(Fr. psaltérion, tympanon; Ger. Hackbrett; It. salterio; Hung. cimbalom, cymbalon, cymbálum; Russ. tsimbalď; Sp. salterio, tímpano).
A name applied to certain instruments of the box Zither type with more than one string but without a keyboard. In many parts of the world, the dulcimer has a trapeziform box; its strings, commonly from two to six for each course, are unfretted, but some are divided into two segments by a partitioning bridge (fig.1). The courses are usually set in intersecting horizontal planes. The player may hit the strings with hammers or pluck them with the fingers or a plectrum. Many scholars, however, reserve the term ‘dulcimer’ for an instrument played with hammers, calling it a ‘psaltery’ when the plucking technique is used. The present article deals with instruments which are hammered or which, though plucked, have features that would facilitate hammering. (In the USA, where the hammer technique is normal, the term ‘hammer dulcimer’ or ‘hammered dulcimer’ has been coined to avoid confusion with the ‘Appalachian’ or ‘mountain’ dulcimer, a distinct instrument with a relatively narrow body and fretted melody strings; see Appalachian dulcimer). The dulcimer’s history is well documented from the mid-15th century. The instrument has been used in popular, folk and art music of the West; it is widespread in eastern Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, India, Korea and China and holds an eminent position in the classical music of Iran. The name ‘dulcimer’ was used occasionally in the King James version of the Bible for the nevel, but the ancient Hebrews evidently did not have a dulcimer. The term has also been applied to an instrument of the glockenspiel type used in English schools since the early 1930s (see L. de Rusette: Dulcimer Playing for Children, London, 1934).
DAVID KETTLEWELL/R
The dulcimer has been known by dozens of different names. Most of these fall into one of six families. The Persian term Santūr and its many cognates derived from the Greek psallo (‘to pluck’), possibly via the Aramaic psantrin, is used in various areas that have absorbed Islamic influence (e.g. Egypt, Georgia, Greece, India and Slovenia, with the variant šenterija. The same term is used in Syria and elsewhere for the plucked zither known as the Qānūn, and this confusion is by no means rare. The dulcimer-type santūr has ‘chessmen’ bridges (see §2) and horizontal tuning-pins; it is trapeziform, with an acute angle of about 45°, except in India and Georgia, where the angle is less acute, about 75°.
The Mandarin Chinese term Yangqin (‘foreign string instrument’) is the commonest one in the orient, and it has also been borrowed in Indian Sanskrit. The term used in Mongolia is yoochin; in Korea yanggŭm; among the Central Asian Uighurs yenjing; in Thailand khim. Like European dulcimers, these usually have long bridges (chessmen only occasionally), vertical tuning-pins and an acute angle of about 60°.
The other groups of names are used in various parts of Europe; Italy has examples from all four, France and Germany both have examples from three. From kimbalom in eastern Europe and tympanon in western Europe – both Greek names for a struck instrument – come two separate lines of derivation. Kimbalom yields cimbalom, zimbel, tsimbalď, cymbaly and cimbolai in the Slav languages; ţambal in Romanian; and cembalo in Italian (some of these names are also used for the percussion cymbals and the harpsichord). Tympanon is the root for tympanon in French, tímpano in Spanish, timpano in Italian; some writers would include the Irish term tiompán in this group, but it has been clearly shown that it was never used for ‘dulcimer’ even though it has been adopted as such in the world of revival folk music (from this same root come ‘timpani’ and ‘tympanum’, the kettledrums and eardrum).
Terms related to the English ‘psaltery’ also derive from the Greek psallo, via psaltērion (Gk.) and psalterium (Lat.), and are found only in western Europe and its colonies. Such terms include psaltari, salterje etc. (Ger., Old Saxon); salterio (It., Sp.); psaltérion, saltérion, psalterium (Fr.); psaltere, psalterio (Old Fr.); and sotrie, sowtrie (Middle English). Many reference works give salterio tedesco (‘German salterio’) as the normal Italian dulcimer name: in fact the only primary source for the term is Bonanni (Gabinetto armonico, 1722), who used it because he was describing and illustrating a German instrument; later writers failed to note this point and used the label as if it were the normal Italian name for the instrument, and even a migration theory was based on this misunderstanding. All other primary sources refer simply to salterio. Some of these names were in use in the Middle Ages for instruments that had few dulcimer features, but the names survived and were used later for instruments with many or all of the features of today’s dulcimers. One such is the McKenzie psaltery which is played in the USA; although copied in the 20th century from a 19th-century patented dulcimer, it is considered by its players to be a distinct instrument.
