percussion instrument

a musical instrument, as the drum, cymbal, triangle, xylophone, or piano, that is struck to produce a sound, as distinguished from string or wind instruments.

[1870-75]

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A musical instrument that is struck (or sometimes shaken or scraped) to produce sound.

This category includes instruments whose own hard substance is made to vibrate (idiophones) and instruments that include a tight membrane that vibrates (membranophones). Percussion instruments may produce tones of definite or indefinite pitch. Their primary function is often rhythmic, but many are used as melody instruments. They include the bell, carillon, cymbal, drum, dulcimer, gamelan, glockenspiel, marimba, piano, steel drum, tabla, tambourine, timpani, vibraphone, and xylophone.

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▪ musical instrument

Introduction

      any musical instrument belonging to either of two groups, idiophones or membranophones. Idiophones (idiophone) are instruments whose own substance vibrates to produce sound (as opposed to the strings of a guitar or the air column of a flute); examples include bells, clappers, and rattles. Membranophones (membranophone) emit sound by the vibration of a stretched membrane; the prime examples are drums (drum). The term percussion instrument refers to the fact that most idiophones and membranophones are sounded by being struck, although other playing methods include rubbing, shaking, plucking, and scraping.

 Although many idiophones and some membranophones are tunable and hence may be melody instruments, both groups serve typically to delineate or emphasize rhythm. Percussion instruments form the third section of the modern Western orchestra, stringed (stringed instrument) and wind (wind instrument) instruments making up the other two sections. The term percussion instrument dates to 1619, when the German music theorist and composer Michael Praetorius (Praetorius, Michael) wrote of percussa, klopfende Instrument (German klopfen, “to beat”), as any struck instrument, including struck chordophones (chordophone) (stringed instruments). The same combination, including prebow chordophones, constituted the divisio rhythmica in the 7th-century Etymologiae of Isidore (Isidore of Sevilla, Saint), archbishop of Sevilla (Seville).

Classification

Idiophones (idiophone)

      Idiophones form a diverse and disparate group. Concussion instruments, consisting of two similar components struck together, include clappers, concussion stones, castanets, and cymbals (cymbal). Percussion idiophones, instruments struck by a nonsonorous striker, form a large subgroup, including triangles and simple percussion sticks; percussion beams, such as the semanterion; percussion disks and plaques, single and in sets; xylophones, lithophones (sonorous stones), and metallophones (sets of tuned metal bars); percussion tubes, such as stamping tubes, slit drums, and tubular chimes; and percussion vessels varying from struck gourds and pots to gongs, kettle gongs, steel drums, bells, and musical cups.

 Shaken idiophones, or rattles, include vessels filled with rattling material, such as gourd, basketry, and hollow-ring rattles, as well as pellet bells; strung rattles, such as dancers' leg rattles or anklets; stick rattles, including the sistrum, originally a forked stick with crossbars on which rattling shells, etc., have been strung; pendant rattles with suspended rattling objects; and sliding rattles.

      Other categories include scraped idiophones, comprising scrapers and cog rattles; split idiophones made of split hollow cane, including the Southeast Asian “tuning fork” idiophones and the chopstick; plucked idiophones, such as the Jew's harp, mbira, and music box; friction idiophones, including friction sticks, simple or combined, and musical glasses; and blown idiophones, such as the 19th-century Äolsklavier and piano chanteur.

Membranophones (membranophone)

      Musical instruments in which the sound-producing medium is a vibrating membrane fall into four main groups: kettledrums and bowl-shaped drums; tubular drums—whether cylindrical, barrel, conical, double conical, hourglass, goblet, or shallow—and rattle drums, the membranes of which are set in motion by enclosed pellets or by knotted ends of a thong or cord; friction drums, with membranes caused to vibrate by friction; and mirlitons (mirliton), whose membranes are set in motion by the sound of an instrument or the human voice. Strictly speaking, mirlitons are voice modifiers rather than true musical instruments inasmuch as they have no pitch of their own.

 Kettledrums (kettledrum) and tubular drums occur in both tunable and nontunable forms; friction drums (friction drum) and mirlitons are not tunable. The membranes of the first two groups are either glued, nailed, lapped, or laced to the body, or shell; if they are glued or nailed, the pitch can be modified by exposure to heat. Lapped and laced heads are readily tunable by tightening the lacings or screws, and wooden wedges may be inserted between the shell and lacings to further increase the membrane's tension and thus raise the pitch. The membranes of such instruments and of friction drums are set in vibration by percussion, while those of mirlitons vibrate by impact of sound waves. In all groups the shell plays a subordinate acoustical part, acting as resonator only—the greater the diameter of a head, the deeper its sound; and the greater its tension, the higher the pitch. In Western culture the only drums tuned to a definite pitch are kettledrums (the orchestral timpani).

      Kettledrums and tubular drums may be struck with the hands, with beaters, or with both combined or with the knotted ends of a thong or cord. Beaters can be cylindrical, club-shaped, straight, curved, or angled, with or without knobs or padding, or may take the form of a switch or wire brush. Friction drums are sounded by rubbing the membrane with a piece of hide or by the more usual method of working an inserted friction stick or cord up and down or by rubbing the membrane with a player's wet fingers. Acoustically (acoustics), they are subject to the same laws as other membranophones, but the speed of friction is an influencing factor. They occur in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia (India and Japan), and Hawaii. Mirlitons are sounded by directing against the membrane the vibrating air column of a voice, be it human (as in a kazoo) or instrumental (as when affixed, for example, to African xylophone resonators), or by holding the membrane against the player's vibrating vocal cords.

      In addition to the four major categories of membranophones, a small group composed of ground drums and pot drums can also be distinguished. Ground drums, consisting in their simplest form of an animal skin stretched over the opening of a pit, are found in many parts of the world. The skin may also be held taut by several players, each beating it with a stick. These and similar ground drums are played by women in Africa and Australia, and in North America usually by men. By their very nature ground drums are nonportable; a similar type of instrument was made by stretching a skin over the opening of a gourd, clay pot, or other object. Among the Swazi of southern Africa such skins are not attached but held taut. Pot drums are found in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—in Africa and the Americas often in connection with exorcism.

Percussion instruments in Europe

Antiquity

      Europe received most of its percussion instruments either directly or indirectly from the sophisticated cultures of the ancient Middle East or from Egypt, a country regarded by the Greeks and Romans (ancient Rome) as forming part of Asia rather than Africa (a practice that will be followed in this article for convenience).

Idiophones

 European antiquity knew many idiophones. Dancers (dance)' clappers (clapper), held pairwise in the hands of maenads (female participants in Dionysian rites) and other female dancers, often stressed the rhythm of accompanying auloi (aulos) (the ancient Greek reed pipes). The time-beating foot clappers of chorus leaders, attached to the right foot like a sandal, were known in Greece as kroupezai, or kroupala, and were adopted by Rome as the scabella. Other idiophones included bells, cymbals, the unidentified ēcheion, and an instrument simply called “the bronze” (chalkos), probably a metal percussion disk. When the Egyptian cult of Isis spread to Greece and Rome, her sistrum followed, always in the hands of a priest or—rarely—priestess.

      With the exception of clappers, all these instruments were of bronze (bronze work); as such they were credited with the apotropaic powers (the special protective powers against evil) accorded this metal in the East. For example, both in various Asian islands and in Greece, it was customary to “sound the chalkos at eclipses of the Moon because it has power to purify and to drive off pollutions” (a scholiast, writing on Theocritus). According to the Roman poet Ovid, the annual visit of ghosts of the dead to their former homes was terminated by requests to depart emphasized by the clanging of a bronze plate. The thin bronze percussion disks were affixed to metal handles; one from Pompeii is even garnished with pellet bells (bell). Small bronze bells, which made a clanging rather than ringing sound, warded off evil spirits, averted the evil eye, served as sentinels' and watchmen's signal instruments, or were attached to the handle of a Greek warrior's shield in order to terrify the enemy by their clamour. Small bells were also frequently worn on anklets by jesters, dancers, and courtesans, particularly in Hellenistic times. In Rome, tintinnabulae (“bells”) served as signal instruments or were suspended from the necks of herd animals—again to ward off evil.

