OK ~ So what exactly is the BEST GUESS?

[Dick Glasgow]

Over on ED, Mrchips just posted this comment on a thread:

If you mean a hammer dulcimer or the varations of one al over the world, no. They have a history going back at least 3000 years and orignated in whats now known as Iraq as the best guess.

Of course I am very interested in this question of where the H-D actually started out, so I thought I'd follow it up over here & see what folks think.

Now I must confess, I'd also been under the impression that the H-D started out somewhere like Mesopotamia, but I recently read that the smart thinking these days is that the modern instrument, the one we all think of as the H-D, actually started life much closer to home, at least for me anyway, in around Germany/France! :?

I remember too, that the article also stated that in it's present shape & design it didn't go back nearly as far as the C11th, but was far more likely to date back only to the C13th.

Of course, perhaps an early primitive form of H-D actually did began life in Mesopotamia, but it had to wait until it arrived in C13th Europe before some smart Luthier set about the transformation?

Would anyone like to comment on this idea?

Cheers
Dick

[Dick Glasgow]

Paul Gifford replied to this question on another forum, thus:

Writers first began speculating on the origins of the dulcimer since the time of Fetis, in the mid-19th century. Because of the Biblical and classical associations, they assumed an ancient origin, and they found "proof" by interpreting an Assyrian bas-relief (Carl Engel, in Britain, was responsible for this) as a dulcimer. In the 1920s, Francis Galpin demolished that interpretation, but it stayed on in popular imagination. Clearly it was a lyre.

Mr. Chips -- by saying Iraq 3500 years ago -- is using this story.

Curt Sachs wrote several books on the history of musical instruments, and his influential (1940) History of Musical Instruments gave the origin as having been something brought from the Near East by Crusaders. I think he cites the 1184 Spanish cathedral carving as a dulcimer, but that carving is clearly a plucked psaltery.

David Kettlewell uses the Byzantine ivory book carving (12th century) as the earliest evidence of the instrument. This is a horizontally placed stringed instrument that King David appears to be playing by holding two long straight sticks. OK, on its own, it does look like a dulcimer. The problem, however, is that if it was, and there is only this carving to go on, it was a deadend. By the 15th or 16th century, frescoes in Byzantine (Greek) churches show versions of the kanun, a plucked instrument, apparently identical to the kanun of the Islamic world. The tribes along the Volga River preserved a (more or less) trapezoidal psaltery, with individual courses, into the 20th century, and that probably had Byzantine origins. I think the Byzantine psaltery of the 14th century, when Byzantine missionaries went up the Volga was preserved by these tribes. However, this was not a dulcimer.

The Iranian santur developed independently. The earliest illustration so far discovered dates from around 1481, and it shows a trapezoidal instrument with the short end toward the player who holds a couple of straight sticks. An older illustration, from the 14th century, shows a half-trapezoidal stringed instrument held vertically; texts say that the santur was the Syrian name for the instrument known in Egypt as qanun. This 1481 illustration was not a fluke----several Ottoman illustrations from the next century show that it was placed in the same position.

My argument in the book on the dulcimer's origins was based on earlier research by Herbert Heyde, who used literary and visual evidence to suggest that the ancestor was the "string drum," a long, narrow box with one or two gut strings, used by peasants in the 14th century in Western Europe, a drone instrument to accompany a flute. He felt that around 1400, the clavichord and harpsichord developed, and it was likely that the dulcimer also developed at the same time. Illustrations from the 1400s start to appear with regularity.

The name "doulcemer" begins to appear in French-speaking areas before 1450, and the illustrations show a psaltery (obviously deriving from the earlier pig-snout psaltery) being struck, sometimes both struck and pluck.
Players were sometimes professional minstrels, but mostly it seems they were aristocratic ladies. This instrument clearly was the dulcimer mentioned in English sources of the late 15th and 16th centuries.

So my argument differs from Heyde's in that I think that around 1500, the Germanic Hackbrett (<string drum) and the French doucemer (<psaltery) started to coalesce, especially in areas like Basel, Switzerland. The 15th-century Hackbrett, a long, rectangular instrument with four treble courses, survived until around 1700 in Italy and Holland, and in the 1640s had gone into England as the "arprey." (At the time I wrote the book I hadn't learned the information in the last sentence).

The argument about drawn wire is what I used in my book, before Blanton's article appeared, I should mention. If I recall, a process was developed in Nuremberg employing a watermill. Earlier writers (I think Isidore of Seville) mention gold and silver wire on psalteries, meaning that such wire was too expensive to be practical. But what seems significant is that the European illustrations of the dulcimer don't appear until the 15th century, and the earliest Persian illustration also appears at this time. They clearly evolved separately, but wire-drawing technology made this evolution possible.

Sorry if this seems too "academic." I started researching the instrument in 1968, when I finished high school. At that time, the little information on the instrument that one could find was in such books as I mentioned above, and there were many mysteries to explore.

So it looks like you Hackbrett guys are responsible for all our pain & suffering, after all! ;D ;D

Fascinating stuff though you must admit, & many thanks to Paul for his very detailed reply.

Cheers
Dick

[Nikita]

Snicker and Chukcle ;D I must admit I do love the idea of my country being THE original birthplace... ;D... of course till we get more info !
Thanks a lot for the info ! and I must get that book

[cooper]

I had always assumed that it was brought over here after the crusades. Those original dulcimers were box like just like that 17th c. Painting of the santur in Iran.

( if that picture did not come out, go to this link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hasht-Behesht_Palace_santur.jpg )

I pretty much assumed that it developed into a trapezoid instrument after the Europeans got ahold of it, then Iran had a revival of the instrument and copied the shape from us.

But, I am no scholar.

[Dick Glasgow]

Hey Cooper, looking at the Hammers in that photo, you could almost play that H-D from the next room.

It also looks like she is playing it upside down, doesn't it!

It's interesting how we often put so much faith in the artists eye when it comes to checking out old instruments in paintings, e.g. Memling's Fiddle. However, I'm sure some artists were happy to just give an impression of an instrument. Just think how often we see Harps being playing back to front in old works of art.

Cheers
Dick

[Nikita]

Yeah, it's exactly that : some artist's eyes arn't very prcise, to say the least, when they draw instruments !
I'm like you, Cooper, I used to think hackbrett originated from the iranian santur, through the silk road a nice bucolic picture !
but the reading of Kettlewell's tremndous job - and now that of Gifford's- show that it's not at all sure... In Switzerland, the first time the name Hackbrett appears is 1447, along with drawings... and the track of the wire-making is, I think, quite a serious one... a lot of instruments were made because the technology to make them was invented : accordions and concertinas appeared arpound 1830, just at the beginning of the industrial era, and it's not a coincidence...

[cooper]

Don't the Chinese claim they got theirs from the Persians too? On that train of thought, what about the Hungarians?

[cooper]

admin said:

Hey Cooper, looking at the Hammers in that photo, you could almost play that H-D from the next room.

I was think more that she was going to play miniature gulf with those sticks

[Nikita]

Actually, the name "Yang Quin", I've read somewhere, means "foreign instrument", or something like that. And, if I remember well, the chinese instrument arrived in China about 250 years ago, which would be consistent with a persian origin (and that picture is 17th-century dated...), with all the commercial exchanges between Persia and China, the silk road especially. I don't really know about Hungary, but it's quite easy to imagine it could have arrived from the west : Hungary was part of the Saint Roman-German Empire, as was Switzerland and Germany.