Kanonaki (kanun)

The kanonaki (kanun) is made in various sizes, of maple or other woods, in the shape of a trapezoid, with its right side at a right angle to the long base and the strings (gut or nylon) running parallel to the two parallel sides. The soundboard is wooden, except for a strip about 15 cm wide on the right, which is of skin. It has one or more sound holes, round or oval and often decorated.

Next to the tuning pegs, on the left side, are small movable levers (mandals). Raising or lowering them changes the pitch of individual strings by small intervals, down to a quarter tone. On the right, on the skin, sits the bridge. The kanonaki is tuned with a metal key, in the past according to the mode of the tune being played, today usually to the diatonic scale. Its range is usually three octaves and three notes, though there are also smaller kanonakia and kanonakia without levers.

How it is played

The kanonaki is usually played resting on the player's lap, with two plectra (also called 'nails') attached to the index fingers with metal rings, which in the past were silver or even gold. Today the plectra are plastic; in the past they were made of tortoise shell, ox horn and other materials. With these two artificial nails the player plucks the strings more easily and steadily, the left hand taking the low notes and the right hand the high ones, which gives better technique and a stronger sound. The inlaid decoration on the sides and the carved rosettes in the soundboard show the influence of Eastern art.

The kanonaki in Greece

Earlier, and especially in the Middle Ages, the kanun was known mainly as the psaltery. We do not know exactly when the name kanun replaced psaltery, but it clearly happened with the spread of Islam and the contact of Arabs and Turks with the peoples of Europe.

The origins of the psaltery lie in Asia, many centuries before classical Greece. In ancient Greece, from Aristotle (Problems 19.23.1) and Theophrastus (Enquiry into Plants 5.7.6) to Athenaeus and other writers, there are many references to instruments that may have been of the psaltery type, under names such as trigonon, psalterion, epigonion, magadis and simikion. Since there are no pictures of these instruments, the link between the ancient psaltery and the kanun remains a matter of hypothesis.

By contrast, in Byzantine and post-Byzantine times, the two main sources for the history of Greek instruments, manuscripts and church frescoes, are rich in images of the triangular or trapezoid psaltery and of how it was held and played, although it is not always easy to tell whether the instrument shown is a kanun or a harp. A 12th-century Scandinavian chronicle mentions the psaltery among other instruments at a celebration in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. It is also the psaltery that Philippe du Fresne-Canaye means when, in his Voyage, he describes a 'Greek harp' played at the wedding of a rich merchant in Pera, Constantinople, in 1573.