      Deeply cupped cymbals, played together with a frame drum, were sounded in religious rites and at secular dances. Forked cymbals known as crotala (crotal) traveled from Egypt to Greece and Rome, and finger cymbals were introduced from the East, chiefly for dancers, a pair being attached to the thumb and middle finger of each hand.

      Among the oldest instruments, rattles (rattle) originally combined the functions of prophylactic amulets and children's toys, and both functions continued to coexist as late as Roman times.

Membranophones

      Only a few kinds of drums, none indigenous, were known to antiquity. The frame drum came from Mesopotamia at an early date. The barrel drum was possibly known in Hellenistic times, for it appears in the Greco-Indian culture of Kushan. A shallow drum is depicted on a Greco-Scythian metal gorytus, or bow-and-arrow case, of the 4th century BC, but there is no evidence of its having been known to Greece. Frame drums were known in ancient Egypt, where they occurred in circular, square, and rectangular shapes; traditionally women's instruments in the Middle East, they remained in the hands of female players and dancers in Greece, and the Eastern playing technique was maintained: held upright on edge in the palm of one hand, the drum was tapped with the fingers of the other. Probably introduced into Greece in the 6th century BC with the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods, Cybele (Great Mother of the Gods), the frame drum is depicted as being played by maenads and was also a cult instrument in rites of the Orphic religion. From Greece the frame drum passed into Rome, where it was also associated with Cybele. Romans also had double-headed drums and spread them as far north as the Isle of Wight, in Britain, where one is represented on a mosaic pavement as a dancing girl's instrument. In the late days of the Roman Empire, frame drums became instruments of street musicians and joculatores (professional entertainers); the latter may have been responsible for spreading them beyond the Italian Peninsula.

The Middle Ages (Middle Ages)

Idiophones

      Greek and Roman idiophones were passed on to post-Classical Europe, their distribution undoubtedly aided by joculatores and civic or court musicians (minstrels (minstrel)). Whereas prior to the adoption of Christianity most were ritual instruments, their function in medieval times—with the notable exception of the bell—was strictly secular.

      Clappers (tabulae), flat pieces of bone or wood, were used to flush out birds for hunting and to provide rhythm for popular dancing. Lepers also sounded them to warn others of their approach.

      Dancers' castanets, hollow clappers in bivalve form, were played in Spain throughout the Middle Ages; they are illustrated from the 11th century on. Already in Roman times, dancers of Cádiz are known to have played metal castanets, but those of sonorous hardwoods have been preferred since. They are mentioned in the Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X (the Wise). Cymbals remained virtually unchanged throughout the medieval period, resembling closely those used by the Greeks and the Romans. Probably cast rather than spun, they were held horizontally, one above the other. Small cup-shaped cymbals called acetabulae, made of brass or silver, are mentioned by Cassiodorus (d. c. 580) and Isidore of Sevilla. Although the modern practice of striking a single cymbal with a stick was anticipated by Isidore and by the Suda lexicon (late 10th century), larger cymbals continued to be played pairwise and—at least in the later Middle Ages—were found among the “loud” instruments that accompanied dancing and were played at seigneurial festivities.

      Bells were still thought to possess the power to avert evil; with their adoption, the Christian church took over the belief that ghosts (supernaturalism) and demons could be put to flight by the sound of metal, a power henceforth augmented by the protection afforded by association with the divine cult and, more specifically, by Baptism. The rite of baptizing bells is first recorded in a capitulary (civil ordinance) of Charlemagne of 789. Exorcizing (exorcism) celebrants sounded handbells or wore bells on their garments. St. John Chrysostom (Chrysostom, Saint John) (d. 407) felt compelled to protest the custom of attaching bells to the clothing or bracelets of children in order to preserve them against demons, yet small bells or pellet bells continued to adorn the vestments of priests (priest), a practice inherited from the ancient Middle East (51 bells ornamented the cope of Lanfranc, an 11th-century archbishop of Canterbury). The tolling of passing bells was intended to ward off evil spirits from dying persons. Church bells announced the time of day, summoned the faithful to worship, sounded alarms, fought off lightning, broadcast the news of peace or the birth of a princeling, and praised God. In secular life handbells (handbell) were played in mixed instrumental ensembles, usually one bell in each of the player's hands.

      Tuned bells strung together to form chimes (chime) were the most highly regarded percussion instruments of the Middle Ages. They appear frequently in manuscript illuminations from the 10th century onward, particularly associated with representations of King David, the second of the Israelite kings. Chimes are generally shown in groups of from four to nine as clapperless hemispheric bells struck on the outside by a hammer. According to the monk Theophilus (12th century), their pitch was determined by the thickness of the casting rather than the size. From the 13th century, thanks to the wholesale adoption of Islamic techniques for making astronomical hardware and automata, linkwork, and gearing, chimes were connected to clockwork and struck mechanically. As bells grew larger and the compass of the chime was extended, it became known as a carillon. The distinction today is merely one of compass, any set exceeding 1¹/₂ or 2 octaves in compass being considered a carillon.

      In secular life, pellet bells were suspended from ladies' belts or worn by jesters. During the 15th century in particular, dancers of the popular moriscas, or Morris dances (Morris dance), attached small bells to their hose.

      Before the introduction of bells in the Greek Orthodox Church in the 11th century, the semanterion, a percussion beam sounded by a striker, summoned the congregation, and in the Roman Catholic Church it has been used as a substitute for bells during Holy Week. Triangles first appear in the 14th century; originally a number of loose rattling rings were threaded on the lower portion. Scraped (scraper) idiophones, known in Europe since Paleolithic times, are encountered as scraped pots intermittently (improvisation) from the 12th century on; such noisemakers were played—to judge by a 14th-century miniature—with other percussive instruments, such as jingle rings and pellet bells, for merrymaking. Few instruments are as suitable for personal music making as the Jew's harp, which was known in the West by the mid-14th century.

      Most of the above idiophones are nontonal; with the exception of bells and percussion beams, they form part of the musica irregularis decried by writers such as the German organologist Sebastian Virdung in 1511 and as such were restricted to popular entertainment or signaling. Written music of this period does not help to determine whether, or how, idiophones were played with voices or with other instruments.

Membranophones

 Frame drums were popular from the era of the Crusades. The most common form was the tambourine, or timbrel, a single head on a shallow body, furnished with four or more sets of jingles placed equidistantly around its rim. Pictorial sources show the instrument being played by both males and females, particularly for accompanying the voice. Literary evidence supports this as well, and in the 14th century Giovanni Boccaccio (Boccaccio, Giovanni) writes of it as accompanying singing too. Jingle rings and pellet bells were also found during this era in popular music making.

      Double-headed drums served to provide rhythmic accompaniment in the Middle Ages, and in the 7th century is found the first evidence of their being played with drumsticks, a technique adopted from Asia. The small rope-strung cylinder drum known as the tabor (pipe and tabor) entered western Europe during the Crusades; the earliest known pictorial evidence is a 12th-century English illumination showing a jongleur disguised as a bear striking a barrel drum suspended from his neck. Varied in size and depth, the tabor was provided with a snare (material such as gut stretched across the head to produce a rattling sound) and struck with a stick. Played together with the three-holed pipe, it formed a lively one-man band and was found in both aristocratic and popular circles as an accompaniment for the dance. The larger double-headed cylindrical, or long, drum was associated with the military. Slung at an angle to the player's left, it was played with two sticks and was popularized by Swiss mercenary troops serving in European armies from the 15th century.

