Early Percussion Instruments

Trumpeters, With brazen din blast you the city's ear; Make mingle with rattling tabourines; That heaven and earth may strike their sounds together, Applauding our approach.

Antony and Cleopatra

Naker

One of the earliest percussion instruments to muscle its way into the symphonic club, it was already making itself indispensable by the sixteenth century, when it became the soundtrack of choice for warfare, pomp, and other activities involving a bunch of guys in uniform who liked a good racket. Usually deployed in pairs, it is habitually glued to the trumpet, the two forming an inseparable double act for signalling, marching, and ceremonial showing-off.

This long-standing association was sufficiently obvious even to Shakespeare, who notes it in Hamlet (1600):

The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels,
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

Visual appearances of the kettle drum duly turn up in the era's serious art. Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) jammed it into his Dance of Death series (1523–1525), notably in Bones of All Men. Nor was Holbein alone in this percussive enthusiasm: Vincenzo Valgrisi (1490–1573) threw down a kettle drum in his own Dance of Death, The Ossuary.

Persian illustrations from the Shahnama (c.1525–30), such as Zal Slays Khazarvan, portray drums mounted on horses and camels alongside trumpets.

Christian iconography also gives the kettle drum its moment in the spotlight. In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, attributed to Pieter Huys, the instrument turns up amid the usual infernal commotion, lending rhythmic authority to the forces of temptation. Earlier ancestors of the modern kettle drum, the so-called nakers, were already doing respectable ecclesiastical service centuries before, turning up in fourteenth-century stained glass at Rouen Cathedral in Normandy. These proto-timpani enjoy a lively afterlife in illuminated manuscripts, where they are enthusiastically brandished by angels, minstrels, and the occasional agent of chaos:

Paris, BnF, NAL 3145, f. 53r.

Chambéry, BM, 004. f. 367v.

With snare. Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. fr. 65, f. 26r.

A particularly eccentric outing for the nakers appears in Paris, BnF, Français 184, f. 5. Here the nakers sit among a mixed instrumental gathering that includes strings, winds, a triangle, and a tambour à cordes. It is a rare moment in which the naker is not accompanying death, damnation, or divine judgment.

The kettle drum did not, of course, spring fully formed from the orchestral pit. Its lineage can be traced back to the naker, itself a European makeover of the Middle Eastern naqqāra, imported courtesy of returning crusaders who evidently brought back more than just dubious souvenirs. These early drums were worn about the person (strapped to waist or shoulders) or else dumped on the ground and struck with enthusiasm. Construction was reassuringly practical: bowls of copper, wood, or baked earth, topped with skins from whichever unfortunate calf, goat, or donkey happened to be available at the time.

A particularly telling halfway house appears in the fourteenth-century manuscript MS Bodl. 264, f. 113r. Here, nakers share the stage with a larger drum and a timbrel perched atop castle battlements. With the introduction of greater size and the early hint of snares, bridging the gap between the naker and the fully fledged timpani.

Tambour 

The tambour was everywhere. A drum of such flexible identity that even it seemed unsure what it was meant to be. In theory, it was an elongated, double-headed cylinder with a single snare stretched obligingly across the batter head, except, of course, when it wasn’t. In practice there was no settled design, no official specification. The most familiar version was double-headed, tightened with cords, and beaten with a single stick, but medieval drum-makers were not in the habit of consulting diagrams. They built whatever survived the job, sounded convincing, and could cut through the clamour of a street fair or the general panic of a battlefield.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, f. 124v.

This was the drum of the people, the drum of soldiers, the drum that showed up in literature again and again alongside pipes and other instruments. Listen to how the poets heard it:

With esy pace and wele avysed, / Taberis and pypes yeden hem by / And alle maner of mynstrelsy 

Sir Orfeo, c. 1400

They haueth in greet mangerie / Harpe, tabor, and pype for mynstralcie

Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon, 1387

And earlier still, Adam de la Halle in the late thirteenth century, cataloguing the full sonic chaos of medieval celebration:

Cil sert de harp, cil de rote / Cil de gigue, cil de viele / Cil de flaiiste, cil chalemele / Sonent timbre, sonent tabor

See The Sound of One Hand Piping Druming

Frame Drums

Start with a word: al-duff. As early as the sixth century, this Arabic term meant frame drum. Didn't matter if it was big or small, round or square, had jingles or didn't, covered on one side or both. Al-duff covered the lot. It's the alpha and omega of frame drums across the Mediterranean, the linguistic thread connecting peoples, music, and culture from the Sahara to Iberia.

The variations tell the story of movement. Daff, deff, doff, duff: the same word, gently battered by geography into local accents. These are the drums of nomadic tribes crossing the Sahara. The bendhir takes it further, featuring gut strings pressed against the drumhead that vibrate when struck.

