Cymbala
(Lat.,
from Gk. kumbalon).
(1)
A type of ancient cymbals (an Idiophone). Ancient cymbala were a pair of small,
plate-shaped or more often cup-shaped bronze cymbals. (See Cymbals and Tympanum
(i) for illustrations.) They were
associated in Greco-Roman culture with orgiastic religious rites, where they
played ecstasy-inducing music together with the tympanum and the Aulos. They became particularly
prominent in Rome after the introduction of the Magna Mater, Cybele, from Asia
Minor in 204 bce. They appear on numerous vases and in murals and reliefs; a
typical literary reference is that of Catullus who had a young votary of the
goddess exclaim: ‘Come follow me to the Phrygian house of Cybele, to the
Phrygian grove of the goddess, where the voice of the cymbalum sounds, where
the tympanum echoes, where the Phrygian tibia player sings on his deep-toned
curved reed, where they celebrate the sacred rites with shrill cries, where the
milling crowd of her worshippers rushes to and fro’. Roman conquests in the
East and increasing luxury among the ruling classes brought many foreign
artists to the capital in the early days of the empire. Exotic dances in
taverns and in the streets were performed to the accompaniment of crotala,
cymbala, tympana and foreign wind instruments. The instrument was used in
biblical times, and early Christian writers when they mention cymbals clearly
mean cymbala, as, for example, St Augustine in his commentary on the psalms –
the sound as they touch ‘can be compared to our lips’.
(2)
Medieval bells. The use of ‘cymbala’ to denote a set of small bells is first
found in about 900 in treatises emanating from the St Gallen region of Germany;
these treatises, which are concerned with proportion, usually designate a
diatonic scale based on C (including B
), and they use the relative weights of the bells (in
the same manner that the length of organ pipes or the stopping of the string of
a monochord are used) to illustrate Pythagorean pitch relationships. Shortly
after, illuminations showing a row of bells hung on a frame and struck with a
hammer began to appear in Germany and in areas influenced by German artists.
The so-called Paris Bibles (produced after about 1290), with their illuminated
initial for Psalm cl showing a seated King David playing a row of bells with a
hammer, inspired numerous copies throughout France, Flanders and England. This
row of bells is not seen in Italian iconography, however, nor is it used except
as a symbol of David, Musica or the Risen Christ, or as an instrument in the
hands of one of the musicians or theoreticians accompanying them (see illustration).
In
the later medieval period the word ‘cymbala’ was employed less specifically.
Sometimes the singular form ‘cymbalum’ was used to denote large church bells or
monastic signal bells. Later, the scale of bells found in a clock or in the
rotating sacring wheel used during Mass to herald the moment of consecration
would be designated ‘cymbala’. The latter usage may explain the origin of the
organ stop called ‘cymbalum’. Literary accounts, especially when joyful events
are being described, make frequent use of the juxtaposition found in Psalm cl
of ‘organs and cymbals’; it was probably because the organ and bells were both
used in church ritual that the word ‘cymbala’ came to be adopted for a bell.
Cymbala,
as a row of small bells struck with hammers, have often been a popular (though
recent – following Smits van Waesberghe’s 1951 publication) addition to the
instrumentarium in the modern performance of medieval music. However, no
medieval account exists that can incontrovertibly be said to describe the use
of bells in this way; neither is there an inventory listing nor an actual
surviving example of the instrument.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
F.V.M. Cumont: Les
religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Paris, 1906, 4/1929; Eng. trans., 1911/R)
J. Smits van
Waesberghe: Cymbala: Bells in the Middle Ages, MSD, i (1951)
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und
Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1978)
H. La Rue: ‘The Problem of the Cymbala’, GSJ, xxxv (1982), 86–99
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo's
Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999),
170–71
JAMES W. McKINNON (1), HÉLÈNE LA RUE
(2)