If you pop open The Cambridge Companion to Percussion thinking you’re gonna get the lowdown on medieval drums, you might wanna sit down. The section on historical development jumps straight to the 'Marimba Revolution' and twentieth-century innovations. Delightful stuff, naturally, but not exactly what you need if you're interested in chainmail, minstrels, and medieval mirth.
Percussion occupies a strange position in early music scholarship: simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Medieval and Renaissance images overflow with drums, bells, cymbals, and tambourines. Yet when you turn to treatises, scores, or scholarly tomes, percussion practically vanishes. For anyone trying to understand how these instruments actually worked in pre-modern Europe, the available research is scattered, tangential, and frustratingly incomplete.
The Terminology Problem
Part of the challenge is that we can't even agree on what to call things. The term 'gaita' could mean anything from a simple reed instrument (albogue) to a sophisticated double-reed bagpipe. 'Duff' covered both square frame drums (adufe) and round ones. When you're dealing with trilingual medieval environments (Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance languages all rubbing shoulders) and instruments evolving over centuries, single terms end up masking huge differences while different names obscure what's actually the same instrument.
Making Instruments From Pictures: Montagu's Practical Approach
The foundational work on medieval percussion reconstruction comes from Jeremy Montagu, who published a 1970 article in The Galpin Society Journal called 'On the Reconstruction of Mediaeval Instruments of Percussion.' The piece opens with a brutal truth: no original medieval percussion instruments survive to reproduce.
What follows is essentially a DIY manual for making tabors, nakers, tambourines, triangles, cymbals, and bells; all the instruments you'd need to actually perform early music. Montagu started reconstructing instruments for a simple reason: 'nobody makes old percussion instruments. If you want them, you make them.'
His descriptions are wonderfully practical: how to lap drum heads onto rope rings, make leather buffs for tension adjustment, fashion brass jingles for tambourines. But the article also reveals a troubling methodological problem. For playing techniques, Montagu admits they're 'wholly hypothetical' and basically advises: look at the pictures, hold the sticks the way they did, and hope the sound comes out right.
This faith in iconographic accuracy is pragmatic but problematic. Can we really trust medieval artists to accurately depict performance practice? Montagu himself would later grapple with this question.
His 2010 follow-up article on the tabor shows how far you can go with careful iconographic analysis combined with practical knowledge. He traces the tabor through European medieval art, documents construction details visible in church carvings, and examines the sole surviving sixteenth-century example from the wreck of the Mary Rose. He even notes fascinating regional variations, like how the Basque tradition holds and strikes the drum completely differently from the rest of Europe.
Today, Jota Martínez continues this tradition. His collection of reconstructed medieval instruments, described by musicologist Jordi Ballester as transforming 'mere theoretical hypotheses into sound objects,' uses the same combination of luthier expertise and performer intuition to fill gaps in the historical record. The practical imperative remains: ensembles need playable instruments, whether or not the evidence is complete.
Gauthreaux's 1989 dissertation on orchestral snare drum performance provides a cautionary counterpoint to this methodological optimism. His comprehensive survey of iconographic sources from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries reveals systematic problems with relying on visual evidence. Working through hundreds of manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures, Gauthreaux documented numerous inconsistencies: drums depicted with organologically impossible features, performers shown holding instruments in ways that would make them unplayable, and considerable variation in the size and construction details of instruments that were supposedly contemporaneous. More tellingly, he found that even when multiple images from the same period showed similar instruments, written sources often contradicted the visual evidence regarding actual performance practice. The tabor, for instance, appears in countless medieval images, yet determining whether it was struck on the top head (where snares often appear in early depictions) or the bottom head (as later became standard) requires reconciling conflicting visual and textual evidence that Gauthreaux ultimately found irreconcilable without making arbitrary methodological choices.
The Iberian Specialty: Molina's Frame Drums
The most comprehensive scholarly treatment of a single percussion instrument family comes from Mauricio Molina, whose Frame Drums in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula won the prestigious Bessaraboff Prize. Combining iconographic analysis with etymological detective work, Molina traces various frame drums from the tenth to the sixteenth century, documenting both their musical use and symbolic significance.