      The naker (naqqārah), a small kettledrum of Arab or Saracen origin, was made of clay, wood, leather, or metal. It was bowl-shaped, with a diameter ranging from 15 to 25 cm (about 6 to 10 inches). Carried in pairs at the player's waist by means of a belt or harness, each tuned to different indistinct pitches, nakers were played with two short wooden sticks. The skin was tensioned by means of a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened or loosened. Nakers spread rapidly throughout Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries. They are mentioned in epic poems of the time, and records indicate that almost every court employed a nakerer among its regular stable of musicians.

      Larger kettledrums were known for some time to the Crusaders, merchants, and other travelers to the Middle East, but it was not until the 15th century that these instruments, mounted in pairs on horseback, found their way into western Europe. They created a sensation in 1457 when a Hungarian embassy entered Paris; such “large cauldrons” had never before been seen, and the horses pranced to the rhythm of the drums. The skins, mounted on rims attached to the instrument by screws, could be tensioned precisely, thus producing true musical notes. Henceforth, following Eastern custom, kettledrums were associated with nobility as an adjunct to pomp and circumstance and a symbol of power and prestige.

      The less-common friction drum first appears, complete with friction rod, in the late 12th-century sculpture of the archbishop's palace at Santiago de Compostela, in Spain. Although it undoubtedly continued to be used, it is not known to be either pictured or mentioned again until the 17th century.

The Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods

Idiophones

      Additional idiophones came into use from the Renaissance on. The xylophone, long widespread throughout Asia and Africa, was illustrated in 1529 by the composer and music theorist Martin Agricola (Agricola, Martin). In 1618 Praetorius depicted an instrument with 15 bars from 15 to 53 cm (6 to 21 inches) in length, tuned diatonically. It remained little exploited until the Flemish carillonneurs combined it with a keyboard and transformed it into a practice instrument in the first half of the 17th century. The older form remained a folk (folk music) instrument, chiefly in and east of Germany.

      In the West, gongs (gong) have always been considered exotic instruments: although the word gong was known in the 16th century, its use is not further recorded until 1791, when it was first employed in orchestral music by the French composer François-Joseph Gossec (Gossec, François-Joseph). Since then, gongs of indefinite pitch have been included in orchestral scores by Giacomo Meyerbeer (Meyerbeer, Giacomo), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich), and others for arresting effect.

      Cymbals were apparently forgotten during the Renaissance; they reappear in the German composer Nicolaus Adam Strungk's opera Esther (1680) to provide local colour but seem not to have been in general use until the craze for Turkish Janissary music gripped Europe a century later. Christoph Gluck (Gluck, Christoph Willibald) used cymbals in Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), as did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus) in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782; The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Joseph Haydn (Haydn, Joseph) in his Symphony No. 100 (Military Symphony) some 11 years later. By the time of Ludwig van Beethoven, (Beethoven, Ludwig van) they had acquired a permanent place in the orchestra.

      Bells grew larger until the largest ever produced, the Tsar Kolokol III (Emperor Bell III; 1733–35) of Moscow, weighing about 180,000 kg (400,000 pounds), proved too cumbersome and heavy for hanging. The hemispheric form was abandoned early as chimes became larger, culminating in tower-borne carillons brought into existence by progress in casting methods and mechanization. Chime bells were connected to town clocks and then hung in separate bell towers, along with a mechanism of external hammers—Chinese in origin—for hitting the bells. Carillons in the Low Countries and northern France had in addition one of the first examples of the stored program. A large wooden barrel or metal cylinder revolved by weight and pulley, furnished with appropriately placed iron pegs indicating the melody; the pegs activated the levers and jack work releasing the hammers that struck the bells. Chorale preludes, hymns, and popular melodies announced the time of day in European carillons, while in Britain, short chime sequences activated by a clock fulfilled the same role. In addition, British tower bells could be rung in “changes”—a series of mathematical permutations—on bells hung dead. (See change ringing.) The role of small bells became negligible, although handbell ringing was (and still is) a hobby in some parts of the world.

      Metallophones (metallophone) reached northern Europe from Indonesia in the second half of the 17th century and, like xylophones, were promptly adopted by carillonneurs. In both the Low Countries and the regions to which such instruments spread from there, steel was the metal employed for bars. A specially constructed instrument with keyboard-activated hammers was employed by George Frideric Handel (Handel, George Frideric) in 1739 in his oratorio Saul and in his revival of Acis and Galatea (1718); another, struck with a beater, is found in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1791; The Magic Flute).

 Plucked idiophones became more important after the Middle Ages. Jew's harps were part of the regular stock-in-trade of instrument dealers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the mid-18th century the playing of multiple Jew's harps is mentioned. Several of these little instruments combined in a single frame were played by virtuosos in the late 18th and 19th centuries and enjoyed enormous popularity. Miniaturization of musical clocks resulted in the creation of the music box, a plucked idiophone provided with a metal-comb mechanism made from about 1770 on, chiefly in Switzerland. In its heyday—1810 to 1910—it was an immensely popular household instrument with a repertoire of opera arias, folk songs, popular tunes of the day, and waltzes (after the mid-century). In the late 19th century it was transformed into a free-reed aerophone (wind instrument) by the substitution of free reeds for the metal comb, but both forms were rendered obsolete by the phonograph and later technologies.

 During the 18th century several friction idiophones were introduced, among them the nail violin of Johann Wilde (c. 1740), with its tuned nails bowed by a violin bow. More characteristic of the period were the friction-bar instruments arising as a result of the German acoustician Ernst Chladni's late 18th-century experiments, particularly those concerned with the transmission of vibrations by friction. Chladni's own instrument, the euphone of 1790, and the aiuton of Charles Claggett of about the same time were the first in a series of models, some with piano keyboard and horizontal friction cylinder or cone acting on upright bars and others with bars stroked by the player's fingers or bowed by a continuous bow.

      Musical glasses are considerably older: the tuned metal cups or bowls of Asia (sometimes played in India as friction vessels) were transformed in Europe into tuned glasses and are first seen in the Musica theoretica (1492) of the Italian musical theorist Franchino Gafori. One hears of them intermittently thereafter until they come to the fore in the mid-18th century as concert instruments. The rims of glasses of graduated sizes containing enough water to tune them were rubbed by the player's moistened fingers. By the 1760s they had attracted the attention of the American scientist and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin), who proceeded to convert them into a more efficient and, above all, a polyphonic (many-voiced) instrument, which he called armonica—now known as the glass harmonica. Its popularity was immediate. Mozart's Adagio und Rondo K 617 was written for it, as was his Adagio für Harmonika K 356, both performed in 1791. Efforts to combine it with a keyboard enjoyed only a passing vogue. Among the last to write for it was the French composer Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector) in his Fantasia on The Tempest of 1830; a decade later it was replaced by the growing family of free reeds.

Membranophones

      By the Renaissance, Europe had a variety of drums performing specialized functions: frame drums and small tabors accompanied dance and song; larger tabors served as time beaters in small mixed ensembles; great cylinder drums with fifes were placed at the disposal of foot troops; large kettledrums and trumpets were restricted to cavalry and ceremonial music of the aristocracy. The music was at first improvised; later both outdoor carousel music and indoor polychoral sacred music were written for one or two pairs of instruments, sometimes in two contrasting ensembles or choirs—for example, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer's Arie per il balletto a cavallo (1667).

