A two-string Spike fiddle. It is widespread in Gobi areas of central Mongolia and among Eastern Mongols, including Buryats. It is also played by Darhats in Hövsgöl aimag (province), north-west Mongolia, who call it hyalgasan huur, and by predominantly female ensemble-performers. The instrument is similar to Chinese fiddles, such as the huqin (hu means ‘barbarian’, suggesting that, from the Chinese perspective, the instrument came from foreign parts). The 12th-century Yüan-Shih describes a two-string fiddle, xiqin, bowed with a piece of bamboo between the strings, used by Mongols. During the Manchu dynasty, a similar two-string instrument bowed with a horsehair bow threaded between the strings was used in Mongolian music.
The huuchir has a cylindrical or polygonal open-backed body of wood or metal, through which is passed a wooden spike. Among herders, it is made from readily-available discarded items such as brick-tea containers, with a table of sheep- or goatskin. Traditional instruments made in Ulaanbaatar used snakeskin brought from China by migrant workers; modern urban and ensemble instruments also use snakeskin. A bridge, standing on the skin table, supports two gut or steel strings, which pass up the rounded, fretless neck to two posterior pegs and down to the bottom, where they are attached to the spike protruding from the body. A small metal ring, attached to a loop of string tied to the neck, pulls the strings towards it and can be adjusted to alter the pitch of the open strings, usually tuned to a 5th. The thick, bass string is situated to the left of the thin, high string in frontal aspect.
In performance, the musician rests the body of the instrument on the left upper thigh, close to the belly, with its table directed diagonally across the body and the neck leaning away from it. The thumb of the left hand rests upright along the neck of the instrument. Horsehairs of the arched, bamboo bow are divided into two sections so that one section passes over the bass string and the other over the top string. The bow is held underhand with a loose wrist. The index finger rests on the wood, and the bow hairs pass between middle and ring finger to both regulate the tension of the hairs and direct them. To sound the thick string, it is necessary to pull (tatah) one section of bow hairs with the ring finger, and to sound the thin string, to push the other section. Strings are touched lightly on top by the fingertips. In modern ensemble orchestras, there are small-, medium- and large-sized huuchir.
The Buryat Mongol huchir is a two- or four-string spike fiddle which is constructed with a cylindrical, hexagonal or octagonal resonator and mostly made of wood rather than metal. Buryats use silk or metal strings, tuned in 5ths; in the case of the four-string instrument, the first and third, and second and fourth strings are tuned in unison. The bow hair is threaded between the strings. On four-string types, the bow hair is divided into two strands, one fixed between the first and second strings, the other between the third and fourth. The huchir is related to the Nanai ducheke, the Nivkhi tïgrïk and the Mongolian huuchir.
J. Badraa: ‘Mongol ardyn högjmiin zevseg’ [Mongolian folk musical instruments], Orchin üeiin mongol uls, iii (1963), 16
C.A. Pegg: Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities (Seattle and London, 2001) [with CD]
CAROLE PEGG