Bouzouki

The bouzouki (also buzuki) (Greek: μπουζούκι pronounced [buˈzuci]; plural: μπουζούκια) is a Greek musical instrument that was brought to Greece in the 1900s by Greek immigrants from Asia Minor, and quickly became the central instrument to the rebetika genre and its music branches. A mainstay of modern Greek music, the front of the body is flat and is usually heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The instrument is played with a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. There are two main types of bouzouki. The trichordo (three-course) has three pairs of strings (known as courses), and the tetrachordo (four-course) has four pairs of strings.

Name

The name "bouzouki" comes from the Turkish word "bozuk," meaning "broken" or "modified", and comes from a particular re-entrant tuning called "bozuk düzen", which was commonly used on its Turkish counterpart, the "saz-bozuk". It is in the same instrumental family as the mandolin and the lute. Originally the body was carved from a solid block of wood, similar to the saz, but upon its arrival in Greece in the early 1910s it was modified by the addition of a staved back borrowed from the Neapolitan mandola, and the top angled in the manner of a Neapolitan mandolins so as to increase the strength of the body to withstand thicker steel strings. The type of the instrument used in Rembetika music was a three-stringed instrument, but in the 1950s a four-string variety by Manolis Chiotis was introduced.