The Hammered Dulcimer: History and Development

Benji Rose

A stained glass window of an angel playing the dulcimer. Picardy, c.1460.

On the Remarkable Tenacity of an Unfashionable Instrument

A musical instrument that has trundled through the Crusades, tiptoed around the Ottomans, nodded politely to the Renaissance and somehow survived the Industrial Revolution without so much as a proper redesign is either a small miracle of craftsmanship or proof that nobody bothered to think up anything better. The hammered dulcimer cheerfully occupies this peculiar spot in history, and I am mostly convinced it deserves applause, although a tiny voice in the back of my mind insists on keeping an eyebrow raised.

This is a chordophone of the zither family, for those who insist on taxonomic precision. It turns up across a stretch of geography so wide that even the most energetic map could pull a muscle trying to cover it. There is the Persian santur and the Hungarian cimbalom, the German Hackbrett and the Chinese yangqin.

What distinguishes this from the piano, its better-dressed descendant, is simple: on the dulcimer, you hold the hammers yourself. The piano, that monument to mechanical ingenuity and bourgeois aspiration, automates the process with keys and felt-covered hammers, one for each note. The dulcimer gives you two hammers and leaves you to your own devices.

Origins and Early Development

Psaltery and Psalterion

Before the hammered dulcimer achieved its modest prominence, there existed the psaltery, its plucked predecessor. We possess no actual specimens from the medieval period, a fact that should surprise no one familiar with the entropic tendencies of history. What remains are iconographic sources and textual references, both notoriously unreliable.

The instrument likely entered Europe via Moorish Spain, that great conduit of Arabic civilisation into a continent still recovering from its own Dark Ages. The Arabic qanun, a sophisticated instrument of considerable complexity, appears to have been the inspiration, though whether through direct transmission or cultural osmosis remains subject to the usual scholarly disputes.

Chaucer references the psaltery in the Canterbury Tales:

Whan Nicholas had done this everideel,
And thakked hire aboute the lendes weel,
He kiste hire sweete and taketh his sawtrie,
And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie.

The Middle English term sawtrie could also be spelled sautrie:

And al above ther lay a gay sautrie,
On which he made a-nyghtes melodie
So swetely that all the chambre rong;
And Angelus ad virginem he song;
And after that he song the Kynges Noote.

The instrument appears in manuscripts in various shapes: triangular, trapezoidal, wing-shaped, as though medieval craftsmen were conducting their own experiments in geometry.

The psaltery's demise came with the increasing chromaticism of Renaissance music. As a diatonic instrument, it simply could not accommodate the expanded harmonic vocabulary of the age. It died out, as most things do, through obsolescence rather than catastrophe. One might draw parallels to various political systems and religious dogmas, but I shall resist the temptation.

The psaltery was rather similar to the harp, although the harp would have strings in front of the sound-board while the psaltery had strings stretched horizontally over the sound-board.

However, despite being reasonably simple in appearance, the psaltery is neither simple to build, neither is it a loud instrument, and this suggests it was probably not an instrument of the peasant or shepherd. This is also represented in Chaucer's description of it as gay which from Middle English might be translated as gallant, ornate, bright or elegant.

Etymology and Nomenclature

The name psaltery probably comes from the Old English psealm or salm and the Old French psaume or saume, which is derived from the Latin psalmus, itself from the Greek psalmos (a song sung with a harp), and psallein (to pluck on a string instrument).

"Dulcimer" comes from the Latin dulce melos: sweet melody. One notes the persistence of this root across European languages: doucemelle in French, doulcemela in Italian, dulcema in Spanish. The linguistic unity suggests a shared cultural experience of the instrument's tonal qualities, though whether this experience was genuinely universal or merely conventional is impossible to determine at this distance.

The Arabic qanun (from which we derive "canon") persists to this day in Middle Eastern music, having evolved into an instrument of considerable technical sophistication: 78 strings, 26 courses, levers for whole, semi, and quarter-tone adjustments. It is what the psaltery might have become had European music not abandoned it for other pursuits.

Historical Documentation and Iconography

We can find examples of the psaltery in iconography: for example in the Romanesque Revelation of John on the exterior of Chartres, Centre-Val de Loire, France, as well as a second sculpture on the exterior of the same cathedral dated from the same period.

