B880 <=> B882 [BTG XLI The bokharian dervish, p. 881]

“’”But here during my long and careful observations, I have never yet noticed any particular effect on our brother dervishes from these same sacred canticles.

“’”What is wrong? What is the cause of this? To find out the cause has recently been my aim and I have now called you to speak with you about it, and perhaps you, as an amateur specialist at making musical instruments, can help me to clear up this question which interests me.”

“’Thereupon we began to enquire into this question from every aspect.

“’After long deliberations we finally decided that probably the whole cause lay in the nature itself of the vibrations of the sounds. And we came to this conclusion because from our conversation it further became clear that in the monastery in which our Sheikh had been an ordinary dervish, they played, besides the tambour, stringed musical instruments, while here, in our monastery, they played these same sacred melodies exclusively on wind instruments.

“’We further decided to replace immediately all the wind instruments of our monastery by stringed instruments; but then another very serious question arose for us, namely, that it would be impossible to get together from among our dervishes the necessary number of specialists for playing the stringed instruments.

“’Then our Sheikh, having thought a little, said to me:

“’”Hadji, you, as a specialist in stringed instruments, try – perhaps you can manage to make a stringed musical instrument on which any dervish, without being a specialist, can produce the sounds of the necessary melody merely by a mechanical action, such as, for example, turning, striking, pressing, and so on.”

“’This proposal of our Sheikh then immediately greatly interested me, and I undertook the task with great pleasure.