I’ve recently fallen in love with a hammered dulcimer. Being on my budget, I haven’t impulsively bought it or anything, but I’ve been thinking about it. I would like one mostly because I like the sound and I think it looks pretty. However, I recently realized I have no idea what kind of music they are traditionally used for, if any, and honestly know very little about them.
(Not that being pretty and sounding good aren’t perfectly lovely, worthy traits, but it seems like a rather silly reason to buy something I cannot really afford. )
They were popular with street musicians, and also were used in circuses in 19th Century America. We can find that they were used folklorically in much the same way as fiddles, for traditional tunes. There are several good field recordings at http://www.loc.gov
The hammered dulcimer has found fairly limited use in both American and irish traditional music-certainly more in American music than Irish. The only older traditional Irish player that I know of is someone named John Rae. In the US the dulcimer has had a varied history and has been used in old time dance music in West Virgina, New York and Michigan. Dulcimer contests were held in West Virginia in the 19th C. The repetoire seems mainly to have been what you could call Celtic/old time. The tunes were likely most like those in Coles 1000 Fiddle Tunes (Ryan’s Mammoth Collection). Dulcimers are depicted in medieval art but I have no idea what their role was. I suspect in most cases it was accompaniment. I have a T shirt with a picture of a dulcimer player playing what appears to be a one-octave dulcimer playing with a lute player.
Nowadays, dulcimer players play all kinds of music. If you do a search for hammered or hammer dulcimer at a place such as CD Baby you will find several different kinds of music represented. One trend is for dulcimer players to write their own music. Sometimes this borders on new age. Sometimes it’s just a display of technique. Most of the time I haven’t found it very interesting. At any rate you can sample some of this by going to the hammered dulcimer home page and clicking on “samples of CDs” That should give you an idea of some of the range of stuff.
Some people say hammered dulcimer and some say hammer dulcimer so it’s never to clear which you should search for. You can search dulcimer and get the results for Appalachain (or is it mountain) dulcimer.
Lilymaid: It is easy to fall in love with the hammer dulcimer. It has been my main instrument and a source of income for a lot of years. I play 'em, teach 'em, design ‘em, sell’ em, and promote 'em. My band is fronted by twin hammer dulcimers. Our repertoire includes music from the British Isles - England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Brittany, the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia, et. al. We also play medleys based on composers such as Bach, Mozart, Vaughan Williams, Faure, King Henry VIII, etc. Modern folk tunes/arrangements by the likes of Dougie MacLean, Karen Ashbrook, Steve Schneider, Bob McQuillen, etc. are always loved by audiences. American fiddle tunes always find their way into our play list… We round things out with medleys of Shaker tunes. If you have any direct questions, please feel free to e-mail me. Also check out www.everythingdulcimer.com…
Best.
Byll
Next to flute it’s my favorite instrument to play.
Play what ever you like and don’t worry about what is supposed to be done.
The CD’s I have are mostly American folk and bluegrass. Several are gospel. A few so-called new-age artists have used it to great effect. I also have some Byelorussian music which is very nice.
See if you can find Tony Elway’s Swinging on a Gate CD. Excellent stuff.
For Irish trad I have one by Vince Conroy which is very good. I have another that is far beyond excellent is by Guy Carawan.
Other great ones: Lucy Reilly, Kendra Ward.
Sadly I did not attend this years Evart Hammered Dulcimer Fest in Evart Michigan. It’s one of the biggest HD festivals in the world.
Visit Gillian Alcock’s web site for interesting pictures and explanations of the different dulcimer-type instruments she makes. One that she doesn’t make is the Chinese instrument (yang quin, yang qin or yang chin). In China you can study playing these in music schools.
Instruments like the hammered dulcimer/psaltery can be found all over the world. Something much like the modern instrument popped up in the middle east over 1000 years ago. The inventor of the pianoforte got the idea when he saw (I believe) a Persian person playing one.
Just to echo what everyone else here has been saying, the hammered dulcimer can play most anything. One professional player (Dan Landrum) was on tour with Yanni last year playing HD. The dulcimer is a diatonic instrument, so that can force you to be creative, but there are chromatic versions of the HD out there that make it easier to play in the “weird” keys.
In 2002, Paul Gifford came out with a book called “The Hammered Dulcimer” which is the first comprehensive history of the instrument. I have yet to get a copy (because I keep buying whistles and things :roll: ) but it traces the lineage of the instrument and all of its variations back through history. It is truly an ancient instrument.