The term ‘dulcimer’ derives from dulce melos (Gk. and Lat. ‘sweet sound’) and is common only in English (i.e. in Britain, North America and New Zealand), with variants such as dowcemere, dulcimor(e), dulcimur, and possibly dulsate and dulsa chordis. Other derivations are doucemelle, doulcemelle (Fr.); dolcimela (It.); dolcema (Sp.); and poetically dwsmel (Welsh). The term Dulce melos was also used by Henri Arnaut de Zwolle (F-Pn lat.7295, c1440) for a related keyboard instrument.
Hackbrett, a German term for a chopping-board, is the normal name for the instrument among the Germanic peoples; hence hackbräd, hackbräde (Swed.); hakkebrett (Dan.); hakkebord (Flem.); Hachbratt (Swiss-Ger.) etc.; and such affectionate diminutives as Brettl in Austria and Hachbrattli in Switzerland.
These various names convey some of the character of the instrument within each culture, and it is surely significant that all except the Hackbrett group have foreign derivations or associations. Other descriptive names are current in smaller areas: in Hong Kong a word meaning ‘butterfly harp’ or piano; in Tibet one meaning ‘many strings’ (rgyud-mang); whamdiddle and lumberjacks’ piano (Michigan, USA); hammarharpa (Sweden). The Pantaleon is said to have been named by Louis XIV after its inventor, Pantaleon Hebenstreit.
The body of the dulcimer is almost universally a box construction (fig.1), though sometimes bridges and strings are mounted on a plank with soundholes and battens, which creates a resonance chamber when the instrument is placed on a table. Some makers believe that there is a relation between the number of soundholes and the volume of sound, but instruments in Scotland and elsewhere have none and sound just as well. Soundboards are normally flat, but the 19th-century northern Irish dulcimer was curved or vaulted, as are some American instruments and some examples of the Chinese yangqin and Tibetan rgyud-mang. As a practical alternative to doubling the string lengths for every octave descent in range, a trapezial shape has been commonly adopted, with the strings at different tensions and sometimes of different thicknesses.
A length of about 1 metre along the bottom side is common. Small instruments about 60 cm long were made in Flanders in the 17th century and in England in the 19th, and larger ones about 130 cm long are known in England, the USA and Alpine areas. The concert cimbalom is even larger, about 160 cm long, while the pantaleons of Hebenstreit and his pupils are said to have been nearly 3 metres. A normal depth is about 5 to 7 cm, but the 19th-century northern Irish dulcimers were 20 cm deep, and the concert cimbalom is 30 cm deep. A larger instrument is by no means always louder, although the concert cimbalom has a very characteristic resonance; a longer instrument gives a lower bottom note, a broader instrument (from front to back) more notes. Families of dulcimers have been built in Central Asia, the Ukraine, Styria and the USA.
Most dulcimers are portable, some easily so, some less easily. Instruments with dampers operated by a pedal are necessarily built with legs (concert cimbalom, Uzbek chang etc.), and legs are characteristic also of some American instruments (see §6, below). A neck strap is quite commonly used in eastern Europe and occasionally elsewhere (the Alps, Germany, Milan; fig.2). Decoration varies widely; moulding and marquetry are common, and the soundholes often have a rose carved in the soundboard or made of gilt paper, metal, or silken threads. It is thought to have been a Persian custom to inscribe poetry on the table. In China the bridges are often delicately carved, and the outer edges of the Cantonese ‘butterfly harp’ are decoratively scalloped.
Bridges are of wood, but almost always with a wire rod or nail set in the top (fig.3a); in China ivory caps are used instead of wire (for illustration see Yangqin), and one small English type has a brass covering. There are numerous ways of arranging the bridges. On some instruments a long solid bridge divides all the strings into two playable parts; Virdung illustrated such an arrangement in 1511, and it is still found. A far commoner arrangement is illustrated in fig.4, from Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen’s Nativity (1512): two long bridges each carry half the courses, led alternately over one bridge and through cut-outs in the other. Normally only one bridge divides its strings into two sounding portions. This is called the treble bridge and the strings the treble strings. The long undivided strings crossing the other (bass) bridge are the bass strings. From the 18th century the bridges were sometimes segmented, so that different strings could be divided into different proportions, and as early as 1636 Mersenne depicted an extra bridge on the left to bear two or three extra bass strings running the whole length of the instrument.
