In Africa south of the Sahara, the xylophone is so widespread in all its various forms that no book on African music can ignore it. It is perhaps in Mozambique, and among the peoples from that area working as contract laborers in South Africa, that the xylophone culture is at its highest, for it is there that we find the xylophone orchestras, with up to a dozen different sizes of timbila, from treble through alto and tenor to double bass, playing together.
Each timbila has from ten to twenty bars (except the double bass, which has only three or four), depending on its part within the orchestra, lashed to a frame that has a curved bar to hold it away from the body when it is, as often happens, played on the move, suspended from a strap around the player’s neck. Below each bar is a complex gourd resonator. The gourds are carefully cultivated by the makers so that there is always a selection of different sizes available, sized to suit the pitch of each bar. Cut into the sides of the spherical gourd are two holes, one of which is waxed to a matching hole in the rail that runs beneath the bars, so holding each resonator in place beneath its bar. The other hole is covered by a thin membrane held over it with wax, and over that is placed a segment of gourd to act as a trumpet and project its sound.
The membrane, found on many different African instruments, adds a buzz to “sweeten” the sound, as we noted above. Its material differs from place to place and custom to custom: sometimes animal intestine, other times a bat’s wing, a spider’s egg sac, or, in a pinch, cigarette paper. The heads of the beaters are covered with thin strands of natural rubber, wound around and over, just as our golf balls used to be made or as one winds a ball of wool, and they vary in size and hardness to suit the bars of each instrument. The bars themselves are made from a hardwood, although among the workers of South Africa they may be sawn-up floor boards, played with beaters covered by a piece of old tire rubber. The bars are tuned by carving away an arch below the bar, which both flattens the pitch and, by thinning the cross-section of the bar, greatly improves the tone quality.
While various details will differ, this description applies to the majority of African xylophones and—without the membranes and with metal tubes instead of gourds—to our own also. The arrangements of the gourds may differ, or they may be replaced by cow horns or other hollow objects (old food cans are common in South Africa, where the traditional materials are many miles away and unobtainable locally), and the shape and design of the instruments differ, but in general principle there are more similarities than differences.
The first indication of the xylophone in Europe appears in the sixteenth century. Holbein illustrates one in his “Dance of Death” sequence in 1538, where the skeleton supports it from a neck strap just as folk musicians have done in more recent years. SaintSaëns, in his “Fossiles” movement in Le carnaval des animaux, was not the first to associate the xylophone with the rattle of dry bones! Martin Agricola illustrated one as the Stro fidel in 1528, with a range of three octaves, diatonic except for both B-flat and B-natural. The German name of “straw fiddle” arose because the bars were laid on hanks of straw, replacing the banana stems of East Africa. So far as we can tell from the illustrations, the bars were simply round or squaresection wooden rods, tuned just by their length. Xylophones were still being made like this, without any of the tuning or tonal subtleties of the African instruments, into the twentieth century in Europe. In Germany they sometimes retained the supports of straw, though a wooden framework padded with felt became more generally common.
The xylophone must have been a recognized instrument in central Europe, although at present our only evidence for this is the extent to which an obscure Viennese composer, Ferdinand Kauer, wrote for it in the early nineteenth century Presumably it was a folk instrument in that area, a supposition that is supported by Bálint Sárosi’s description of the facimbalom both as an instrument in its own right and as a substitute for the local form of hammered dulcimer. It was certainly this same type of instrument, with three or four rows of bars arranged with the lowest nearest to the player and the highest farthest away, totally different from our modern left-to-right layout, that was played by the Polish virtuoso Gusikow who so impressed Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt in the 1830s.
We owe our modern xylophone to the peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, who derived it from instruments made in those areas by African slaves. There, the individual resonators, carefully tuned to match each bar, were usually made of wooden boxes, rather than gourds, and the instruments grew to a considerable size. Their bars were tuned, as in Africa, by arching the undersides, producing a far better tone quality than the very chippy sound of our instruments up to the early twentieth century. J. C. Deagan of Chicago adopted these techniques and changed the layout that was usually a single row into that familiar from the piano keyboard, using metal tubes for the resonators. From his design come all our xylophones; marimbas (adopting the Central American and African name), with wider, thinner bars and lower pitch; and vibraphones, with metal bars and revolving fans in the top of each resonator tube to provide an amplitude vibrato.
Xylophone Magic