Oh, and BTW..one type of music not specifically mentioned but played a lot on HD is harp music, especially the works of O’Carolan.
In the slow session group that I belong is a guy who plays HD. Does a great job of it too. His wife plays piano. I think the three instruments go great together.
The best HD player that I know about is Dan Duggan. Has several albums, but I favor his album Trillium Lane. It’s not ITM, but good is good music, eh?
I’m with you wishing I could play one. That many strings makes it look too difficult for me though.
Maggie Sansone and Kate Price are also good HD players.
Does Taraf de Haidouks use HD, or is that a Cymbalom? I previewed one of their albums once, and thought I heard some HD in it. Whatever it was, the player was very good.
Great site. If you click on Dulcimers before 1800 and then early rennaissance, you can see the picture on my T shirt. It’s the bottom right picture. Apparantly the pictures on that page can’t be enlarged and it’s hard to make out the details.
Lily,
Others have given you good information on musical styles and some good links. I just can’t pass up a topic with “hammered dulcimer” in the title.
There are so many instruments that sound good and look pretty! Of course none of us can go out and buy every instrument that fits those criteria, and even if we were Bill Gates and could afford it, we wouldn’t have time to learn to play them all. LOVE, on the other hand, is the ONLY good enough reason to buy an instrument because it’s the reason that will drive you to learn how to play it, and that will make your investment worth every penny. If you really love the sound of the hammered dulcimer, save up your pennies and get yourself one. I don’t think you’ll regret it. (Do your research first, though, and be sure you get one with the sound you like, and that it’s a quality instrument so it will stay in tune.)
I admit, I’m biased – I’m thoroughly in love with the hammered dulcimer myself. (Though I have to admit I’m getting awfully fond of the whistle, too.) When people ask me what my instrument is, I’m always tempted to say “an acoustic amplifier – it amplifies joy in my life.” My hammered dulcimer and all the musical friends I’ve made since starting to play it have enriched my life enormously.
In the few brief shots of the instrument it certainly appears to be a cymbolom. However in the picture on the BBC page the instrument to the right of the fiddler and on the opposite side from the accordion does not look like a cymbolom. For one thing, the player appears to be “wearing” it. This is possible with a dulcimer-at least with some dulcimers but a cymbolom is too large. To see a close up of some cymboloms you can look at the used dulcimer section at Elderly Instruments. http://www.elderly.com/vintage/155U.htm
There used to be a Romanian guy with a cymbolom who came to the Southern Michigan Dulcimer Festival (RIP). As far as I could tell, he was excellent. Certainly he put most of the average dulcimer players to shame. He never looked at the instrument but was always surveying and mugging for the audience. He also used to accompany an old time fiddler in informal sessions, playing wild chromatic gypsy sounding passages behind old time fiddle tunes.
People have been mentioning some of their favorite dulcimer players but have passed over some of mine. I don’t recall seeing the names of Ken Kolodner, John McCutcheon, Malcolm Dalglish or Bill Spence. The latter three were very active in the dulcimer revival period beginning sometime in the 1970s.
Ken Kolodner was the dulcimer player with Helicon, a band featuring Chris Norman. More recently he has recorded with a band called Greenfire. Along with Howie Mitchell, I would say that Bill Spence was one of the most influential people in sparking a revival in interest in the dulcimer and that McCutcheon and Dalglish were (and remain) two of the most outstanding players of the dulcimer.
fThere are a multiitude of tapes and Cds with this
instrument, quite a few devoted to celtic music,
others to appalacian stuff, others to classical.
You can get a pretty good idea from these.
I play flute with a society for HD, which is fun.
Goes well with flute.
My one small complaint about HD is that
the tone can become monotonous
when the player just rattles along. The hammers
have a wood side and a felt covered side for softer,
but the instrument seems to lack the
variety of tone and expressiveness of the
piano. Needs to be played with some
restraint, I think; sometimes less is more. best
I second all the recommendations for particular hammered dulcimers that have been made so far. In particular, Ken Kolodner’s “Walking Stones” CD is one of my all-time favorites, and I also listen to Fennig’s All-Star String Band (Bill Spence) over and over.
Here are a few more HD players that haven’t been mentioned yet in this thread, and are worth a listen:
American old-timey: Rick Thum, Critton Hollow String Band (Sam Hermann is the dulcimer player)
Irish/Celtic: Karen Ashbrook, David James, Cliff Moses
Thank you all for the information and links. I’ll continue to look into it, but other than the fact that Yanni scares me, I think it does sound as if it would suit me. They’re really lovely.
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