The Adaptable Appalachian Dulcimer

Abstract

The tones of the mountain dulcimer were first heard thousands of years ago in the hanging gardens of Babylon. But it also provided music for Shakespearian productions at the Globe Theatre in England, and in the New World it was welcomed by the people of the Southern highlands. Today this ancient music instrument is enjoying a renaissance. The dulcimer can be heard in concerts, on recordings, and in the classroom, where elementary school teachers can use it to demonstrate the basic elements of a variety of styles of music. The dulcimer is mentioned in the book of Daniel with the harp and psaltery as being among the iiistruments of the court of King Nebuchadnezzar, but this biblical instrument was markedly different from modern dulcimers. (The derivation of the word dulcimer comes from the Latin dulce and the Greek melos, literally meaning sweet song.) The ancestors of the modern dulcimer can be identified by their elongated shapes and diatonic tunings. The rebec, one such ancestor, was a medieval English instrument that was played in courts and carried from town to town by wandering minstrels. The German scheitholt, another diatonically scaled instrument, also is related to the modern dulcimer. Although a basic structural similarity to the dulcimer also exists in the Norwegian langleik and the Danish humle, folklorists generally believe that when English and German colonists migrated to the New World, the rebec and scheitholt were merged into one instrument, which was quickly absorbed into American culture and became thoroughly identified with the Appalachian mountain people. By the beginning of the twentieth century, commercialization had crept into Appalachian music, and with it came the availability of massproduced, mail-order guitars, fiddles, banjos, and mandolins. The dulcimer almost was forgotten in the deluge, but the folk music revival of the sixties sparked a renewed popularity. Several rock groups use electric dulcimers on stage, some college music departments now require music education majors to play the dulcimer, and, perhaps most important, it gives the average person a relatively simple means of individual musical expression.