      Kettledrums were introduced into the orchestra about 1675–90 by, among others, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Lully, Jean-Baptiste) in Thésée (first performed 1675) and by Henry Purcell (Purcell, Henry) in his Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1692). With the development of new playing techniques, modified drumstick heads, and the possibility of notating their music (hitherto prohibited by the rules of secrecy imposed upon guild members), kettledrums, henceforth called timpani, triumphantly entered orchestra, opera, and church, soon becoming the most important percussion instrument in the orchestra. Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach, Johann Sebastian) included a timpani solo in his Cantata No. 214 (Tönet, ihr Pauken!; “Sound, You Timpani!”) and again in his Christmas Oratorio (1735). Haydn also wrote significant parts for the instrument. It was Beethoven (Beethoven, Ludwig van), however, who liberated the drums from merely rhythmic functions and their conventional tunings; he was also one of the first to write chords for the instrument.

      The snare drum remained primarily a military instrument, although Handel used it in his Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749) and Gluck wrote for it in his opera Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). The bass (bass drum), or “Turkish,” drum was rare in Europe until the craze for Janissary music in the later 18th century; it was found in Gluck's Le Cadi dupé (1761), Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Haydn's Military Symphony.

      The northern frame drum, or tambourine, was given the status of a salon instrument by 18th-century French society, and, combined with harp or keyboard instrument, it could be heard at fashionable soirees.

      Friction drums maintained an existence in various parts of Europe, where they were played at Christmas, during the carnival season, or to greet the New Year; some of these traditions continued into the 21st century.

Developments after 1800

      In general, until the early 19th century, the trend in Western musical culture had been to make diminishing use of nontonal percussion instruments. Those that succeeded in gaining access to the orchestra were used sparingly, often only as special effects or indications of local colour. By the mid-20th century, this trend had been reversed, especially in popular music, in which percussion instruments, both traditional and alien, play a basic part. castanets, for example, either clicked together rhythmically or in sustained rolls, had been little more than dancers' instruments since the 16th century. Richard Wagner (Wagner, Richard) was probably the first major composer to use them, in the Paris version of his opera Tannhäuser (1861); 14 years later Georges Bizet (Bizet, Georges) employed them with great effect in his opera Carmen. Now, modern rhythm bands frequently include one or two single castanets or a pair attached to a long handle for ease in clicking.

      On the other hand, tonal percussion instruments have assumed increasing importance. Those inherited from the Middle Ages, such as xylophones and Jew's harps, were expanded to the limit of their potential; others were imported and modified to meet local requirements. Influenced by the great popularity of the piano, keyboards were adapted to numerous 19th-century idiophones in an attempt to render hitherto monophonic (single-voiced) instruments polyphonic.

The 19th century

      The 19th century saw a rise in the use of percussion instruments in orchestral music. For example, Berlioz called for 10 cymbals in his Requiem (1837), some to be struck together, others to be hit with various drumsticks. Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich) used syncopated cymbal crashes in his overture Romeo and Juliet (1870). The solo triangle appeared in Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz)'s First Piano Concerto (1849), and Wagner called for rolls or tremolos on the instrument in both Die Walküre (1856; The Valkyrie) and Die Meistersinger (1868; The Mastersingers). Camille Saint-Saëns (Saint-Saëns, Camille) included a xylophone solo in his Danse macabre (1874). Among membranophones, the snare drum is given a solo in Gioachino Rossini (Rossini, Gioachino)'s overture to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1817), and Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss (Strauss, Richard) each made use of the tenor, or long, drum. The bass drum was employed by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony (1824) and by Giuseppe Verdi (Verdi, Giuseppe), who asked for hard, loud blows in his Requiem (1874).

      Several new instruments—or at least new versions—were introduced in the 19th century. The glockenspiel (from the German Glockenspiel, “bell chime”) was originally a bell chime, as its name indicates. Its transformation into a metallophone was in response to the need for a portable instrument. For marching bands the bars were hung in a lyre-shaped frame; for symphony and opera orchestras—and today rhythm bands as well—a large horizontal glockenspiel shaped like a xylophone is used. Late 18th-century experiments with graduated sets of tuning forks (tuning fork) struck by hammers from a keyboard produced the 19th-century “tuning-fork pianos,” the most noteworthy of which were different models of Victor Mustel of Paris from 1865 on. Graduated steel bars struck from a keyboard by piano hammers form the celesta, patented in 1886 by Auguste and Alphonse Mustel of Paris; Tchaikovsky used the celesta in his ballets The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892), and it is found in opera scores and light orchestral music as well. tubular bells are European adaptations of Southeast Asian bamboo chimes. They started appearing as substitutes for traditional bells, which were both expensive and cumbersome, in the 19th century, first in the form of steel bars, then hollow bronze cylinders, and finally brass tubes struck with wooden mallets.

      Mirlitons (mirliton), with their ability of amplifying and colouring tone, had been known in Europe since at least the 16th century, but they did not gain popularity until the early 19th century. From 1883 on, a French toy maker named Bigot brought out a series called bigophones, which were shaped like orchestral instruments. Popular in the mid-20th century was the tubular kazoo.

      The importance of timpani in the orchestra became firmly established in the 19th century. Meyerbeer wrote a melodic solo for four timpani for his opera Robert le Diable (1831). Berlioz required 10 players on 16 drums in his Requiem, and Wagner used 2 players, each with a pair of drums, throughout his opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Russian composers often wrote for small kettledrums with high pitches. Pedal, or machine, drums, which allow players to make almost instantaneous pitch changes, were developed in the 1880s and were soon featured in the tone poems and operas of Richard Strauss and Vincent d'Indy (Indy, Vincent d')'s Second Symphony (1902).

The 20th and 21st centuries

      The exploitation of various and unusual tone colours and effects characterizes the use of percussion instruments in 20th- and 21st-century music, classical and popular alike. Clappers (clapper), for example, have been used sparingly but to great effect in, among others, Richard Strauss's Elektra (1908), to simulate the cracking of a whip, and Gustav Mahler (Mahler, Gustav)'s Sixth Symphony (1904). Claves, of Cuban origin, consist of two cylindrical hardwood sticks and are found primarily in dance orchestras, but symphonic composers have written for them as well (Edgard Varèse (Varèse, Edgard) in Ionisation, 1931, and Aaron Copland (Copland, Aaron) in his Third Symphony, 1946). Castanets are found in Richard Strauss's Salome (1905).

      The xylophone appeared in Mahler's Sixth Symphony; it is also scored, in two different sizes, in Giacomo Puccini (Puccini, Giacomo)'s Turandot (1926). Alan Hovhaness (Hovhaness, Alan) called for a xylophone solo in his Fantasy on Japanese Wood Prints (1965). The marimba, a xylophone with metal resonating tubes suspended beneath its wooden bars, is featured in Darius Milhaud (Milhaud, Darius)'s Concerto for Marimba and vibraphone (1947). The vibraphone is similar to a celesta but has motor-driven revolving vanes inside each resonator, giving it its unique pulsating tone. Since its development in the 1920s, it has found widespread use in jazz but is also heard increasingly in art music such as Alban Berg (Berg, Alban)'s Lulu (1934) and Michael Tippett (Tippett, Sir Michael)'s Third Symphony (1972). The glockenspiel is featured throughout the modern era, from Claude Debussy (Debussy, Claude)'s La Mer (1905; “The Sea”) to Pierre Boulez (Boulez, Pierre)'s Pli selon pli (1962; “Fold According to Fold”) and beyond. Tubular bells were employed effectively in Ernst von Dohnányi (Dohnányi, Ernst von)'s Variations on a Nursery Tune (1914).

