Bright, harp-like shimmer — the one Turkish instrument that can shift a note's pitch mid-performance with a flick of a lever.
The kanun is a plucked zither with a trapezoidal wooden soundboard, typically strung with 26 courses of three strings each — 78 strings in total. Its defining feature is the mandal system: small levers near each course's bridge that a player raises or lowers instantly, mid-performance, to microtonally shift that course's pitch by changing its effective string length.
The soundboard runs roughly 95–100 cm long and 38–40 cm wide. Because each course can be flipped across several mandal positions, a kanun player has instant access to dozens of pitches from a single string.
The instrument is held flat on the lap while seated, and played with two picks — traditionally tortoiseshell, now often plastic — worn on the index finger of each hand. Its range spans roughly three and a half octaves.
Alongside ney and tanbur, the kanun is one of the instruments most associated with taksim (solo improvisation); the rapid mandal flips and glissandi they enable are among the most immediately recognisable kanun signatures.
Performance: Göksel Baktagir — "Kanun Taksimi" (Yenikapı Müzik). Shown via YouTube's own player under its embed licence. Watch on YouTube →
Instruments from the same family, sharing a similar way of making sound:
The kanun is a plucked zither with a trapezoidal wooden soundboard, typically strung with 26 courses of three strings each — 78 strings in total. Its defining feature is the mandal system: small levers near each course's bridge that a player raises or lowers instantly, mid-performance, to microtonally shift that course's pitch by changing its effective string length.
The instrument is held flat on the lap while seated, and played with two picks — traditionally tortoiseshell, now often plastic — worn on the index finger of each hand. Its range spans roughly three and a half octaves.
Alongside ney and tanbur, the kanun is one of the instruments most associated with taksim (solo improvisation); the rapid mandal flips and glissandi they enable are among the most immediately recognisable kanun signatures.
Listen for a bright, harp- or santur-like shimmer, and for the sliding ornaments and tremolos produced by fast mandal changes — a signature no other Turkish instrument shares.
This page is written from more than one source; where sources disagreed or a technical detail (an exact string count, an exact tuning) had only a single unconfirmed figure behind it, we left it out or described it in general terms rather than publish a number we could not confirm.
Back to the Turkish Instruments tool for all instruments; for the melodic side of Turkish music see the Makam tool, and for rhythm the Usul tool.