according to Fétis.[2] The Persians place its origin in the highest antiquity. Carl Engel[3] gives an illustration said to be taken from a very old painting.[4]
The dulcimer was extensively used during the middle ages in England, France, Italy, Germany, Holland and Spain, and although it had a distinctive name in each country, it was everywhere regarded as a kind of psalterium. The importance of the method of setting the strings in vibration by means of hammers, and its bearing on the acoustics of the instrument, were recognized only when the invention of the pianoforte had become a matter of history. It was then perceived that the psalterium in which the strings were plucked, and the dulcimer in which they were struck, when provided with keyboards, gave rise to two distinct families of instruments, differing essentially in tone quality, in technique and in capabilities: the evolution of the psalterium stopped at the harpsichord, that of the dulcimer gave us the pianoforte. The dulcimer is described and illustrated by Mersenne,[5] who calls it psaltérion; it has thirteen courses of pairs of unisons or octaves; the first strings were of brass wire, the others of steel. The curved stick was allowed to fall gently on to the strings and to rebound many times, which, Mersenne remarks, produces an effect similar to the trembling or tremolo of other instruments. Praetorius[6] figures a hackbrett having a body in the shape of a truncated triangle, with a bridge placed between two rose sound-holes, and played by means of two sticks. Another kind of hackbrett[7] (a psaltery), which was played with the fingers, was known to Praetorius. The pantaleon, a double dulcimer, named after the inventor, Pantaleon Hebenstreit of Eisleben, a violinist, had two sound-boards, 185 strings, one scale of overspun catgut, the other of wire. Hebenstreit travelled to Paris with his monster dulcimer in 1705 and played before Louis XIV., who baptized it Pantaléon. Quantz[8] and Quirin of Blankenburg[9] both gave descriptions of the instrument.
(K. S.)
[1] The names of the musical instruments in those verses of the Book of Daniel have formed the basis of a controversy as to the authenticity of the book.
[2] Histoire de la musique (Paris, 1869), vol. ii. p. 131.
[3] Music of the most Ancient Nations (London, 1864), pp. 42-3.
[4] Hommaire de Hell, Voyage en Perse, p. lxii.
[5] L’Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), livre iii. p. 174.
[6] Syntagma musicum (Wolfenbüttel, 1618), pl. 18 (3).