Music of Chechnya

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Music of Russia: Caucasian music
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[edit] Native musical instruments

The pondur is the oldest of musical instruments of the Chechens, comprising of three chords and a wooden casing. Being similar to the Russian balalaika, the difference lies in the casing: the pondur is rather long, is made of one solid block of wood and has a soft, rustling voice.
The reed-pipe is played on a summer solstice marking the day of Pkh'armat, a legendary figure who brought fire to the Chechens via burning embers on a reed stalk, which was said to have burnt small holes in the reed, thus forming the reed-pipe.
The chiondarg which resembles a fiddle. It was played in the fields and was believed to make grain grow faster and yield better crops.

The first recordings of Chechen music were made by an exiled member of the Decembrist society in the middle of the 19th century. Composer A.A.Davidenko visited villages of Chechnya in the 1920s and made recordings of a number of historical, ritual, love and dance tunes. Thirty arrangements of Chechen folk tunes were published, in one volume, in Moscow, 1926.