But there's a methodological catch. Modern reconstruction efforts often assume that current North African and Balkan folk traditions preserve medieval Iberian practices in essentially unchanged form. Martínez uses Moroccan techniques for the bendhir and bûq, Bulgarian models for whistles, Sardinian launeddas as templates for medieval triple-pipe instruments.
These comparisons solve practical problems: they give you something concrete to work with. But they risk circular reasoning. You're reconstructing medieval practice from modern traditions that were themselves shaped by centuries of complex historical change. The assumption that there's been unbroken transmission from medieval Iberia through North African exile communities to modern Morocco is plausible, but it's largely unexamined.
What the Sources Don't Tell Us
Here's the core problem: we have no notated percussion parts before 1588. Even then, Thoinot Arbeau's Orchésographie only provides basic rhythmic patterns.
This absence forces what Pablo Cantalapiedra (in his 2016 survey of Spanish early music practice) describes as percussionists 'exercising their musical intuition' in communion with 'the little that is known of ancient practices.' The result? Modern early music percussion is heavily influenced by Arab techniques, tar and bodhrán approaches, doum-tak articulations, dance rhythms like maksum and masmoudi.
The problem, as Cantalapiedra points out, is that these rhythms probably originated in the nineteenth century. They're part of the same Orientalist fascination that influenced early music interpretation through groups like Studio der Frühen Musik.
Modern percussionists train almost entirely in these techniques, even when performing European medieval music.
The Institutional Reality
The scholarship gap reflects institutional neglect. Spanish conservatories offer early music programs for recorder, viol, harpsichord, and plucked strings, but not percussion. The single exception is the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMuC), where students study with Pedro Estevan.
Training happens informally instead: summer courses, apprenticeships with ensemble directors, performance practice passed down through doing rather than documented in scholarly literature.
Can We Trust the Pictures?
This brings us back to the fundamental question: when we look at medieval images of percussion, what are we actually seeing?
Joachim Braun's 1980 study of Byzantine manuscripts reveals percussion evidence that challenges simple narratives about Eastern or Western origins. He documents what he calls a 'dionysian orchestra': cymbals, fiddles, barrel drums, and flutes appearing together in multiple eleventh-century manuscripts. But he also notes that Byzantine organology remains almost completely absent from standard music histories.
Sandra Pietrini's 2017 study throws another wrench in the works. Her examination of thirteenth-fourteenth century marginalia reveals images encoding multiple meanings simultaneously: rakes as vielle bows, tongs and bellows as percussion, kitchen implements as trumpets. These scenes might represent actual charivari performances, or mock entertainers' ignorance, or encode theological hierarchies between sacred and profane music, or satirise specific social classes, often all at once. The polysemy makes straightforward reconstruction impossible.
And it gets worse. Rosario Álvarez Martínez and Miguel Ángel Aguilar Rancel's 2002 analysis of Romanesque sculpture reveals that clergy controlled iconographic programs 'to the smallest details.' Sculptors worked from models in manuscripts and ancient artefacts, creating instruments that were often organologically impossible but theologically correct: square psalteries representing the Ten Commandments, triangular harps embodying the Trinity.
Their conclusion challenges reconstruction methodology directly: 'the real organological world surrounding sculptors did not have such a great influence on musical imagery as one may assume.' Instead, images were 'based on descriptions in the exegetic and allegorical texts.'
Consider the octagonal drums depicted in the Cantigas de Santa María. Are they showing real instruments? Or encoding religious symbolism, the number eight representing resurrection and renewal in Christian theology?
We often can't tell.
The problem extends beyond religious symbolism to practical questions about performance technique. Gauthreaux's analysis of sixteenth and seventeenth-century military manuscripts reveals a fundamental disconnect between what images show and what written sources describe. His examination of sources from Orchésographie through Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle (1636) and Pistofilo's Il Torneo (1627) found that while these texts provide detailed rhythmic notation and sticking patterns, their accompanying illustrations often contradict the technical requirements of the written music. In Pistofilo's treatise, for example, the drum depicted in the frontispiece shows a playing position and stick grip that would make executing the notated rhythms (with their specified right-hand and left-hand patterns) extremely difficult if not impossible. This suggests that illustrators were either working from conventional visual templates rather than observing actual performers, or that there was considerable variation in performance practice that the prescriptive written sources attempted to standardise.