      Rattles are used primarily in modern rhythm bands, but various types are found, for example, in Carl Orff (Orff, Carl)'s Weihnachtsspiel (1960) and Benjamin Britten (Britten, Benjamin)'s The Prodigal Son (1968). Scraped gourds are now part of the professional percussionist's equipment, and scrapers (scraper), in the form of blocks covered with sandpaper, are rubbed together in Morton Gould (Gould, Morton)'s Latin-American Symphonette (1941). Scrapers also survive today as carnival noisemakers.

      Twentieth- and 21st-century composers have frequently called for instruments to be played in new and unusual ways. The gong, for example, is played on the rim with a triangle beater in Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; The Woman Without a Shadow), set in vibration by a violin bow in Krzysztof Penderecki (Penderecki, Krzysztof)'s Dimensions of Time and Silence (1960), and lowered and raised into a tub of water after being struck in John Cage (Cage, John) and Frank Harrison's Double Music (1941). Likewise, cymbals have been rubbed together in a circular motion in Béla Bartók (Bartók, Béla)'s Second Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra (1944), played by drawing a cello bow over the edge in Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg, Arnold)'s Five Orchestral Pieces (1909), and placed on the heads of a pair of timpani in Arthur Bliss (Bliss, Sir Arthur)'s Meditations on a Theme of John Blow (1955). In William Walton (Walton, Sir William)'s Façade (1923) the triangle is used to strike a cymbal, while William Russell's Fugue for Eight Percussion Instruments (1933) requires three muffled triangles of different sizes. The tambourine is dropped on the floor in Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor)'s Petrushka (1911), its jingles flicked in Walton's Façade, brushed in Constant Lambert (Lambert, Constant)'s The Rio Grande (1927), and played without jingles in Manuel de Falla (Falla, Manuel de)'s El retablo de maese Pedro (1922).

      Drumming in the 20th century in the West gained an important place outside its traditional preserves of orchestra and military band. Film and musical theatre scores are full of percussion, and their metamorphoses into symphonic suites by arrangers such as Robert Russell Bennett take optimum advantage of all percussion instruments. Both jazz ensembles, or combos, and experimental music have explored new fields. In the former, the drum, or trap, set—bass drum with foot-operated beater, snare drum, set of tom-toms (cylindrical drums graduated in size), and suspended cymbals—is treated as a solo instrument among its peers. The latter has been preoccupied with rhythmic stress and has exploited drum tones for their own sake. On a popular level, rhythm is stressed or punctuated, often by the clarity and opposing pitches of Latin American drums. Consequently, both the role of the drum and playing techniques have become freer—in orchestral as well as popular music. The snare drum, for example, plays an important solo role in Maurice Ravel (Ravel, Maurice)'s Boléro (1928) and an unconventional improvisatory one in Carl Nielsen (Nielsen, Carl)'s Fifth Symphony (1922). Glissando passages on the timpani are found in Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), and stepwise ascending and descending chromatic passages are used in Britten's Nocturne for tenor solo, seven obbligato instruments, and string orchestra (1958). Franco Donatoni's Concerto for Strings, Brass, and Timpani (1953) calls for the drum to be hit in the centre of the head, while other composers stipulate that it be struck on the head and rim simultaneously (a rim shot). Britten directed that the bass drum be hit with a snare-drum stick in Peter Grimes (1945), but soft wire brushes or other types of sticks may also be used, as in Harold Farberman's Concerto for [Five] Timpani and Orchestra (1962).

Percussion instruments in Asia

Idiophones

      Still preserved today are actual clappers from ancient Egypt (art and architecture, Egyptian) and from Sumer of about 3000 BC. Their use seems never to have died out. Copts still ritually strike clappers of a type that has probably been in existence since the 3rd or even 4th millennium BC. Modern Vietnam also retains clappers in its religious observances. In South Asia circular wooden clappers are played by beggars and fakirs in some regions and are used as rhythm instruments in others. In East Asia they have a role in the theatre, as signal instruments, at funerals, or, as in the Ryukyu Islands, accompanying traditional dances. Castanets appear in Egypt in the 24th dynasty (c. 730–709 BC) as typical dancers' instruments.

      Cymbals are indigenous to Asia; ancient Assyria had a unique form, funnel-shaped with long necks serving as handles. Known in ancient Israel from about 1100 BC on, cymbals were the only permanent idiophones of the Temple orchestra. Egypt did not have true metal cymbals until the 24th dynasty. Today they remain in ritual use in northern India, Japan, the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, and Vietnam. They appeared in the 5th century AD in India, where they are now also found at secular festivities. In China they play a prominent part in the theatre. Turkey, in contrast, has traditionally connected cymbals with military usage. In some parts of Southeast Asia their ancient metal-connected function of dispelling evil spirits still prevails.

      Xylophones reach their highest development in Southeast Asia. They vary in form from the simplest log type to the highly developed orchestral instruments found in Indonesia. Trough xylophones were depicted in Java in the 14th century but are not restricted to Southeast Asia; those of Japan, for instance, are rhythm rather than melody instruments, and in Myanmar (Burma) they are associated with royalty. Xylophones of the Indonesian gamelan, or percussion orchestra (and some mainland ensembles), have various complementary compasses.

  stone chimes (lithophones) of two types occur: oblong bars like xylophone keys resting horizontally, found in Vietnam only, and vertically suspended plaques. In China their generic name is qing; there, single sculpted musical stones and also 16-stone chimes are suspended from ornate frames. Stones forming a chime, carved in a typical L-form and struck with a mallet on their larger portion, are very ancient; a chime of this form dating from the late Shang (Shang dynasty) era (c. 1600–1046 BC) was excavated at Anyang, in northeastern China. Both in China and in Korea, where the oldest chime goes back to the 14th century, the lithophone is a Confucian (Confucianism) ritual instrument. Single stones and chimes are still in use in rural central Vietnam.

      Indonesia and Indochina have metallophones (metallophone) constructed like xylophones, of which they are indeed metal counterparts. But in China the fangxiang, with its 16 bars, is a metal imitation of the lithophone. Among important components of the gamelan are the saron, a trough metallophone depicted as early as about AD 800 on the Borobuḍur stupa (Buddhist (Buddhism) monument), Java, and the frame metallophone gender, now usually supplied with tubular resonators, which has been known since the 12th century. Introduced to China by a Turkic people in the 7th century, the horizontal type of metallophone reached Korea in the 12th century and is still occasionally played there. In Japan it is a Buddhist ritual instrument.

      The slit drum is made by hollowing a log or wood block through a slit. Those of East Asia and Indonesia are of great antiquity and of a high degree of complexity. The Chinese mu yu (traditionally fish-shaped) is a Buddhist and Daoist ritual slit drum. Its Korean and Japanese counterparts are likewise ritual time markers, while in Vietnam the slit drum is both a temple and a watchman's instrument. On Java slit drums can be traced to the Hindu-Javanese period (1st–9th century AD). Small models are generally suspended vertically, whereas larger ones rest horizontally; some underscore dance rhythms, while others are signal instruments.

      Southeast Asia is the home of tubular chimes (chime); resonant tuned bamboo tubes are united to form a chime in central Vietnam and Java. In western Java up to 16 tubes are strung in ladder formation and suspended from a house or a tree and played with padded beaters.

      Western Asia is believed to be the home of the gong, which reached China in the 6th century and Java by the 8th. Originally, it was thought to have afforded protection against evil spirits; present-day Iban people of Borneo beat gongs during a storm. Chinese gongs serve a whole gamut of purposes: as signal instruments of the army, as rhythm makers to accompany a song, and, in the case of the bossless luo, as a Buddhist ritual instrument. In Japan the employment of the gong varies from temple to theatre to folk festival.