Bendhir, known variously as bandir, pandair, pandero, meze, timpanum. Each one a clue to the origins of the tambourine and the adufe. The term 'pan' likely comes from Sumerian, meaning 'skin'. Go back further still: Sumerian terms like alal, balag, and adapa date from 4000 to 5000 BCE and connect to this same family of instruments. Meze and mizhar have been around for roughly 4000 years, appearing in ancient texts describing tambourines used in ceremonial and ritual contexts.

The linguistic web spreads wider: dayareh, dayira, daire, dareh, dahare, tur (Polish), atari (Swahili), tar (Persian). Each term marks a place where the frame drum took root, and adapted.

Back in the eighth century, Persian musicians rolled into the Iberian Peninsula riding the waves of Abbasids and Umayyad influence, setting up shop in hotspots like Córdoba and Seville. They brought their sounds, styles, and terminology with them, much of which stuck and still echoes in North African music today. 

By the thirteenth century, the adufe was firmly planted in Iberian culture. Martín de Ginzo, rollin' with Alfonso X's court, references it in the Cantiga de Amigo.

The adufe as we know it today in the Iberian Peninsula has clear cousins across the strait in North Africa: the deff, the doff. Flip it into Arabic, slap on that definite article 'al' to 'duf,' and you get al-duff, the frame drum, the particular one within Arabic musical tradition.

Square frame drums produce a sound completely different from their round cousins. Less defined pitch, quicker decay. The attack is sharper, the resonance shorter.

The history stretches back to the tomb of Rekhmire in Egypt, dated to 1500 BCE, which shows square frame drums in use. North Africa, then. That's the starting point. Fast forward to the eighth century and the Moorish invasion brings these instruments, along with countless other cultural treasures, to the Iberian Peninsula. The Moors came from Mauretania in northwest Africa, and they brought their music with them.

Portugal gained independence in 1143, shaking off Arab rule, and established itself as a kingdom. The square frame drum stayed.

The iconographic evidence is overwhelming: this instrument was far more widespread and culturally significant during the medieval period than it is now. The early twelfth-century Tavira Vase gives us one of the earliest surviving representations in Iberia.

By the mid-thirteenth century, European iconography is full of them. You see square frame drums at Barruelo de los Carabeos, Igreja de Santa Maria de Yermos, in the Maciejowski Bible (Paris, MS M.638, fol. 39r), in four windows in Troyes, Grand Est, France. These are the earliest European depictions we have.

Around 1300 manuscript W.102 (78v) shows something crucial: the square frame drum being played with a beater.

Whether jingles, bells, or snares were placed inside remains uncertain, but we know the sonic possibilities expanded over time. The double-headed construction, with two skins closing the structure, doesn't appear clearly depicted until the thirteenth century in the Pierpont Morgan Library Old Testament.

Paris, BnF, Français 60 f.141

Construction was local and practical: pine for the wooden frame, goat, sheep, or lamb skins for the drumheads. Materials at hand, craftsmanship passed down through generations.

In Portugal, the adufe sometimes features bordões, snares placed inside the instrument that add a buzzing, rattling texture to the sound. It's the same principle as the bendhir's gut strings.

Nowadays, the adufe shines brightest in Portugal’s Beira Baixa, particularly in religious festivals. Women make 'em, deck 'em out, and play 'em. This association isn't incidental or modern. The Biblia de Pamplona from 1197 shows women rockin' the square frame drum in festivals and community gatherings.

Similar instruments appear across the region with different names: the pandeiro mirandês in Northeast Portugal, the pandeiro quadrado in Spain and Galicia. The term 'pandeiro' (masculine in Spanish/Galician) derives from the Persian-Arabic bendayer (or ben-dair).

In Peñaparda, Salamanca, the square frame drum sits at the heart of traditional music and local jams. The instrument is held perpendicular to the body, supported on the knee, struck with a mace or club in the right hand. Meanwhile, the left hand strikes the drum with the palm in a distinctive rhythmic pattern. Slide over to Morocco and this same technique is found.

Traditionally, the square frame drum was women's turf, bashing out accompaniment while getting on with the singing. A few centuries later and along comes folk revivalism, with figures like Eliseo Parra rescuing the thing from the ethnographic footnotes and plonking it back into Spanish folk ensembles. In places like Astorga, León, Asturias, and Ourense in Galicia, it’s still very much tagged as a women's instrument, though men now have a go as well.

The instrument even managed to blag an all-expenses-paid trip to Brazil, popping up in Folias do Espírito Santo, Pastorais, and Ranchos dos Reis, especially around São Paulo. Brazilians tend to pin its ancestry on Africa, with the Portuguese doing the transporting. Colonialism and slavery provided the travel arrangements, ferrying the drum across the Atlantic, where it promptly settled in and got busy reinventing itself in new surroundings.

After the fifteenth century, square frame drums more or less vanish from view, slipping quietly out of the iconographic record. Then along comes Praetorius in 1619, wheeling it back onstage under the splendidly exotic label Mostowitesihe Trumreln oder Paucken.