Dulcimers Surging Ahead
on Multiple Fronts

By Leo Kretzner

You may not have been looking, but an amazing era of evolution in mountain and hammered dulcimers has been under way for the past twenty-five years - and it's definitely not your father's or mother's dulcimer anymore.

First, a generation of builders and players, mostly baby-boomers, raised the standards of dulcimer design and construction as well as the possibilities of what can be played on these instruments. Now, in a most welcomed development, a great influx of young players is in progress - and by young I mean pre-teens, teens and college students - and one suspects that almost anything can happen at this point.

The flagship publication for dulcimer players, The Dulcimer Players News, is now in its 35th year of publication and has recently gone full-color and glossy, with a CD included in each quarterly issue. Virtually every issue underlines these positive trends in building and playing. The Winter 2009 issue featured interviews with a dozen players ages 9 to 24, and they seem to be only the tip of the iceberg of the dulcimer youth quake. Local adult player and teacher Lori Knight was cited in the article for her extensive extracurricular dulcimer teaching to dozens of fifth and sixth graders at her school, a program started with help from fellow local player and performer Cyntia Smith.

Among the many younger players featured was 23-year-old Stephen Humphries, who won the 2007 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship in Winfield, KS. In his view, "A lot of the dulcimer community is made up of people who started playing after they were older. The younger folks picking up these instruments now don't have the same history of seeing it as a folk instrument, and instead are just playing their own music."

‘MY GENERATION'

Melissa Pandiani, a twenty-something from Seattle who fronts a band called The Gloria Darlings, concurs: "There is a big movement in the Northwest right now where kids are reviving a lot of the old traditions, both in instrument and instrumentation, and melding them with new creativity. My generation grew up loving this stuff and finding treasure in basement record boxes that belonged to our parents when they were our age." She also notes that, "We have grown up with such an influx of virtual technology - home computers with internet lines became popular when I was in about 8th grade!" and the resultant technical savvy is of course being put to good use in networking and spreading the music.

For various reasons, the most active part of the dulcimer scene is still most strongly rooted ‘back East,' from the Appalachian states into the Midwest and South-Central region. States from North Carolina to Ohio to Texas boast multiple dulcimer clubs and many small annual festivals that feature mountain and hammered dulcimers. There are also numerous country- and bluegrass-oriented festivals, with contests for fiddle, banjo, and guitars, and increasingly their ‘other instruments' category is filling up with dulcimer players. These events are attracting ambitious young musicians who see the music in an active and positive light.

LOCAL ACTIVITY ABOUNDS IN AUTUMN

In the southern California area, dulcimer clubs are well represented by the Southern California Dulcimer Heritage, a group whose 15th Annual Harvest Festival of Dulcimer will be coming to the OC Sailing & Events Center (34451 Ensenada) in Dana Point on Saturday, October 3rd. This year's festival features Colorado's Kim McKee and Ken Willson on both mountain and hammered dulcimers, plus West Virginia mountain dulcimer master Dave Haas, along with many local teachers and players. In addition to vendors and workshops all day long, the featured performers will be giving both a free noontime concert as well as an evening show. McKee, Willson, and Haas are also teaching master classes on the days before and after the festival. Throughout the year the SCDH promotes local dulcimer players' gigs, open jams, and occasional special workshops through its periodic E-vents Newsletter and website. On any given month in Southern California there are a dozen or more such dulcimer-oriented events happening.

THE INSTRUMENTS - EVOLUTION NOW IN PROGRESS

The quality of dulcimers themselves and the skills of the players are dramatically far beyond what they were circa 1980, when I began encountering the traditional Appalachian dulcimer scene. At that point, huge numbers of instruments existed that were difficult to tune and not necessarily of the best playability. Players predominantly used only the designated ‘melody string' - with perhaps an occasional harmony on the middle or bass strings - to gently coax a ballad along or to crank out a faster fiddle tune. Nowadays, fine professionally made instruments are the norm, all the strings are fair game for melody, and chord styles abound.

On the hammered dulcimer front, instruments have gone from being heavy and strictly diatonic (scale-based) to being much more portable yet in many cases adding strings to become semi- or fully chromatic. Another invention has been the option of adding a foot-pedal damper for the strings, allowing for modulation of string sustain up to and including playing in a punchy pizzicato style and emphasizing the instrument's percussive side. The hammered dulcimer repertoire has grown far beyond standard fiddle tunes to encompass classical music, contemporary songs, and world music pieces of all stripes.

Lap dulcimers remain almost entirely 3- and 4-stringed - albeit sometimes with double-strung courses - but have expanded their key range by the addition of two key extra frets.

 Purists notwithstanding, this has opened up the ability to play in multiple modes and keys with far less retuning than used to be the case. Simultaneously, the use of high quality tuning machines has all but completely replaced the charming-looking but hideously difficult friction pegs of older instruments.

