
The initial refutation of the above theory is to be found by taking a cursory glance through a Turkish and an Arabic dictionary. The Redhouse Turkish dictionary gives the word a Spanish derivation. Furthermore, after checking with all the authoritative dictionaries of modern and calssical Arabic, as well as historical and etymological dictionaries, we have established beyond a doubt that no Arabic root or stem exists which would generate "ghaida" or any similar word that could be transformed into "gajda". Beyond this, the word "ghaida/gaida" does not appear in the Arabic vocabulary at all, not even as a loan word. The full significance of this fact will be dealt with further on.
The Redhouse reference to a Spanish derivation leads one next to Spanish sources, many of which also concern themselves with the interaction of Arabic and Spanish language and culture. It is in the works of Corominas, Diccionario Etimologico de la Lengua Castellana and of Dozy, Glossaire des Mots Espanols et Portugals derives de l'Arabe (including a supplement) that the truth begins to emerge. Both men concur that "gajda" (Spanish "gaita") is not derived from Arabic at all. On the basis of one example of this word found in the writing of the famous Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, who journeyed through Spain in the early 1350's, Dozy concluded that "gaita" is a Spanish word borrowed by the Arabs. Other readers of Ibn Battuta, working without the benefit of Dozy's analysis, took the presence of this word in the Arabic source as proof that "gaita" was in fact an Arabic word. Without investigating the linguistic feasibility of this premise, subsequent scholars have perpetuated this fallacy which, through sheer force of reiteration, has become accepted as fact.
Further evidence against the possibility of an Arabic derivation is found in Corominas. He presents an etymological analysis in which he demonstrates how the Spanish "gaita" actually stems from the Gothic word for goat, "gaits". The "s" at the end of "gaits" is the Gothic, feminine, nominative ending, which in Romance languages becomes transformed into "a". As in other Spanish words from Gothic roots, the "t", which is an unvoiced consonant, remains unchanged, thereby producing "gaita" and not "gaida". The history of the Goths and the Gothic language, which will be treated in much fuller detail in a later section of this article, strongly supports the hypothesis of a Gothic origin for the Spanish word "gaita". Given the linguistic evidence documented by Corominas and Dozy, the question to be solved assumes new characteristics: if the word "gaita" is Spanish, and does derive from Gothic, by what means did it travel from the Iberian to the Balkan Peninsula, bypassing so many European nations and cultures without being adopted or leaving a trace? Was it across northern Africa with the Arabs, or did the word, in fact, not travel across Europe at all?
The proponents of the Arabic connection, or origin, of "gajda" had to assume that the Arabs were responsible for transmitting the term as well as for deriving it. Their reasioning is that Arabic speaking armies, merchants, etc. carried the term either first westward to Spain and then back east, or at least eastwards from Spain. The Turkic speaking peoples, whom the Arabs first encountered on the frontiers of Central Asia around the 10 century, would have then accepted this word from Arabic, eventually bringing it with them into southeastern Europe. There are again two proofs which demonstrate that this is untenable. The first is quite straightforward: as of yet I have not found any word resembling "gaita/gaida" in an Arabic dictionary, indicating a general unfamiliarity with this word among Arabic speakers. It has been documented that such a word exists among the Arabic speakers in Morocco or Algeria. THis can be explained by the long, historical influence of Spain and Spanish in this region of northern Africa and does not alter the fact that "gaita/gaida" is absent from the vocabulary of the other Arabic speaking parts of the Near East. The second proof lies in the Turkish connection. Although the word "gayda" is found in Turkish, it is not the common word for bagpipe; that is "tulum". According to W. Radloff, an accepted authority in Turkic languages, in his Versuch eines Worterbuchs der turkischen Dialekte, the word "gayda" is known only in Turkish and not in any other eastern Turkic language. Furthermore, the first known usage of this word comes from the 18th century! To say the least, such evidence is startling. It negates the possibility of the Arabs bringing the word to the Turks. One would expect to find some form of "gayda" in the vocabulary of the Tukic languages spoken in eastern Anatolia and central Asia. One would also expect to find examples of its usage, even oif only in Turkish, which precede the 18th century.
Since this is not the case, we must again adjust and tighten the criteria by which we define the parameter of the problem. To recapitulate once again: bagpipes are first evidenced in the Balkans in the 16th century; "gaita", of Gothic etymology, is known in Spanish but not in Arabic; the term could not have traveled via Arabic, due to the temporal and geographic borders of its distribution. With these criteria in operation, what are the other viable alternatives by which the presence of "gaida/gaita" in Spain and in south-central Europe may be explained?
To begin with, it is necessary to take a closer look at the actual distribution of the word "gajda". Beyond Spain, this word is found in the region ranging from the northern Aegean up to the southern border of the Carpathian Mountains, an area that includes some Greek, Slovak, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Polish, as well as Macedonian, Bulgarian and Turkish. A pattern of distribution such as this would indicate that "gaita/gaida" belong to a population which had at one time been settled either in Spain or central Europe, and which subsequently moved across Europe with no intervening stops. The first group which comes to mind are the Judeo-Spanish speaking Jews. The Jews, who settled in Spain under the encouragement of the Arab dynasty, had among their professions musicians who played for Spanish patrons. It is known that they played bagpipes, and one assumes that the bagpipes were called "gaita". Upon their expulsion from Spain at the end of the 15th century, the Jews were invited to settle in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Salonika and Istanbul. The Jews were invited as merchants and craftsmen, and it is hard to say to what extent, if any, the professional musicians continued to work. Several things can be said, however, which would discount the Jewish role in the history of the gajda. First of all, "gaita" is not to be found in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) vocabulary lists, of which there are admittedly only a few. Even so, had the Jews continued as professional musicians in their new surroundings, and if the bagpipe was one of their instruments, once can be fairly certain that the Jews would have adopted the local name for the instrument, just as they did in Spain. The Jews were a small minority, more likely to be influenced by the dominant culture than to influence it.
