The long history of the hammered dulcimer

Lately I've been reading up about hammered dulcimers. Today, hammered dulcimers are typically associated with Celtic and American folk music, but their history and influence stretch across most of Europe and Asia dating back for centuries.

Basically there has been some form or another of a common instrument that has gone by many names. It is essentially a stringed instrument shaped like a trapezoid and the sound is made by striking the strings with little hammers. In the picture at the top of this post is a Persian santur, which may have been in existence 1800 - 2000 years ago in Central Asia. In India its incarnation is known as a santoor.



This instrument is a tsymbaly. The tsymbaly has been present in Russian and Ukranian culture since the ninth century. Other Eastern European cultures have very similar instruments with very similar names.

The Chinese yangqin (below) also looks very similar -- though scholars debate whether it was derived from a Central Asian ancestor or invented in China independent of outside influence.



Either way, other East Asian cultures have their own versions of the instrument, from the Korean yanggeum to the khim of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.

During the Middle Ages in Western Europe there was some form of salterio or psaltery. While there is some confusion as to whether some of these instruments were plucked instead of struck by hammers, there remains a common connection in the shape of the instrument and even the similar-sounding names. (Try saying "santur" and "psalter" out loud together to hear the connection.)

Eventually someone figured out how to create a hammered instrument that wouldn't need to be re-tuned nearly as often as a santur/dulcimer/etc. The hammers and strings were put into a larger box, and the hammered were hooked up to a long row of keys so that notes could be played with a light touch of the fingers. And, voila, we have a much more familiar instrument to Western audiences:



Thanks go to Wikipedia, from which most of this superficial exploration derives. For more information on the subject, I've embedded links to various pages within the text above. From the Wikipedia entries you can also find more external resources -- you know, if you want to go beyond the basic overview of the instrument and its history.