 In Indonesia and East Asia tuned gongs are united to form gong chimes. The Chinese upright yunluo is a Buddhist and Confucian ritual chime and was formerly also played at court. The horizontal gong chimes of Indonesia (called bonang in Java) are outstanding components of Southeast Asian orchestras and have been known since the 10th or 11th century. Frames of Thai gong chimes arch upward at both ends to form an upright semicircle. Ancient kettle gongs (kettle gong), products of Bronze Age culture, are found only in China, Indochina, and Indonesia. They are hung so that the striking surface is vertical and are struck in the centre of this surface (the head). Kettle gongs were ritual instruments connected with rainmaking; those of the Dong Son culture area of northern Vietnam may be dated from the 5th to the 3rd century BC.

      Bells of bronze dating from approximately 1000 BC have been excavated in India, from the 22nd dynasty (945–730) in Egypt, and from about 700 in Assyria. An intimate connection existed in ancient India between bell sound and mystic experience, and today a handbell is still rung in temple ceremonies in India and other areas of Buddhist influence. The Chinese differentiate between clapper bells (ling) and clapperless ones ( zhong); their temple bells, like those of Japan, are always of the zhong type. Temple bells usually assume the form of chimes in China; one from the 6th century has 13 bells, but more modern chimes consist of 16 bells hung in two rows of a frame. Rural areas continue to use wooden bells with single or multiple clappers.

      The sistrum in its earliest form, that of a U, is seen in Sumer in the mid-3rd millennium BC, and a little later, about 2100/2000, a rectangular form appears in Horoztepe, Anatolia (modern Turkey). Egyptian sistrums are characterized by being closed at the top: the sesheshet was shaped like a temple, the iba like a closed horseshoe. Sacred to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, the iba was played only by women, and after Hathor's metamorphosis into the goddess Isis it remained sacred to Isis.

      A sliding rattle called angklung, found only in Indonesia, consists of several tuned bamboo tubes with cut-back tongues, inserted into a frame; they slide back and forth when the frame is shaken.

      Scraped idiophones are Confucian ritual instruments in East Asia. The “tiger” of China, known as early as the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BC), is a vessel scraper of wood with a series of notches cut along its back; it is scraped with a split bamboo stick. Split idiophones (made of hollow cane split between nodes) are slapped against the player's wrist or thigh in South China and Southeast Asia, producing a fixed-pitch buzz.

      Jew's harps have idioglott tongues (cut from the same material as the frame) in Indonesia, while both idioglott and heteroglott (the tongue made separately and attached to the frame) forms occur in China and in South Asia. More recent are those of metal having the outline of an onion. In the Philippines and some other areas, Jew's harps are important adjuncts to courtship.

      Musical cups, the forerunners of musical glasses, are depicted on the Borobuḍur stupa. The South Asian rastrarang can be played either with small sticks by percussion or by rubbing wetted fingers along the rims—the cups do not contain water. But the jaltarang, also South Asian, makes use of water for fine tuning and for the playing of gamakas (ornaments) by carefully bringing the sticks into contact with the surface of the water. Similar musical cups are played in Japan in Buddhist temples and in the music of the Kabuki theatre.

Membranophones

      Unlike the drums of Western musical tradition, those found in ancient (and parts of modern) Asia are primarily ritual and ceremonial instruments. Babylonia already had a variety of forms: cylinder, hourglass, goblet, and bowl-shaped, all of terra-cotta and all beaten with bare hands. Assyrians also carried in procession a large conical drum played in the same manner.

      Temple drums were of considerable proportions: huge frame drums existed from the 3rd millennium on in Mesopotamia, and the waist-high lilissu had a goblet form—a bowl on a stand. All these were played by men, but the smaller frame drums appearing in Sumer about 2000 BC are depicted in the hands of women; a king's granddaughter was appointed player of the balag di in the Temple of the Moon at Ur about 2400 BC. Ever since, frame drums have been predominantly women's instruments. The Bible says that in ancient Israel “Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dancing.” They are still played throughout the Middle East—in some areas in art-music ensembles, in others only in popular and folk music.

      Wherever Islam (Islamic arts) is practiced, large and small kettledrums are encountered. In Turkey classical monophonic singing is accompanied solely by a small kettledrum, played either in the centre of the head or close to the rim, depending upon whether clear or muffled beats are desired.

      In many regions of the East, drums were believed to create or imitate thunder. Sets of thunder drums are depicted on art objects from the 9th to the 11th century found in East Turkistan (present-day western Xinjiang, China). In China the Daoist deity Lei Gong (Lei Kung) is traditionally depicted as surrounded by numerous drums on which he creates thunder, and in Japan thundering drums were even automated by attaching a number of them to the outer circumference of a wheel that, when revolved, caused them to rattle—an early application of the rattle drum principle. As in Africa and the Americas, ritual drums of Asia have been associated with human sacrifice; in China, drums were consecrated in the 7th and 6th centuries BC by smearing them with sacrificial blood, usually that of a war captive.

      Rattle drums, either containing in their cavities objects that rattle when the drum is twirled by a handle or with attached cords having knotted ends that strike the heads, can be traced back to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC) and are now in use from the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China and South Asia to Japan. Still a ritual drum in some areas—it is an attribute of Siva (Shiva), the third member of the Hindu (Hinduism) trinity—in others the rattle drum has degenerated to a mere toy. On the giant stupa of Borobuḍur, Java, an archetypal image of the known cosmos, are sculpted the musical instruments that were in use at the time of its erection (c. 800). These include cylinder, conical, hourglass, and pot drums—all Indian instruments. Yet today's Indonesian orchestra, the gamelan, virtually ignores drums in favour of metallophones. Drumming is exclusively a man's business on some islands of the Malay archipelago, where drums are kept in the men's house, out of sight of women.

 Drums played an important part in early court orchestras of China and Korea, judging by their surviving elements in gagaku, court orchestral music of Japan. Here the leader beats time on a drum—either cylindrical or hourglass-shaped—having projecting heads, a characteristic feature of Japanese hooped drums. Larger barrel-shaped drums with nailed heads are suspended from elaborate frames. In South Asia a variety of membranophones participate in art-music ensembles or accompany dances, while small kettledrums are played pairwise in processions; large single kettledrums are temple instruments or may be mounted in pairs on elephants' backs in outdoor ceremonies. Many smaller drums have laced and wedged heads, the skin being further tensed by an application of tuning paste. In Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and south Nias Island (Indonesia) a number of tuned barrel drums of varying sizes are suspended in a low circular pen to form drum chimes; such a chime may consist of from 16 to 24 drums, all played by a single musician with his fingers and palms, occasionally with a drumstick. These chimes form part of the theatre orchestra and are played in processions.

      In East and Southeast Asia a mirliton device is applied to many woodwinds in order to obtain a characteristic modification of tone quality. To this end an additional aperture is cut in the tube and covered with a thin membrane. A different application of this principle is encountered in South Asia, where a pair of short wooden mirliton “trumpets” are placed against the throat of a humming performer.

Percussion instruments in Africa (African music) and the African diaspora

Idiophones

North Africa

      Idiophones of Islamic Africa are mainly those of the Middle East or derivations thereof. Outsize hollow clappers shaped like a dumbbell sliced lengthwise are clicked by Moroccan singers, who hold a pair in each hand. An inverted bowl set afloat in a larger, water-filled bowl, is beaten with a single stick by the Saharan Tuareg as their substitute for the western African water gourd. Finger cymbals are worn pairwise on the finger and thumb of each hand by dancers. Basically, however, the percussion of this area is executed by drums.

Sub-Saharan Africa

      In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa has an almost bewildering variety of idiophones. Clappers, generally of wood, are played from coast to coast. Simple percussion sticks are known in East and West Africa. Scrapers in both solid and vessel form are widespread.