On a few instruments both bridges divide the strings; the right-hand strings thus become effectively shorter and lose their bass function, but are tuned to give extra chromatic notes instead (Austria, England, Georgia). These bridges are used on larger examples of the north Chinese yangqin and are occasionally found on 18th-century European instruments. A tuning diagram pasted on the back of a Milanese salterio dated 1779 shows five bridges, with a correspondingly complex tuning system. In the 1920s a chordal dulcimer was made in England with a third bridge carrying seven courses, each of which was tuned to a four-note chord as on a zither harp.
‘Chessmen’ bridges (fig.3b) were first depicted around 1600, but they did not become common until the 19th century, when presumably they facilitated chromaticism. At first they were joined by a rod or wire (see fig.13 below), so they were only marginally more flexible than the long bridges. Even when they are not joined, they are often set in straight lines, so the flexibility is not exploited; thus the full potential of chessmen is only sometimes realized (e.g. on the Persian santūr). On some Indian types the chessmen are apparently placed at the extreme edges of the soundboard.
A number of instruments combine more than one system – Jozsef V. Schunda’s concert cimbalom (see §6 and fig.16 below), for instance, and some 18th-century salterii which had divided long bridges for the trebles and the right-hand basses but chessmen for the extra left-hand basses. There are also instruments in which all the strings have only one playing portion and are in the same horizontal plane. Most of these are designed to be plucked and could therefore be classed as psalteries; but they sometimes have dulcimer names, and some early pictures and carvings show such instruments being hammered, though they do not always have strings of equal length as shown in fig.5. (The positioning of the bridges is discussed in §4 below.)
Hammers may have hard or soft playing-heads and stiff or flexible shafts, and be with or without finger-grips (fig.6). In Britain and North America they are often designed by the maker or player; elsewhere there are standard types. The Chinese use very thin, springy bamboo beaters (sometimes with carved shafts) without a finger-grip. Indian hammers are of rigid wood with an elegantly carved finger-grip. Persians use very light wooden hammers with a flat end and grips for both finger and thumb; nowadays these are mass-produced in plastic. Cimbalom players use wood thickly covered with soft cotton. A type used in Styria consists of a wooden ring on the end of a shaft of sprung steel, capable of producing a very rapid tremolo. The Klöppeln of Salzburg and Bavaria have two playing surfaces, wood and felt. A similar device, but with a much longer, thinner shaft, is used in Appenzell, Switzerland, while players in Valais use wooden hammers bent into a curve, with finger-grips. 18th-century west European hammers are of carefully turned wood (see fig.14 below). In England lengths of cane are steamed and bent into a loop at one end, then bound with wool or, in Northern Ireland, with leather. Scottish players use carved wood without a finger-grip. Whalebone corset stays used to be particularly recommended, as was crabpot cane, and cork or velvet for a soft sound. In North America and in the Alps experiments have been made with double-headed hammers for playing 3rds one-handed, and a few players have the left hammer longer than the right because it plays the higher notes, farthest from the player.
The position of the treble bridge determines the portions into which each treble string is divided and hence the relative pitch of its segments. The maker’s intention can often be discerned even when the bridge is missing, as there is normally an inside support directly underneath. The commonest ratio is 2:3, giving a 5th between the two parts of the string. In East Anglia some of the bridges are pushed ‘a semi-tone to the left’, producing a minor 6th (ratio 5:8), and Geiser mentioned the use of this interval in Switzerland. In the USA a 4th (3:4) is quite common, though some players now adopt a 5th (2:3) because it gives more keys. An octave (1:2) is normal in Iran, sometimes modified by semitones.
Early tunings probably consisted of a simple major scale and used the 2:3 ratio (fig.7a). This has remained the basis of most systems, transposed and extended to a greater or lesser degree; fig.8 indicates the treble notes in three such modern schemes. The bass notes are commonly an octave below the right-hand portion of the trebles; less often they are a 4th below, hence an octave below the left-hand portion of the trebles. Sometimes the lowest strings are tuned down to the first, fourth and fifth degrees of the scale. The scheme in 4ths (3:4) used in the USA is similar but has a sharp 7th and gives only two major keys (fig.7b). However, there are many variations on the basic 2:3 diatonic pattern, giving extra semitones; an example from East Anglia, using movable chessmen bridges, is shown in fig.7c. A device used since the 17th century to render a diatonic instrument chromatic is the dital, a small metal lever which may be pushed up to shorten the sounding length of a string by about one-eighteenth and thus raise its pitch by a semitone. (For a similar device on harps, see Harp, §V, 9(i).)