One of the earlier depictions of the psaltery dates from the 11th century: Le Mans, BM, 0197, f. 001-002 bis v (f. 002 bis v) from the Book of Psalms. This instrument is rectangular and held upright on the knee as one would expect from a harp. It is seen played together with a rebec and a horn.

Medieval art usually depicts the psaltery held upright, although there are some exceptions such as the Sforza Hours (BL Add. MS 34294) where the instrument is laid flat. There are four different designs of the psaltery depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria.

The Hammered Dulcimer: Design and Construction

The Western European hammered dulcimer typically presents as a trapezoidal box with two rows of bridges and courses of four strings per note. One plays it laid flat, either on a table, across one's lap, or upon a stand. The horizontal orientation dampens the sound somewhat, though propping the instrument at an angle increases resonance. This is physics, not mysticism, though some players seem unclear on the distinction.

The use of hammers rather than plucking fingers necessitates greater spacing between strings. Strike a dulcimer with insufficient clearance and you will produce not music but cacophony, hitting adjacent strings with the enthusiasm of a drunk assaulting a xylophone.

Western hammers measure roughly 20 centimetres, weighted at the striking end, with carved grips designed to facilitate the bouncing technique characteristic of European playing styles. This percussive approach contrasts sharply with Middle Eastern technique, which employs the mezràb: a lighter implement with felt at the striking end and weight concentrated at the grip. The mezràb does not bounce. It strikes and withdraws, a different philosophy embodied in a different tool.

Playing Technique and Construction Features

The use of the hammers requires the dulcimer to be bigger than the psaltery - allowing more space between the strings, without which striking neighbouring strings by mistake is unavoidable. The rise of the dulcimer also saw closely adjacent parallel strings tuned to the same pitch being placed together in courses of two, three or even four as is usual for modern instruments. These courses however did not originate with the dulcimer, the psaltery acquired courses at around the same time as the hammered dulcimer first appeared.

Bridges for the dulcimer's strings were quite high, to prevent them from hitting the sounding board and stopping their sound. Some dulcimers had a separate bridge for each string, while others used alternating bridges on both ends, holding every other string up on one end and the alternate strings on the other end.

The hammers/mallets of Western Europe today would generally be around 20cm long, and reasonably thick and weighted at the head, with a carved grip on the handle which allows the player to bounce the hammer on the string.

Regional Variations

The Germanic Tradition

Sebastian Virdung illustrated the Hackbrett in 1511. Martin Agricola did the same in 1532. The instruments are nearly identical. Michael Praetorius included the instrument in his Syntagma Musicum of 1619, perpetuating what had become a standard form: two bridges, decorated sound holes, the whole apparatus instantly recognisable across Germanic territories.

Marin Mersenne's 1636 Harmonie Universelle presents a different vision: simpler, more austere, with single courses and a mere two octaves. 

Eastern Europe and the Țambal

In Romania and Moldova, the instrument became the țambal, achieving the status of a fundamental folk instrument alongside the accordion, which would eventually supplant earlier forms through the influence of Roma musical traditions during the Ottoman period. The history of musical instruments is, among other things, a history of displacement and replacement, of technologies superseding one another with the remorselessness of natural selection.

József Schunda's 1874 invention of the concert cimbalom represents one of the few significant modifications to the dulcimer's basic design in its entire history. Schunda added chromatic notes, pedal-operated dampers, and expanded the dynamic range. The result was an instrument suitable for the concert hall, a transformation from folk implement to orchestral voice. Whether this constituted an improvement or a corruption is, naturally, a matter of considerable dispute among those with strong opinions and insufficient other concerns.

The Persian Santur

The santur claims antiquity, as do most instruments from that region, with the usual conflicting accounts. Some trace it to Assyrian inscriptions from 669 BC. Others credit the polymath Farabi, who flourished in the 9th and 10th centuries. Still others place it in the Sassanid era, that final flowering of pre-Islamic Persia. The likelihood is that these ancient instruments were harps, and that the santur as we know it developed considerably later, but such inconvenient probabilities rarely deter those determined to claim ancient lineage.