 Xylophones vary in complexity from the pit xylophone, with a few wooden bars placed over a pit or trench, to the leg xylophone, with a couple of bars placed on the outstretched legs of a woman player, to the large instruments with independent framework and tuned keys graduated in size. African xylophones are usually provided with a gourd resonator suspended from each key, often containing a mirliton device that adds a buzzing quality to the tone. Ensemble playing of several xylophones, reported by 17th-century travelers, has continued to be practiced. In some areas xylophones form small orchestras (orchestra) with several performers playing one large instrument. Unmistakable similarities of form, playing technique, tuning, and even of the music performed confirm the African xylophone's Southeast Asian origin.

      Slit drums occur in western Africa and the Congo basin. They may be cylindrical, boat-, wedge-, or crescent-shaped, and zoomorphic with a dorsal slit. A cylindrical slit drum with from two to five slits is encountered in western Africa; the Kisi people of Guinea strike not only the slats formed by the multiple slits but the ends of the slit drum as well.

      Bells (bell) occur in a large variety: metal and wooden, single or double, clapperless and with single or multiple clappers, played as rhythm or signal instruments. The apotropaic qualities of metal bells are recognized in Africa, where such bells may be associated with chieftainship. Double bells, usually of metal, share a common handle but differ in length or in diameter and, consequently, always in pitch. Metal double bells are devoid of clappers and are often made of sheet iron soldered down the side, whereas double bells of wood often have multiple clappers.

      Water gourds—half gourds floated open side down in a pan of water and struck rhythmically with small sticks—are played in western Africa; in Benin their chief use is at funeral rites.

      Rattles (rattle) are the instruments par excellence of dancers, although they can also be worn on the leg simply to provide walking rhythm. Strung and gourd rattles are common, with the latter often serving in religious cults or magic rites in the Congo basin area. In western Africa the surface of a gourd is covered by a network of dried fruit seeds threaded on a cord; a player holds the gourd handle in one hand and shakes the plaited ends of the cords with the other. Sistrumlike forked sticks strung with threaded pairs of calabash fragments have an important part in fertility and initiation rites among the Mande of western Africa. The ancient horseshoe and rectangular forms of sistrum are still played in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church.

 The African lamellaphone is known to the West as the sansa, mbira (lamellaphone), or “thumb piano” (a misnomer, based superficially on its appearance). It consists of a varying number of cane or metal tongues fitted to a wooden board or resonator so as to permit one end of the plates to swing freely; their different lengths determine the pitch. Mbiras show affinity of tuning with xylophones.

The Americas

      Western African idiophones introduced into the Americas with the slave trade are still flourishing. Clappers (clapper) that originated among the Yoruba of Nigeria are played in Cuba; the claves, a pair of cylindrical percussion sticks of Haiti and Cuba, are standard equipment in Western rhythm bands. The xylophone may already have entered the Western Hemisphere in pre-Columbian times. Known chiefly as the marimba, it has been accepted in Western musical culture. Bells frequently figure as Vodou ritual instruments in Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian communities. In Cuba water gourds are played at funeral rites for Cubans of African heritage.

      Steel drums (steel drum) originated in Trinidad during World War II and since then have become vehicles for popular music in the United States. Actually a single “drum” forms a chime, as one head of an ordinary oil drum is divided into sections of different sizes by punched grooves, each section then being tuned to its own pitch. Today only a greater or lesser part of the sides is left below the rim, depending upon the range required, but originally the oil drum was left intact.

      Rattles play an important part in African-derived rituals of the New World, both gourd rattles with internal and external percussion and a distinct variety consisting of two metal cones joined at their widest part. (The maraca gourd rattle is probably indigenous to South America.)

      Scrapers are highly popular. The notched gourd with natural handle, called guiro, is another African American instrument. Notched turtle carapaces are scraped in the Caribbean. The jawbone of a horse, mule, or donkey, with its teeth left in, is played throughout the Americas; its use among coastal Peruvians of African descent goes back to the 18th century. In the United States it has been used in Louisiana and the Carolinas.

      Lamellaphones in the Caribbean and in South America bear such names as marímbula (Cuba) and marimbao (Brazil), words that may derive from mbira.

Membranophones

North Africa

      Drumming tradition in the Islamic north centres on smaller, portable drums, such as frame, goblet, and small kettledrums. Frame drums are made in a number of forms: circular with single membrane, square, even diamond-shaped. Although the human voice is the preponderant instrument in Islamic (Islamic arts) religious music, the frame drum plays an important role as vocal accompaniment. It also lends rhythm for dancing and is the basic percussion instrument of Islamic art-music ensembles. In Morocco groups of women may sing to the accompaniment of a frame drum supplied with jingles, a spike fiddle (one in which the handle traverses the body and emerges at the lower end to form a spike), small cymbals (cymbal), and a pair of kettledrums, each playing her own instrument.

Sub-Saharan Africa

      Sub-Saharan African cultures make perhaps wider use of their membranophones than do any other cultures. Numerous variant forms of drums and lacings make classification difficult; indeed, a study of types remains to be established. Some drums are played as musical instruments, and others are used to transmit messages (“talking” drums); some are restricted to religious uses and funerals and others—partly desacralized—to royalty; still others participate in everyday life. Ethiopia admits drums to the church, while western African ritual drums may not be seen by the uninitiated. Drums are beaten with bare hands or with rectangled or knobbed sticks. Footed drums (i.e., with a base prolonged to form “feet”) attain a height of about 3 metres (nearly 10 feet) in the Loango area of western Central Africa (coastal areas of modern Congo [Brazzaville], Cabinda province of Angola, and Congo [Kinshasa]) and must be tilted to bring the head within the performer's reach. The playing head of hourglass drums may be struck with one hand and with a stick alternately. Kettledrums are royal, ritual, or ceremonial, and unlike their North African counterparts they are of wood, often with sculpted shells. Their traditional pairing with trumpets reaches as far as south of the Congo region.

 That portion of western Africa known as the Bend is the area of talking drums (talking drum), by means of which messages are conveyed for up to 20 miles (32 km), to be relayed by another drummer. Languages of this area are characterized by pronounced high and low pitch tones (tone languages), a quality exploited when two drums—a lower-pitched, or male, drum and a higher-pitched, or female, one—transmit low and high tones, respectively. Accent, number, and pitch of the syllables are transmittable. Among the Yoruba a talking drum set consists of four hourglass drums and a kettledrum; the leather lacings of the former are gripped by its player, enabling him to change the pitch as he exerts more or less pressure on them; the chief drum of the set is capable of an octave range and, in addition to tones, produces also the glides typical of the Yoruba language by manipulation of the lacings.

      East African drum chimes are tuned to specific pitches; these instruments attained royal status in Uganda, where the largest chime consists of 15 drums requiring 6 musicians to play them.

      Friction drums of the lower Congo area were once exclusively ritual instruments but are now becoming desacralized. Whereas in Central Africa they are played only by men, women of the South African Pedi play them at female initiation rites (ritual).

      African mirlitons can be most imaginative: standard material is a spider's egg membrane, and this may be added to apertures pierced in the bottom of xylophone resonators or applied to one end of an independent cane tube that is inserted into a nostril, as among the Fang of Gabon and its neighbours.

The Americas

 Western Africans reconstructed their native drums in the New World, preponderantly as ritual instruments. Small sets of two or, more often, three drums of graded sizes form an integral part of African American rituals and, in the Caribbean, also of Vodou dances. Only the skins of sacrificial animals may be used for membranes among Afro-Bahians in Brazil, who baptize their new drums, preferably with “holy” water obtained from a Roman Catholic church. Drums in Haiti are sacred objects and may even represent the deity itself; as such they receive libations. One type of bongo drum (bongo drums)—there exist at least four of these—has been adopted by Western rhythm bands, as has the conga.