Four different systems are in use to provide a fully chromatic scale through most of the instrument’s range. The McKenzie psaltery retains the 2:3 ratio; each side of the bridge is separately tuned in semitones, as shown in fig.7d. Another American system, albeit rare, has the bridge just right of centre, giving a semitone between the two parts of the string. A third system, devised independently by a 19th-century Englishman, Charles Grey, and a 20th-century Austrian, Julius Derschmidt, provides ‘white notes’ on the left-hand bridge and ‘black notes’ on the right, using a 2:3 ratio at both bridges. An instrument used in the vicinity of Salzburg and in Bavaria has two whole-tone scales, one on each bridge, with no strings divided. The Schunda cimbalom uses this system for its bass range (nearest the player); the treble section uses a modification of the diatonic 5ths system, with extra small bridges for the highest notes, as shown in fig.7e. The result is four chromatic octaves, E to e'', plus D, with no note duplicated. In spite of this plethora of notes the instrument (at the near end of the treble bridge) is essentially based on a C major scale on four courses.
Steel piano wire is the commonest material for modern dulcimer strings. Each string may span the instrument twice (from wrest-pin to hitch-pin and back to another wrest-pin) so that a wire crossing the treble bridge will have four sounding lengths. Many instruments have strings of the same gauge throughout, though older players and tutors (in the West) recommend three or four different grades.
In the santūr the wrest-pins are fixed horizontally in the side of the instrument, but in the yangqin and in most Western dulcimers they are fixed vertically; occasionally the pins are fixed at an angle between the vertical and horizontal. They are nearly always to the player’s right, but a few instruments in the USA and India are reversed. Among those early engravings that appear to show reversed instruments, it is not always clear which are due to the kind of mirror-image printing that is responsible for depictions of left-handed fiddles, flutes and so on.
Usually each treble course has the same number of strings. Four is the commonest number by far, three and five are not unusual, and six, seven or even eight are occasionally found on 18th-century instruments. Two was apparently a common number before the 18th century and was also the number used on 19th-century American instruments, and hence on McKenzie psalteries; double courses are also used in Mongolia and, increasingly (for ease of tuning), in England. Quite a number of dulcimers have fewer strings per course for the basses than for the trebles: three for each bass course and four for the trebles is fairly common in England and Styria; other patterns are two in the bass and three or four in the treble, three or four in the bass and five in the treble, or even six in the bass and seven in the treble. More complex arrangements are also found, mostly on 18th-century instruments, with fewer strings for the lower treble courses than for the higher ones, and similarly among the bass courses. Thus on one 18th-century French dulcimer the bass bridge (to the right in fig.9a) carried three courses of four strings each and ten courses of five, while the treble bridge carried three courses of five strings each and ten of six. Fig.9b represents a north Chinese yanqin with three bridges, the treble bridge carrying nine quadruple courses. On an older dulcimer with bridges missing, the pattern of the wrest-pins may help in making a reconstruction.
Tuning a new double-course dulcimer can be completed in a few minutes; a more complex instrument may take hours. In north China tiny cylinders of steel are placed under each string to allow fine tuning; elsewhere the 5ths are tempered by a slight adjustment of the bridge position or by stretching individual sections of the strings so that the tension becomes slightly uneven in the two parts.
Little is known of the dulcimer from before the mid-15th century. It is often said to have been of Persian origin, but H.G. Farmer (Grove5) adduced considerable negative evidence, pointing out that ‘not one of the great Arabic and Persian treatises on music contains the slightest reference’ to the dulcimer and concluding that ‘it seems to have found its way to Iranian ears during the 17th century, perhaps through Turkish influence’. The oldest known depiction of an instrument that is unmistakably a dulcimer – it is trapeziform, with lateral strings struck by hammers – is in a 12th-century carved ivory book-cover made in Byzantium for Melisende, the wife of Fulk V of Anjou, King of Jerusalem (fig.10). No other dulcimer is known for another 300 years, although there are numerous medieval depictions of the psaltery, plucked only and with undivided strings in a single plane. In the map shown in fig.11 the dotted arrow north-west from Turkey suggests that perhaps it was from Byzantium that the dulcimer was introduced to western Europe in the 15th century.