The extensive military association of early percussion creates its own evidentiary problems. Gauthreaux's survey of military manuscripts from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries reveals that while drums were ubiquitous in military contexts, their documentation follows patterns that systematically obscure actual practice. His analysis of sources ranging from William Barriffe's Military Discipline (1639) to George Kastner's Manuel général de musique militaire (1848) shows that military manuals focused almost exclusively on signals rather than technique. They document what should be played (calls for assembly, retreat, charge, etc.) but rarely how it should be executed. Sticking patterns, grip, playing area, and other technical details are almost entirely absent.
This creates a methodological trap for reconstruction: military sources provide the most extensive corpus of notated percussion music before 1800, but they document a highly specialised, functional repertoire that may have little relationship to how the same instruments were used in other contexts. When Beethoven included snare drum in Egmont (1810), was he drawing on actual military practice, conventional representations of military practice, or using the military association purely symbolically? Gauthreaux's work suggests we often cannot determine which, because the military sources themselves are prescriptive rather than descriptive.
The Archaeological Disconnect
Here's perhaps the strangest thing: sometimes we have abundant physical evidence but almost no documentation. The ta'arija (a double-cone ceramic drum) appears in over fifty archaeological finds from the eighth to the fourteenth century Iberian excavations. Yet contemporary literary and visual sources barely mention it.
This inverse relationship suggests that iconographic and textual sources systematically underrepresent popular instruments. The drums we can literally hold in our hands are invisible in the historical record because they were too common, too low-status to warrant attention.
The Uncomfortable Position
Percussion occupies uniquely uncomfortable territory: too practical for pure musicology, too historical for modern percussion studies, too specialised for general organology. It falls through the disciplinary cracks.
Yet serious scholarship is clearly possible. Montagu's combination of iconographic analysis, practical reconstruction, and technical expertise shows one viable path. Molina's interdisciplinary approach combining visual evidence, etymology, and cultural context shows another.
What's needed isn't different methodology. It's simply more scholars willing to do the painstaking work.
Until then, as Cantalapiedra notes, 'there is still much work to be done to bring percussion to the level of other early instruments, especially in terms of historical rigor.'
The drummers remain invisible, their literature unwritten, their practices reconstructed more from intuition than evidence. For a field that should be thriving (given the ubiquity of percussion in medieval imagery and the clear importance of these instruments in actual musical practice) it's a depressing state of affairs.
But perhaps this very absence represents an opportunity: one that requires acknowledging the limitations Gauthreaux identified rather than repeating Montagu's optimistic leap from images to sound. Gauthreaux's conclusion, after exhaustively surveying both iconographic and written sources, is worth quoting: 'The movement of the snare drum into the orchestra was accomplished primarily from military associations. This fact, along with significant organological information, is well documented in the abundant iconographical evidence from as early as the sixteenth century.'
Yet even after pages of meticulous documentation, he can only establish that the instrument moved from military to orchestral contexts, not how it was actually played in either. The iconographic evidence documents the instrument's presence and approximate construction; it cannot reliably document performance practice.
The field remains wide open, but the path forward requires different methodology. Rather than mining visual sources for performance details they may not reliably contain, we might focus on what Gauthreaux calls 'the institutional reality', tracing how training systems, professional networks, and economic structures shaped what players could do and what composers could expect. We might take seriously the archaeological evidence that shows popular instruments systematically excluded from visual and textual sources. We might examine the nineteenth-century transition more carefully, where we actually have overlapping evidence from multiple source types.
These musical monstrosities lurked in the great cosmic antechamber: the waiting room between a pagan past and the Christian future still shifting its sacks and sorting its saints.
They embodied everything medieval society claimed to fear: wildness, mutability, things with too many limbs... and everything it secretly adored.
Because deep down, everyone enjoys a dragon with a trumpet.
Some insomniac Baroque courtier grafted sympathetic strings onto a viol, carved a leering Cupid on the scroll, and called it the viola of love.
What followed? This baby went rogue.
It spawned a whole dynasty of sound, a dozen offspring from Istanbul to Oslo. It survived its own extinction and utterly confounded (almost) every scholar who tried to pin down where it came from.