Deductive reasoning has led to the elimination of the popularly held opinions concerning the history of the gajda. All the evidence, moreover, points to a solution which fits the requisite criteria, both concretely and circumstantially. The solution appears to lie in the history of the Goths and the Gothic language, especially the Visigoths. It must be stressed that more is known about the political history of the Goths than about their language; this necessitates making assumptions based in part on hard fact and in part on probability and circumstance. Gothic is the earliest recorded Germanic language, examples of which have survived in remains of a Bible translation and a few other manuscript fragments. From these sources it has been possible to reconstruct Gothic grammar, but naturally knowledge of the Gothic vocabulary is restricted to what is in the documents themselves. By the 3rd century, the Goths had traversed Europe from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, where they settled and separated into the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Here their respective histories began to diverge, but it cannot be said for certain to what extent their languages did the same. While the Ostrogoths occupied much of the northern north-western Europe, the Visigoths made inroads into south-central Europe, reaching parts of the southern and central Balkans. Throughout this period, beginning in the 4th century, the Slavs were pushing south from the Dniester and Dnieper Rivers, crossing through Gothic territories but not gaining military ascendency. Events of the 5th century had a dramatic impact on the history of the Goths, particularly the Visigoths. At the hands of the Byzantines and the Hun invaders, the Visigoths were virtually banished from southern Europe by 420, at which time a small enclave settled just north of Spain. By 476, the Huns had been defeated and the Visigoths had established their kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula; concurrently, the Slavs had driven deeply enough south to occupy territories formerly in Gothic hands. In other words, the Visigoths, who had lived in central and southern Europe for several centuries, were cataclysmically driven out and within fifty years had established a new independent dynasty in Spain. The clearest, graphic rendition of this process can be found in the Penguin Atlas of Medieval History.
Although the above account of Gothic history is in an abbreviated form, it does demonstrate how it is possible to find related, cultural phenomena so widely dispersed from one another. As I forewarned, however, establishing the Gothic connection through evidence of linguistic kinship is a process for which, due to a lack of information, we must rely on inferences to a certain extent. The Gothic language is an intermediate step between proto-Germanic and the earliest recorded stages of the other Germanic languages. It therefore retains some arcane features in its structure that are no longer found in the other languages of its family. The word "gaits" does appear in Gothic, and is a feminine noun in its singular, nominative form. When "gaits" is taken through its declensions, the "s" suffix is dropped and replaced by other case suffixes. Once of these case suffixes is "a" making the word "gaita" perfectly legitimate in Gothic, meaning "to the goat" or possibly "from the goat/goats", or "of goats". It is unknown whether "gaita" existed as an independent word in Gothic; but having a non with this type of construct, i.e., designating an object by the material from which it is made, is a widely documented phenomenon. Another possibility is that Visigothic may have retained the archaic noun form of inserting a short vowel before the final "s' suffix, in which case goat would be "gaitas". Again, in one of its declensions, "gaitas" would be "gaita", but as before this word does not appear in Gothic texts in this form. Despite the fact that "gaita" as such is not found in Gothic, the ability of Gothic grammar to generate "gaita" as a linguistically legitimate form is of the greatest importance in the final analysis of the history of "gajda".
In his original analysis, Corominas stated that the Spanish "gaita" stems from the Gothic "gaits". Taking into consideration the linguistic feasibility of the Gothic "gaita", the distribution of the term, and the means of transmission, it is safe to say that this was probably not the case. There is no reason to believe that Spanish and the Slavic languages independently transformed "gaits" into "gaita/gaida", both of which would mean bagpipe. Slavic languages have no transformational rules that would generate "gaida" from a construct such as "gaits". It has also been shown that no viable means existed by which "gaita" could have been carried eastward from Spain. Based on all the evidence, it can only be concluded that "gaita" was an actual Gothic word, borrowed by the Slavs from the Visigoths, and transported to the Iberian Peninsula by the Visigoths, all before the end of the 5th century. In the Slavic languages, the unvoiced "t" would change to a voiced "d" when falling between two vowels: Gothic "gaita" = Slavic "gaida".
Given the scope of the data, no other solution seems possible. Not only does this explain the derivation of "gajda", but it also radically affects the known history of the actual instrument. From the literary sources, the terminus post quem was previously established in the 16th century. From the lingustic/etymological analysis, the terminus post quem must be shifted to the 5th century. This means that although the first description of bagpipes in the Balkans comes from 1578, the instrument was known among the south Slavs perhaps as early as 476. It also indicates that the Turks, rather than contributing "gayda" to the vocabulary of the Balkans, actually adopted this word from south-central Europe during their 500 year occupation. This would account for both the temporal and geographic limitations of "gayda" among the Turkic languages. Questions still remain, and their answers will probably never be decided: was "gaita" an actual Gothic word; was it found in Visigothic and not Ostrogothic; did the Goths actually play the bagpipes? Deductively, no one knows. Inductively, the Slavs and the gajda have a long history.
Bibliography