Of the many illustrations of dulcimers after about 1440, only about a quarter are angel representations, although virtually all of the medieval psaltery players are heavenly beings. The medieval psaltery is usually held flat against the body, the player looking out and away from the instrument, but the position shown for the dulcimer is such that the player must look down ‘into’ the instrument to get the right notes (fig.12). Around 1440 Arnaut de Zwolle described the divided-strings principle in connection with a keyboard instrument, the Latin name of which (dulce melos) is evidently the source of the term ‘dulcimer’, which appeared later in the 15th century. Most of the references to and illustrations of the dulcimer from the next 100 years centre on the German and Alpine regions, including Grenoble and Aosta, but there are also others from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Flanders, northern France and England. 15th-century illustrations show instruments with or without bridges, and with single courses of six to nine strings, being played on the lap or sometimes on a table or bench; in 16th-century illustrations, the instruments almost always have bridges and between eight and 12 double courses. Most of the illustrations appear to depict players from the higher classes of society, but the dulcimer was evidently popular elsewhere as well: Luscinius described it in 1536 as commonplace (ignobile) and esteemed particularly for its volume, and Gerhard de Jode (c1600) portrayed it along with the hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe.
More detail is known about the dulcimer in the Baroque period, although the evidence relating to its dispersion is far from complete. Surviving instruments have between 18 and 25 courses and mostly four strings per course. There is an isolated Norwegian reference in the introduction to a psalm-book (1623) by the Danish bishop Anders Arrebo. In Sweden the hackbrad in 1683 was an instrument played by farm workers. Dulcimers were certainly played in the Czech lands at this time, reached Spain and became more widespread in Italy. According to Farmer (1937), the first unequivocal indications of the dulcimer in Iran or Ottoman Turkey are from the 17th century (hence, in fig.11, the arrow leading into Turkey). Within 100 years the dulcimer was being played in most areas under Turkish domination – but by Christians and Jews rather than by Turks. In 1609 a dulcimer was recorded with a violin in a ship’s log in Jamestown, Virginia. According to Korean sources the dulcimer arrived in Korea in 1725 from China and only subsequently reached Japan.
By this time nearly all dulcimers were trapeziform and had multiple courses divided by a long bridge. A few 17th- and 18th-century bridges were made of several blocks rather than long strips; but as the blocks were joined by a rod across the top, they did not provide the flexibility of the later ‘chessmen’ bridges. Double courses are most often in evidence, but some instruments had three, four or even five strings per note. Praetorius depicted fewer strings for the bass courses than for the trebles (five triple courses over the treble bridge but four double courses and one single over the bass bridge) and subsequently this kind of arrangement became increasingly common. There are occasional single-course instruments without divided strings, some of them designed only to be plucked but nonetheless called dulcimer or Hackbrett. Other instruments, in the Low Countries, Spain and perhaps Italy, were also plucked but have the characteristic arrangement of strings crossing in two planes so that they could equally well be struck.
Baroque illustrations are nearly all of real players (as in fig.13), with just the occasional allegorical figure. Translators of the Bible, on the Continent as well as in England, sometimes used ‘dulcimer’, hackbräde, psaltérion or the like for the Hebrew term nevel. Some writers alluded contemptuously to the use of the dulcimer among their social inferiors, and Mattheson suggested in 1713 that it ‘should be nailed up in houses of ill repute’. However, Pepys liked the dulcimer (‘played on with sticks knocking of the strings, and is very pretty’) and mentioned it in 1662 as accompanying puppet shows. Grassineau noted a similar use of the instrument in 1740.
Mersenne devoted about 1000 words to the psaltérion – its bridging, stringing, tuning, playing techniques and repertory – and illustrated a double-course instrument with notes on only one side of a single bridge. He described more complex types with two or three bridges, strings of gut or silk (as well as the more usual metal) and courses tuned in octaves (and the added possibility of 5ths and 15ths). He mentioned also a double instrument with high and low registers for playing duos. He depicted an extra-long bass course nearest the player, and a lid that could be locked. The player might use, he said, a single hammer for a single melody, or two hammers to play part-music; he might pluck the strings with fingers or quill, or hammer a melody with the right hand and pluck chords with the left. Mersenne said that the dulcimer could be played after only an hour or two of practice but that with industry one could derive as much pleasure from it as from any other instrument and that it was suitable for all sorts of songs, for teaching singing, for just intonation and so on.