Percussion instruments in the Americas

Idiophones

      A wide assortment of idiophones are available to American Indians (Native American music), but many of these are restricted to nonmusical uses. Concussion sticks, for instance, serve as game calls in North America, while concussion stones are invariably ritual: they are clashed to make thunder. Small conical bells of metal and multiclapper bells of wood were known in ancient Peru.

      Slit drums have been played in the Americas since pre-Columbian times, but their occurrence in South America is now rare. Characteristic of the well-known teponaztli is the form of its slits, cut to form an H with tongues of different thicknesses, thus allowing it to emit two differently pitched sounds. Formerly, Zapotec warriors of Ixtepeji, Mex., went into battle carrying an idol and singing to the accompaniment of the teponaztli, while Indians of 16th-century Hispaniola danced to their slit drums.

      Strung rattles are worn as leggings to emphasize a dancer's movements, but when the strung material consists of a dead enemy's teeth, as was the practice among the Brazilian Mundurukú, the rattle becomes a source of magic strength to the wearer; elsewhere, strung deer or caribou hooves attract game during the hunt. Vessel rattles of gourd and pottery imitations of gourds have been in use since Aztec times. Ritual instruments in the prehistoric Americas, they are still used by healers during their incantations. Hollow seed-filled staffs were ceremonial rattles of Aztec and Maya, and descendants of these instruments are still played.

 Scrapers (scraper) are seen on the Maya frescoes of the temple at Bonampak in Chiapas state, Mex., played in a procession. Today among the Pima people of Arizona, scrapers play an important part in rainmaking ceremonies. Elsewhere in North America they serve as time markers. Scraped sticks of animal or human bone or of antler, with a series of notches along one side, were sounded at Aztec sacrificial or memorial ceremonies. In modern times they have been played in North America by healers. Split idiophones were employed in western coastal areas of North America chiefly for ceremonial purposes; in some communities they were slapped against the chest and in others against the palms. Finally, a friction-instrument vessel of Central and South America, the rubbed tortoise carapace, is a ritual instrument and forbidden to the noninitiated; the instrument is rubbed with the fingers, not scraped.

Membranophones

      Pre-Columbian drums of Mesoamerica appear to have been played without sticks, regardless of their size, and to have been devoid of lacings, whether they were small pottery drums, such as those excavated in Costa Rica, or the large footed drums of Mexico. Slender pottery drums of the Guatemala highlands, open top and bottom, can be dated to the late Classical period (c. 700–1000). Skeletons of wooden cylinder drums, very shallow, have been found in Peru.

      The North American shallow drums are ritual and dance drums, having a heavy hide head struck by a hard beater and emitting a loud staccato sound. Larger models are suspended and struck simultaneously by up to 10 drummers seated in a surrounding circle. The “dream-dance” drum, a tub-shaped shallow drum, is elaborately decorated and has a bell suspended in its interior; it is credited with great healing power.

      Cylinder drums made of a hollowed log were traditionally war and dance drums of tribes of the southwestern United States. Pottery drums, either potbellied, bowl-shaped, or footed, were formerly common among the eastern and southern Indians of the United States; the potbellied type remains in use among the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest.

 American Indian frame drums are usually circular; square shapes are rare, but rectangular frame drums are found in California, Mexico, and Bolivia and octagonal ones among the Cherokee of the southeastern United States. All were war drums, regardless of whether they had one or two membranes. By adding a rattling device, a frame drum is converted into a medicine drum. The frame drum, a shaman (shamanism)'s instrument, is distributed over Greenland, northern Siberia, North America, and among the Sami of northern Scandinavia; it differs from other frame drums in that it has a fixed handle and is struck on the hoop, not on the membrane.

      Friction drums are rare; in Venezuela one is formed from a small barrel over which a piece of leather is stretched, with central perforation to admit a friction stick.

Percussion instruments in the Pacific (Pacific Islands)

Idiophones

      The different cultures of this wide area where singing and dancing form so prominent a part of the musical life include a number of primitive idiophones, some of which are played with considerable sophistication. Concussion sticks are clashed by an Aboriginal Australian (Australian Aborigine) singer to lend emphasis. The Maori of New Zealand breathe words of a song onto a carved stick held between their teeth while tapping it with a second stick. In Hawaii concussion stones were held pairwise by dancers who clicked them together like castanets. In Papua New Guinea log xylophones (xylophone) are played, consisting of two banana stems or other logs placed on the ground with a few keys placed across them.

      A percussion gourd of New Guinea has an hourglass form, open at both ends; when plunged in and out of water, it is said to emit the sounds “uh-ah-uh-ah.” Split-bamboo percussion tubes, doubling as rattles, are indigenous to the same area, while the percussion board o-le-polotu of Samoan and Tongan chiefs accompanies solo songs. Slit drums (slit drum) can be huge. Made from a tree trunk, living slit drums in Vanuatu are carved with the faces of ancestors, and in New Guinea roofed drum houses are built over large horizontal slit drums to protect them from the weather. The Maori, one of the relatively few peoples who have no membrane drums, use their slit drums as signal instruments. Related to these is a percussion tube of Fiji, partly hollowed and tapering at the ends and struck with two sticks on the side opposite the slit.

 Idioglott Jew's harps (Jew's harp) of bamboo are the major tonal idiophones of the area; here the tongue is vibrated either by the player's finger or by jerking it with a cord. A friction vessel of New Ireland (in Papua New Guinea) consists of a rounded and hollowed block of wood, its upper portion carved into three tongues of different lengths and hence emitting as many pitches. Already rare nowadays and forbidden to women and children, it is played at death-commemoration rites by a male performer who rubs well-oiled hands over the tongues.

Membranophones

      Two forms of drum are distributed over this huge area. Elongated hourglass drums, usually with wooden handles of a piece with the drum shell, often beautifully carved and ranging up to about 2 metres (about 6 feet) in height, are commonly in the hands of dancers and singers and are said to symbolize the transition from earth to heaven. Among the Wapenamundu of New Guinea they lack handles and are war drums. Such hourglass drums are not found in Polynesia. The other form is a conical footed drum made of a tree trunk, reaching great dimension. Those of Polynesia are sometimes about 2.5 metres (about 8 feet) high and have elaborately carved pedestals. They are usually made of breadfruit tree wood or hollowed coconut palm, with a single sharkskin head. Throughout the area drums are beaten with bare hands.

      Whirled friction drums are met with in Hawaii, where a large nut or a calabash is furnished with a friction cord and swung through the air.

Sibyl Marcuse Edmund Addison Bowles

Additional Reading

James Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History, rev. ed. (1984), is a definitive work in the field, with numerous illustrations and bibliographies. Reginald Smith Brindle, Contemporary Percussion, 2nd ed. (1991), offers information on how composers write for these instruments. James Holland, Percussion (1978), presents the history and development of orchestral percussion.Separate groups of percussion instruments are discussed individually in Joseph H. Howard, Drums in the Americas (1967), containing descriptions of the most popular drums from pre-Columbian times to the present; Richard St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums, rev. ed. (1951), based on anthropological material on Kenya and Nigeria; C.R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891, reprinted 1974), still useful though dated; and Wendell Westcott, Bells and Their Music (1970), a brief survey of the cultural role of the bell from the Bronze Age. Good coverage of membranophones, gongs, and cymbals is provided in Neville H. Fletcher and Thomas D. Rossing, The Physics of Musical Instruments, 2nd ed. (1998); and Thomas D. Rossing, The Science of Percussion Instruments (2000).Edmund Addison Bowles Ed.

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