The Sound of One Hand Piping drumming

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Français 13096. Apocalypse de S. Jean, en français. fourteenth century

The word drum doesn’t even bother showing its face in English until about 1540, but once it arrived, it seemed determined to make up for lost time, booming, banging, and generally refusing to shut up.

A poke around Early English Books Online turns up a not-too-shabby 4,077 hits for the drum between 1540 and 1720, more mentions than any other musical instrument in the manuscripts of the time (Marsh 2011). Yet, for all that bragging rights, the early drum still manages to keep its secrets: how it was built, how it was played, and what it actually meant to anyone back then are mostly left to speculation and guesswork.

The Tabor

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, f. 70r.

The tabor was usually a dainty little drum, as anyone glancing at medieval illustrations like the Luttrell Psalter (British Library Add MS 42130, c. 1325–1340, f. 23v) or various Books of Hours can see. But don’t get too comfortable, there was plenty of variety in what counted as a drum, both in type and size.

The Snare

One of the drum world’s cleverest tweaks was the snare, which started showing up around the fourteenth century. Essentially a single, or sometimes double, strand of gut or similar material stretched across the head, it rattles when the drum gets a whack. Without it, you just get a dull thud.

Snare drums make a pretty unmistakable cameo in the murals at the Musée de l'Oise (MUDO), Beauvais, in the north tower of the episcopal palace, dating to the first half of the fourteenth century; the Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 20v; and, of course, the ever-fashionable Luttrell Psalter.

But don’t assume every tabor was in on the trend, some early depictions, like those in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, give the snare the cold shoulder. The Macclesfield Psalter opts for a chunky cord. How they kept the snares taut is anyone's guess, though Montagu suspects those ornate knots on side drums were designed for one thing: a quick grip-and-pull to tighten the snare on the fly.

According to Guy Gauthreaux's study of orchestral snare drum performance, the snare became common around the fourteenth century, transforming the instrument's sonic character (Gauthreaux 1989, 18). From the thirteenth century, whenever the upper (batter) head of a drum is visible in iconographical sources, a snare is almost invariably depicted (Montagu 2010).

The composition of snares evolved considerably. Mersenne's Harmonie universelle (1636) provides detailed description of seventeenth-century French practice: 'that below which is held by the string AB which traverses the diameter, and which is called the bell of the drum, which is made of two strings, or a single cord bent double' (Mersenne 1636, as cited in Gauthreaux 1989, 26). His illustration includes not only two snares but also a primitive snare release mechanism, demonstrating that drummers already recognised the need to control the snare's engagement with the head for different musical effects.

Virdung was not a fan

Virdung, writing about the Herpaucken, Trumeln und clein paücklin, has some harsh criticisms.

They make a lot of noise that disturbs honorable drummers of old times, the sick and weak, the devout people in monasteries who read, study, and pray. I believe and am convinced that the devil invented and created this, because there is absolutely no holiness or goodness in it, but rather it's a corruption and destruction of all sweet melodies and all Music. Therefore I firmly believe that timpani may have originally been different things that were used in the service of God, but now our drums have been made, and we unjustly give them the name of this devilish instrument, which is not at all worthy to be used for Music.

Construction Details

Medieval iconography reveals considerable detail about tabor construction. The head of animal skin was lapped onto a ring known as a flesh hoop. Tension cords passed between hoops at each end of the drum in a V or W pattern. The critical question for reconstruction: how do you attach tension cords without counter hoops, which only appeared around the mid-1500s. The Lincoln Cathedral carving suggests the rope went through both head and hoop, which would require drilling holes through both once the head had been lapped on (Montagu 2010).

As Gauthreaux notes, the most significant manufacturing development was the introduction of threaded tension rods, generally attributed to Cornelius Ward in 1837 (Gauthreaux 1989, 121-122). This single innovation enabled drummers to achieve much tighter heads and subsequently allowed for quicker stick response, eventually leading to advances in snare drum performance evident in modern orchestral repertoire. Prior to this development, the rope-tensioning systems visible in iconography from Praetorius's Syntagma Musicum (1619) and Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle (1636) produced heads that were probably quite loose by modern standards, affecting both tone quality and the types of rhythmic articulation possible.

Changing Proportions

The drum's proportions changed over time. Most thirteenth-century tabors were wider in diameter than their depth (technically a double-headed frame drum). By around 1330, as seen at Beverley Minster, diameter and depth were approximately equal. By the early sixteenth century, the shape had changed again, normally being deeper than its diameter, as shown on a Beverley Minster misericord. This deeper shape persisted into modern times in the Basque and Provençal tabors. The Mary Rose yielded the sole surviving sixteenth-century tabor, incomplete but with portions of upper and lower edges intact, allowing us to define the depth as 250 mm and estimate the diameter at around 300 mm (Montagu 2010).