  Dulcimer making has remained largely a cottage industry, resulting in a delightfully vast range of designs and features. However, most builders - often players themselves - have become acutely aware of the finer points of lutherie, turning out instruments of eminent playability and tone production. Hence there are now dozens of high-quality mountain and hammered dulcimer ‘brands' available, and many still in a $300 - $600 price range that is a fraction of what a guitar of similar quality would cost.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Mountain and hammered dulcimers are distant cousins within the zither family of instruments, defined by their strings aligning over the actual body of the instrument as opposed to over a neck of any sort. This group therefore also includes the autoharp, the Japanese koto, the German hummel (‘bumblebee') as well as the classical zither of Austro-Hungary through the Alps.

Of the two dulcimer cousins, the hammered dulcimer springs from the more ancient lineage. It is one of many descendents of the Persian santur, along with the Hungarian cimbalom, German hackbrett and Chinese yangqin. The ‘dulcimer' referred to in the Old Testament may have been a santur or was perhaps a more lyre-like instrument lacking a sound box, but it was certainly not a fretted instrument. Hence, a club for hammered dulcimists in Michigan is called "The Original Dulcimer Player's Club," and they are referring to the instrument itself, not simply to the club's own long-standing existence.

‘BORN IN THE USA'

In contrast, the mountain - or lap, or fretted, or Appalachian - dulcimer is relative upstart. Although it has European ancestors going back a couple of centuries, the American lap dulcimer as we now know it was invented in this country during the mid-to-late 1800s. Findings of some of the oldest instruments tell us this took place in the area of southeast Pennsylvania and Maryland followed by further developments in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Our lap dulcimer is related most closely to European folk zithers such as the French epinette, Norwegian langeleik, and in particular the German sheitholt. The immigrants who became commonly known as the Pennsylvania ‘Dutch' were really Deutsch, i.e., German. Several of their sheitholts - literally, ‘long wood piece' - can be found in the museums of eastern Pennsylvania. In their simplest forms these were long, rectangular boxes with strings over the top and crude frets along only one edge, closest to the player. They were clearly meant to have most of their strings strummed but not fretted.

The mountain dulcimer seems to have begun as a sheitholt placed upon a larger sounding box for - what else? - volume. Appalachian ingenuity! A good deal of ethnomusicology scholarship convincingly shows this arrangement of a naturally amplified sheitholt to be the immediate predecessor of the modern mountain dulcimer. This is beautifully documented in L. Allen Smith's "A Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers" (University of Missouri Press), unfortunately now out of print but occasionally available on-line. The playing and building history of the mountain dulcimer also continues to be detailed in the wonderful work of Ralph Lee Smith of Reston, VA, a collector, player and writer, and a treasure trove of old dulcimer facts and stories.

The other remarkable thing about Pennsylvania German sheitholts is that many were found with an accompanying bow! This lost tradition is being revived by luthier and multi-instrumentalist Ken Bloom, of Pilot Mountain, NC, who every year conducts a class in bowing the dulcimer at Western Carolina University's annual Mountain Dulcimer Week. This yearly week-long gathering also deserves thanks and credit for helping to foster the influx of very young players by offering multiple Youth Scholarships for talented young people interested in the lap dulcimer.

BIGGER SOUNDS, BIGGER DREAMS

There are now of course ways to greatly amplify mountain and hammered dulcimers in addition to setting them astride a large sounding box, and electric dulcimers can be found advertised in any issue of the Dulcimer Players News. Perhaps the most recent take on this was when Melissa Pandiani of Seattle ordered an otherwise very traditional ‘courting dulcimer' with pickups installed.

This mountain dulcimer variant has two fretboards running in opposite directions from each other, and was meant to be played by a ‘courting' couple sitting across from each other holding the instrument on their collective lap. (Allegedly, any overly long breaks in the music would alert nearby elders that something more carnal was afoot.) After contacting one of the largest dulcimer shops in the country, Melissa was told that they'd made plenty of courting dulcimers before but never one with electric pickups!

While this may represent the first electric courting dulcimer in existence, one suspects it will not be the last. The dulcimer revival was once an enclave of senior citizens sprinkled with some latter-day hippies from the 70s who'd taken up the cause, inspired by the likes of Jean Ritchie, Richard and Mimi Farina, and Joni Mitchell. Today it exists as a vibrant community of thousands of players of all ages and musical persuasions from across the country and even around the world. It has truly taken on a life of its own, and the full extent of its progress in instrument and playing styles remains to be seen. It is an evolving body of work and play still very much in progress.

Leo has himself been one of the "latter-day hippies from the 70's" he mentions in the article. He started playing dulcimer in 1975, having been a drummer who dabbled in guitar. His first albums, Dulcimer Fair and Pigtown Fling, have been described as "modern classics" by knowledgeable people (working on actionable intelligence) in the dulcimer community. He long ago abandoned the full time pursuit of poverty through music but still does the occasional performance along with teaching workshops here and elsewhere. He also waters his cacti and plays tunes with The Old Grey Cats stringband in Claremont. www.leokretzner.com