ligawa

Ligawa, ligawka, legawka - it's kind of a long wooden trumpet. It belongs to the folk wind instruments and aerophones group, known in Poland since the eleventh century. Ligawa was popular especially in Mazovia. An arched ligawa has the form of a corner and is longer than 1 meter. The instrument is usually whittled from spruce or alder and consists of two halves glued with wax.

ligawa

The sound from ligawa comes from blowing the proper air pressure into the embouchure and getting more tone elements so-called aliquot tones.

The ligawa's sound is shrill, somewhat similar to oboe, and even stronger. The name ligawa derives from the Polish word: “leganie” i.e. leaning it while trumpeting, because original ligawka had from 2 to 3 yards length and it was too heavy to be able to play it freely without support.

View the embedded image gallery online at:
http://www.instrumentyludowe.pl/en/ligawa.html#sigProIdde2fe900cd

ligawa-legend
instrumenty

Instruments

The instruments recorded in the project come from museum of sound with more than 80 thousand object collections from the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. Together with museum staff we have chosen 23 instruments guided by the following principles – they should be definitely folk, unusual, derived from the old times, Polish and coming from different cultural backgrounds, also exotic like e.g. Asian.

Recording a full range of tone of 23 instruments - tonal and sonic scale lasted several days. Thanks to the recordings - sound banks were created and have been used in the project in two ways. The first way was based on motion-sensitive controllers which created new practical instrumentarium for use during the workshops and animation activities. The second way was placing recorded sounds on the website for promotion of the idea of the project and gathering a great number of recipients.

All instruments were also photographed and described which enabled creating of publicly accessible compendium of information about them.