In 1704 Pantaleon Hebenstreit brought a large version of the dulcimer to Louis XIV, who is said to have decreed that the instrument should share the name ‘pantaleon’ (see Pantaleon). In the later 18th century a number of pantaleon virtuosos travelled about Europe, notably Hebenstreit’s pupil Georg Noëlli, who played in Sweden, England, Italy and other countries. Italian composers including Jommelli, Carlo Monza and Chiesa wrote for the salterio. Schickhaus (1972) listed nine sonatas for dulcimer with continuo, two trios with violin and cello, two concertos (one with oboes and horns as well as strings) and a sinfonia with strings, all in galant style; some of these have been published in modern editions. Mitjana (EMDC, 1922) discussed a Spanish opera of 1753 in which the prima donna accompanied herself on a salterio, with an orchestra of flutes and strings.
A Danish manuscript of 1753, Tablature indrettet till Hakke-Bret (in the Musikhistorisk Museum, Copenhagen), contains the melody lines of 43 dance- and song-tunes from various countries, written in note names on a five-line staff. A few paintings and engravings from the 16th century to the 18th show the dulcimer being played from music (including a march in note-name tablature, as in fig.13, and a ‘Pastoril’ in staff notation), in various ensembles.
The 18th-century instruments were often more complex than their 17th-century precursors, with as many as five bridges (to achieve complete chromaticism) and seven or eight strings to a course. Joos Verschuere Reynvaan in Flanders depicted a right-hand extension to the body to carry long single bass strings tuned an octave below the rest of the course (fig.14). Similar systems, but usually with the extension to the left, appeared in England, Germany and France. Reynvaan’s drawing also shows little metal tangents or ditals that could be pushed up between a course of strings and the soundboard, shortening the sounding portion of the strings to produce the note a semitone higher than the open string – a device for chromaticism that was apparently invented or first described in connection with the dulcimer by a Florentine abbot about 1750 and is still in use in Valais (Switzerland) and elsewhere. An early tutor describes a dulcimer with separate movable bridges at a time (1770) when most instruments had long strips (though occasionally divided in two parts for flexibility). An unusual instrument dated 1776 from the Engadin, a Romansch-speaking district of Switzerland, shows many of the features of Virdung’s drawing of 1511: a trapeziform shape with a very shallow angle, a single solid bridge, few courses, and side tuning-pins. By this time, however, European instruments normally had vertical tuning-pins, side pins being much more typical of the Middle East.
The dulcimer continued to be popular in country areas, and the later 18th century saw the development of the Striichmusi, still flourishing in many Alpine regions and in eastern Europe – a band of two fiddles, dulcimer and bass. In Switzerland the traditional fife-and-drum band also sometimes featured a dulcimer.
The dulcimer has become so widespread since 1800 that its history is best traced by approximate geographical area. Though evidently less popular in cultivated Western society, perhaps because of the increasing availability of the piano, the dulcimer in the 19th century retained its appeal among country folk and many working townspeople. Several new models were developed, and with the coming of industrialization some instruments were produced in hundreds or even thousands. London firms like Douglas & Co. or John Grey & Sons used individual chessmen bridges, and these models became popular in many cities and in East Anglia (where the bridges are nowadays arranged to give up to six keys). A small triple-strung instrument is also commonly found (Grey’s version of this model was called the ‘Dulcet’ or Dulcette’). A type particularly favoured in Birmingham has lids covering the hitch- and wrest-pins (see fig.3a); long bridges are used, and the strings are so close together that plucking is quite convenient: this type probably originated with an early 19th-century Biedermeier instrument.
The dulcimer probably went to Northern Ireland with the Lowland Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries; the surviving repertory includes both Scottish and Irish tunes, mainly jigs, reels and hornpipes. Elsewhere in Britain popular songs of the early 20th century are most often heard, with occasionally an older traditional dance. Instruments and playing styles went to southern Ireland via Dublin, probably from the south of England in the early 1900s, although the repertory there is completely local. In the 1920s and 30s the dulcimer was played in Scottish dance bands with melodeon, fiddle, piano and other instruments and was popular as a domestic instrument in Britain and with street buskers during the Depression: in the 1970s too, buskers with dulcimers were seen in Liverpool and Norwich. Players in Scotland and Ireland use hammers, while plucking is commoner in Birmingham and London; in East Anglia both methods are used.
