The making of sybyzgy and the art of performance
Sybyzgy is the national wind musical instrument of the Kazakh people along with kobyz and dombra. Sybyzgy belongs to the ancient type of wind instruments. Historical sources mention that sybyzgy was widely spread in the Kazakh steppe in the 17th-19th centuries. Russian researcher Alexey Levshin in 1932 in his work published in St. Petersburg "Description of Kirghiz-Kaisak hordes and steppes" wrote: "kylkobyz and sybyzgy is one of the main Kazakh instruments". And in some sources it is written: "they have so-called sybyzgy, made of thick trunk grass and wooden, wrapped with thick thread with several holes". In the old days Kazakh performers on sybyzgy in many cases sybyzgy were made of kurai and reed. The scholar Kudaibergen Zhubanov writes: "sybyzgy is one of the instruments of Kazakhs". If the suffix of the word "sybyzgy" is pronounced with a deaf sound, i.e. the sound "z" is replaced with a hard sound "s", the word "sybyz" will be obtained.