What distinguishes the santur technically is its movable bridges, allowing continuous pitch adjustment, and its division of strings into "yellow" notes of brass for the lower register and "white" notes of steel for the upper ranges. The tuning system differs from Western models: the treble bridge produces an octave rather than a fifth, and the intervallic relationships follow patterns distinct from European diatonic progressions.

The santur's influence extended throughout the Middle East and into Europe, particularly the Balkans, where the cimbalom became central to folk traditions. This is cultural transmission operating as it always does: through trade, conquest, migration, and the stubborn persistence of musicians who refuse to abandon instruments that serve their purposes.

The Asian Trajectory

The Chinese Yangqin

Paul Gifford's research suggests British merchants introduced the hammered dulcimer to southern China circa 1700, a hypothesis supported by the yangqin's use of connected bridges rather than the separate bridges characteristic of the Persian santur. This contradicts earlier theories crediting Persian influence during the Ming Dynasty, but the structural evidence favours European transmission.

The earliest yangqin featured two bridges with seven double or triple courses each. The design evolved, acquiring additional courses and undergoing more dramatic modifications following the 1949 Communist Revolution, when the new government established music conservatories and encouraged experimentation. One notes with some irony that a totalitarian regime proved more willing to innovate with traditional instruments than had centuries of imperial rule.

The Cambodian Khimm

The khimm entered Cambodia via Chinese residents, possibly as recently as the 1930s, brought initially for theatrical accompaniment and subsequently adapted to Khmer secular music. Similar instruments appeared throughout Mainland Southeast Asia: the don-min in Burma, the khim in Laos and Thailand, the du'o'ng cam in Vietnam. This represents yet another instance of cultural diffusion, the inexorable spread of technologies and practices across porous borders and resistant populations.

Concluding Observations

The hammered dulcimer endures not through revolution but through obstinate continuity. It has absorbed local variations without surrendering its essential character, adapted to different musical systems without fundamental transformation, and survived the rise and fall of empires, religions, and musical fashions with the indifference of stone.

The instrument serves purposes its makers and players have deemed sufficient, and has done so across an improbable span of time and geography. In an age obsessed with innovation and improvement, there is something almost subversive in such steadfast resistance to change.

The relationship between the psaltery and the hammered dulcimer illustrates a pattern familiar from evolutionary biology: a successful design proliferates, undergoes local adaptation, and either persists or perishes based on its fitness for purpose. The psaltery failed to adapt to chromaticism and died. The hammered dulcimer required no such adaptation, having never aspired to the concert hall until Schunda's intervention, and therefore survived in its folk habitat.

One might conclude that obscurity and modest ambition constitute survival strategies of considerable efficacy. The hammered dulcimer never challenged the violin for orchestral supremacy, never competed with the piano for bourgeois living rooms, never sought the spotlight of virtuoso performance. It remained what it was: a folk instrument, played by people who needed it for purposes of their own, and precisely because it sought nothing more, it has lasted longer than instruments of far greater pretension.

Bibliography

Agricola, Martin. 1532. Musica instrumentalis deudsch. Wittenberg.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Middle English text.

Dusty Strings Harp and Hammered Dulcimer Makers. "Hammered Dulcimer Models, D10." Accessed October 29, 2014. http://manufacturing.dustystrings.com/hammered-dulcimers/models/d10/

Gifford, Paul M. 2001. The Hammered Dulcimer, A History. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Kettlewell, David. 1984. "Dulcimer." The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments v.1: 620-632.

Mersenne, Marin. 1636. Harmonie Universelle. Paris.

Praetorius, Michael. 1619. Syntagma Musicum. Wolfenbüttel.

Rose, Benji. 2020. "The Hammered Dulcimer."

Virdung, Sebastian. 1511. Musica getutscht. Basel.

Manuscript Sources

Le Mans, BM, 0197, f. 001-002 bis v (f. 002 bis v). Book of Psalms. 11th century.

Nice, BM, 001 (R. 03) f.140v. 13th century manuscript.

Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, 0017. Mid-13th century manuscript.

Marseille, Bibl. mun., ms. 0014, f. 002. 13th century manuscript.

Troyes, BM, 0144 (tome III) f.311. 14th century manuscript.

Sforza Hours (BL Add. MS 34294). British Library.

Cantigas de Santa Maria. 13th century manuscript collection.