In Victorian times dulcimers of English origin became popular for square dances in the eastern USA, along with the fiddle, accordion and various other instruments which were used because they were available. Other immigrant groups – Czechs, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians – brought their dulcimers and to some extent kept their native traditions alive in the new country. In the later 19th century several makers patented designs which included such features as double courses, an integral rectangular case, curved soundboards (to allow the bass strings to be played at either end), legs, dampers (antedating those of the pedal cimbalom), adjustable ‘frets’ for fine tuning and a reversible frame with two soundboards and two sets of strings (one for flat keys, the other for sharp ones). Modern McKenzie psalteries retain many of these features.
A dozen or more tutors were published between 1848 (by Haight in the USA) and about 1920 (by Dallas in London). Also published were plans for dulcimer builders, such as Charles Grey’s design, in 1883, for an instrument which had ‘white notes’ over the left-hand bridge and ‘black notes’ over the right (a similar system was independently produced in Austria by Julius Derschmidt in the 1950s). The period between the world wars must have been something of a heyday for the dulcimer in the USA, as in Britain. A spate of gramophone records became available commercially, and from 1924 Henry Ford’s Early American Orchestra broadcast and recorded regularly with fiddle, dulcimer, cimbalom and double bass or tuba.
In the second half of the 20th century older American dulcimer players still played dance melodies monophonically, but younger players were experimenting with diverse textures and techniques. In the increasingly popular style characteristic of the McKenzie psaltery, for instance, slow-moving melodies were played in the lower register accompanied by rippling figures in the treble. There is no evidence for living dulcimer traditions in the folk music of the Canary Islands (where there survives a single 19th-century instrument, in a museum), Norway (where the dulcimer has been confused with the langeleik, which is related to the Appalachian dulcimer) or Sweden (where the last known player was active in the 19th century).
In 1912 a ‘Hackbrettler Kongress’ was organized in Brig, the major town of the Swiss canton of Valais; intended as a satire in the Germanic carnival tradition on an earlier Alphorn congress, it nonetheless attracted 13 Hackbrett players and a crowd of 2000. The Hackbrett traditions of the Swiss Alps are basically those of the Germanic peoples, but the instrument was formerly known in French-speaking parts of Switzerland. Nowadays there are two distinct styles: a simple one from Valais in the west, where the dulcimer is played with wind instruments (clarinet, trumpet, accordion etc.) as well as with the fiddle; and a more refined style from Appenzell and Toggenburg in the east, where it is normally played with a string ensemble – perhaps with two fiddles playing the melody in 3rds, a cello playing off-beat chords and a bass. In Styria a combination of melodeon, Hackbrett and bass has taken over from the older string group; Tyrolean and other traditions have largely died out.
In Salzburg in 1932 Tobi Reiser, inspired by players from Styria, redesigned the dulcimer to accommodate chromatic harmony, and by 1940 there were 1000 players of the new instrument, which was soon adopted in Bavaria too; there, evening classes in the instrument produced by the 1970s some 5000 ‘Hackbrödler’. Salzburg and Bavaria have a common style of Stubenmusi (drawing-room music) using Hackbrett, zither, harp, guitar and bass. Some Styrian players with their waltzes and polkas rather scorn the Bavarians’ refined Stubenmusi with its delicate instrumentation and Mozart minuets.
Some years after such ideas were patented in the USA, the Schunda family in Budapest produced a large concert dulcimer or cimbalom, with legs, an integral rectangular case and dampers operated by a pedal, but with a greater range – four chromatic octaves (fig.16); see also Cimbalom). Shortly afterwards, similar instruments were made in Bucharest. These are now standard town instruments – played, for instance, by gypsy virtuosos in cafés – in both Hungary and the western part of Romania, where many Hungarians live, and are known also in parts of Poland, and the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In the country the older, portable dulcimer is still played (Hungarians call both types ‘cimbalom’), characteristically providing the harmonic background to fiddles and bass, with off-beat chords and arpeggio flourishes. Large instruments without dampers or pedal are known in Hungary and Poland. The smaller dulcimer is still widely used in the country (fig.17); in Romania it is called ţambal mic (cf ‘micro’), and a piece of cloth is sometimes woven among the strings, giving the same effect as damping a concert instrument (see Cimbalom).
