Sitar
plucked stringed instrument used in Hindustani classical music
The sitar (English: or ; IAST: sitāra) is a plucked stringed instrument, originating from the Indian subcontinent, used in Hindustani classical music. The instrument was invented in the 18th century, and arrived at its present form in 19th-century India. Khusrau Khan, an 18th-century figure of the Mughal Empire, has been identified by modern scholarship as the inventor of the sitar. According to most historians, he developed the sitar from the setar, an Iranian instrument of Abbasid or Safavid origin.
Used widely throughout the Indian subcontinent, the sitar became popularly known in the wider world through the works of Ravi Shankar, beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The advent of psychedelic culture during the mid-to-late 1960s set a trend for the use of the sitar in Western popular music, with the instrument appearing on tracks by bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Metallica and many others.
Etymology
The word sitar is derived from the Persian word sehtar, meaning 'three-stringed'.
According to Curt Sachs, Persians chose to name their lutes around the word tar, meaning string, combined with a word for the number of strings.
By example:
Du + tar is the 2-stringed dutār,
se + tar is the 3-stringed setār,
čar + tar is for a tar with 4 strings,
panč + tār is for a tar with 5 strings.
History
It was theorized that the sitar was invented, or rather developed by Amir Khusrow (c.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sitar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.