A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter T

Tanbur

Musical Instrument
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A long-necked lute from the Middle East and Central Asia, used in classical and Sufi music

Detailed Definition
The tanbur’s resonant, meditative tones appear in Persian and Kurdish poetry to symbolize mystical journey, divine love, and oral tradition; its role in Yarsani and Alevi rituals makes it a vessel for spiritual and lyrical transmission in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Persian classical poetry, the tanbur’s long neck reaches toward divine mystery like a prayer; A Kurdish poem compares the tanbur’s strings to the veins of ancestral memory; In a verse by Hafez, the tanbur’s sound “unlocks the tavern door of truth”; Contemporary Iranian poets use the tanbur as a symbol of cultural resistance; A Sufi-inspired poem describes the tanbur’s resonance as “the echo of creation’s first breath”; In diasporic verse, the tanbur becomes a bridge between mountain homelands and foreign cities.
Additional Notes
The tanbur (or tanbūr) refers to long-necked lutes across the Middle East and Central Asia; the Persian version has a pear-shaped body and sympathetic strings, used in Sufi and classical music—ideal for poems about mystical longing, the drone as divine presence, or the tanbur as vessel for centuries of poetic-musical fusion in Persian and Kurdish traditions.
Also Known As
Tanpura (distinct but often confused) tambur Persian tanbur
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