The concert cimbalom was accorded the status of an orchestral instrument by Liszt, who used it in the revised version of his Ungarischer Sturmmarsch (1875) and in the orchestral version of his Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody for piano. The instrument’s association with Hungarian gypsy music was exploited by Kodály (Háry János, 1926), Bartók (Rhapsody no.1 for violin and orchestra, 1928) and other Hungarian composers. Stravinsky’s interest in the cimbalom dates from the time of his friendship with the famous Hungarian virtuoso Aladár Rácz (1886–1958), whom he met in Geneva in 1914 and who later (1954) became professor of the concert cimbalom at the Budapest Academy and made a number of remarkable recordings. Stravinsky purchased a cimbalom during his residence in Switzerland in World War I. He composed Renard (1915–16) on it, in the same way as he normally composed on a piano, and included it in the score of Rag-time (1918) as well as in Renard; he also planned to use it in an early scoring of The Wedding (composed 1914–17) and then began another version whose instrumentation included two cimbaloms. Other composers attracted to the instrument include Orff (music for Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, begun 1939), Heinz Holliger (Glühende Rätsel, 1964) and Boulez (Eclat, 1965). Humphrey Searle wrote important cimbalom parts in his operas The Photo of the Colonel (1964) and Hamlet (1965–8), and in his Fourth Symphony (1962), Burn-up (1962) and Oxus (1967).
A.L. Lloyd mentioned cimbaloms in Hungary and Transylvania from the 16th century, but J.H. van der Meer suggested that the dulcimer in the Slavonic countries dates not from the Renaissance but from the 18th or the 19th century, when it arrived from western Europe. It may have been from Hungary that the instrument spread to Ukraine, Belarus and the rest of the former USSR. At any rate, modern Central Asian instruments, made in a variety of sizes, have been influenced by Western ideas, notably the damper pedal.
According to Curt Sachs (Real-Lexikon) and Farmer, a European dulcimer, santūr fransiz, appeared in Turkey about 1850 alongside the santūr turki, which had already spread to Egypt and Georgia as well as Persia. The modern Persian santūr occupies a pre-eminent place in classical music. In South Asia the santūr is most often played by Kashmiri musicians. Shiv Kumar Sharma has developed a technique incorporating tremolo and fast runs, approximating the gamak of Hindustani music, which he uses in performances of rāga.
In China the yangqin is widely used in entertainment music and is a normal part of the amateur classical orchestra. It may be played solo, in the older style, but in westernized film music is accompanied by an orchestra. Rapid two-hand tremolos alternate with single notes, and the occasional ornamentation is produced by ‘bending’, i.e. pressing a course hard behind the bridge to produce portamento or quickly rising and falling glissando.
MersenneHU; MGG1 (H.-H. Dräger and W. Wünsch); MGG1 (‘Zither’; J.H. van der Meer); PraetoriusSM
J. Jenkins: Musical Instruments (London, 1970)
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Grove5 (‘Santir’; H.G. Farmer)
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H.G. Farmer: Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century as Described in the Siyahat nama of Ewliya Chelebi (Glasgow, 1937/R)
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K.-H. Schickhaus: Hackbrett-Fibel (Munich, 1962)
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Chang Sa-hun: Han’gak akki taegwan [Korean musical instruments] (Seoul, 1969), 100
K.-H. Schickhaus: ‘Volksmusik aus Hausmusik’, Sänger und Musikantenzeitung, xv (1972)
B. Geiser and K.-H. Schickhaus: Das Hackbrett in der Schweiz (Visp, 1973, enlarged 2/1975 with J.H. van der Meer as Das Hackbrett, ein alpenländisches Musikinstrument)
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B. Geiser: ‘Volksmusikinstrumente der Schweiz’, GfMKB: Berlin 1974, 596–9
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F. Gösmann: ‘Das Hackbrett: Neubesinnung auf ein traditionsreiches Musikinstrument’, Quaestiones in musica: Festschrift für Kranz Krautwurst, ed. F. Brusniak and H. Leuchtmann (Tutzing, 1989), 159–65
B.A. Cherwick: ‘Ukrainien Tsymbaly Performance in Alberta’, Canadian Folk Music Journal/Revue de musique folklorique canadienne, xxiii (1995), 20–27
E. Ho and Xu Pingxing: ‘The Manchurian Yangqin’, Chinese Music, xviii/3 (1995), 50–55