Beaters

Beaters evolved over time. Early depictions show heavy club-shaped beaters with round, possibly padded heads, as at Lincoln (c. 1275) and Beverley (c. 1330). By the sixteenth century, a simple stick was more common, though the Mary Rose beater appears as an exception, a very thin stick quite different from the heavy medieval beaters (Montagu 2010).

Special Features and Variations

One notable depiction from the late Middle Ages appears in the Horae ad usum romanum (c.1401-1500), which shows a tabor player accompanied by bells on both the drum and the player's clothing, adding a distinctive sound element to the performance.

The French theologian Jean de Gerson (c.1425) refers to the use of the tabor in his Tractatus de Canticis, where he writes about drums which are 'more commonly used by the people, because they are easier and produce a more resonant sound for wild dances and other types of revelry, to which pipes with double-reeds are often joined.' Even medieval theologians understood people needed to blow off steam occasionally.

Types of Drums in England

Unfortunately, most early modern English documents fail to distinguish between the various types of drum that were in use during the period: snared tabors that were slung from the wrist or shoulder and struck with a single stick held in one hand while the fingers of the other played tunes on a pipe; larger side drums, also supported with a strap but beaten with two sticks; and, much more rarely, kettle drums, built on frames of metal rather than wood and heavy enough to render portability problematic. There were probably many hybrid, intermediate and improvised forms to set alongside these ideal types. Early modern people were extremely resourceful and could liberate the rhythmic potential of any resonant object. The humble basin was regularly beaten as a percussion instrument, and in 1602 a raucous assembly at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, hastily turned a beer barrel into a drum, after first consuming the contents (Marsh 2011).

Playing Techniques and Performance Practice

The Challenge of Reconstruction

Despite frequent references to the tabor in medieval art and literature, much about how drums were played remains speculative due to the lack of surviving drum music from the period. We can surmise the drum's primary function in many contexts was to keep time, particularly in dancing. This is evident in works such as Orchésographie by Thoinot Arbeau (1589), which provides detailed descriptions of the role of percussion instruments, including the tabor, in accompanying dances.

Of course, knowing Arbeau documented these patterns doesn't mean we agree on what they meant. A 1977 exchange in Early Music saw scholars arguing over whether pavane drum beats should be twice as fast as previously thought, all because of confusion over whether note values had been halved in modern editions. One correspondent admitted to preferring no drum at all for certain dances, despite clear historical evidence of their use, a telling reminder that historical performance practice often comes down to educated guesswork seasoned with personal taste.

English Drumming Patterns

Our knowledge of the precise rhythms that were played by England's drummers is similarly superficial. Admittedly, some of the military sequences were sporadically notated during the early modern period, but we can only guess at the relationship between these and the patterns commonly beaten on village greens and urban streets (Marsh 2011). To what extent did the ordinary side-drummers of England master techniques such as the roll, the drag, the flam, the roof and the diddle?

The concern that was expressed during the 1630s about the shortage of drummers capable of beating 'The English March' for the nation's trained bands seems to suggest that many local players relied more on natural rhythm than on meticulous training and technical expertise. Around 1635, an enterprising drummer named John Rudd asked the government for permission to tour the countryside in order to put this right: he would 'brede up men to perfection' by teaching them the national march (Marsh 2011).

Literary sources represented the characteristic sound of an English drum with the onomatopoeic formula, 'dub a dub dub,' suggesting that strong and basic rhythms made up of crotchets and quavers (or minims and crotchets) prevailed. The same conclusion is encouraged by renditions of drum beats in musical compositions by William Byrd, Tobias Hume and others (Marsh 2011). Such sources are neither comprehensive nor necessarily reliable, but they are among the most informative that we have.

The String Drum

In addition to the tabor, the pipe can also be played with other percussion instruments, one of the most elaborate being the string drum. A chordophone, the string drum is similar to instruments like the psaltery, zither, and dulcimer. It consists of a rectangular box with strings stretched across it and varies in size, though it typically measures around 90 cm in length.

Dating back to the Middle Ages, the string drum continued to be in use throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods and remains a part of the folk music traditions in the Pyrenees today. Like the tabor, the string drum provides both a drone and percussive accompaniment. In Italy, the instrument is known as the Buttafuoco. Interestingly, it is most often depicted in religious settings during the Middle Ages.

c.1466-87 Anonymous. Museo Diocesano de Solsona, Lleida, Spain

The string drum first appears in depictions from the late fifteenth century, such as in the Sforza Hours and in the Church of Santa Maria de Ventosa. The strings of the instrument are typically grouped in choruses, and it can produce both drone sounds and single bass notes. The shape of the instrument is long, trapezoidal, with wave-shaped sides.

Paris, BnF, Français 7 f.155

Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, 1266, f. 184