X is for Xylophone

The Xylophone is a very simple instrument, perhaps one of the first Fisher-Price toys you had as a kid. Bang a stick on different colored bits of metal to make different sounds. The xylophone is also one of the most ancient of inventions, replicated in different ways over time and across cultures, with different names. Same principle. Hit something with a stick and make music. The music produced isn’t always simple; in 2019, music professor Lee Hinkle of the University of Maryland performed a 21-scene solo opera on the xylophone.

Today, the sounds are made with metal or plastic, but for centuries they were made on wood and on stone. Ancient xylophones may have appeared first in the Far East, especially the Southeast, an area passed over by archaeologists. People made them throughout Africa, where they still play them today. Sometimes the wood or rocks were chosen and arranged together. In other places, the rocks that made music were part of the where people lived, at least to the imaginative. If the music is made from rocks, those instruments have a special name: lithophones. Some of those lithophones may just be 12,000 years old.

Today, let’s ask three questions about this ancient invention:

1. What makes something a xylophone?
2. Where and when were xylophones and their musical counterparts created?
3. What can the invention of this class of musical instruments reveal about ancient cultures?

Overall, it seems that a key part of the Stone Age was not just forming stone tools for hunting but also for music.

The Various Definitions of Banging

You’re probably already thinking, if I hit something with a stick, isn’t that a drum? Yes and no. The xylophone is part of the percussion music family, which is defined as instrument which produces music by being hit. Other music families involve strings vibrating (violins, kitharas), or woodwinds, which are vibrating air columns inside the instrument (flutes, oboes). In the previous “M” post on Music, I noted that bone flutes have been found that are 30-40,000 years old, which makes woodwinds officially the oldest instruments.

There is, however, a distinction between drums and xylophones. A drum is a single object being hit. A xylophone is multiple objects being hit. Hit one piece of wood, and it’s a drum. Hit three pieces of wood of different lengths, and it’s a xylophone. Drums also are typically circular and have a skin stretched across the top, which is why they are subcategorized as membranophones. The sound comes from the membrane over the drum. Things which make sound by being struck directly, such as xylophones or cymbals, are called idiophones.

A little etymology will help us out. Idio is Greek for “unique/self,” so an idiophone is a sound produced by the thing itself. Xylo is Greek for “wood,” so a xylophone means wood is being hit to make a sound. A marimba is–today–considered a sub-group of xylophones, even though marimbas are all made of wood, and xylophones are no longer all made of wood. The distinctions between xylophones and marimbas today is a matter of tone, created for classification purposes. Marimba is a Bantu word, appropriate, since the Sub-Saharan African countries may have been some of the first to create those unique wooden sounds.

Lastly, there are lithophones. Litho is Greek for stone or rock, so lithophones are another subclass of the xylophone family. But this subclass is likely the oldest. Hitting stones was probably the earliest kind of percussion. In fact, the oldest possible examples may have come from the biggest stones of all, the walls, pillars, and boulders that humans used as shelter.

Bang a Gong? Fire in the Twilight?

Among all this discussion of “rock” music, I can’t help but think of real rock music that might give this post a soundtrack. Pick your choice: T. Rex’s 1971 “Bang a Gong”? Wang Chung’s “Fire in the Twilight”? We’re going to get to a famous marimba piece before we’re done, i promise. Hum your favorite while you read.

Multiple places in the world have been identified as having “singing rocks” or “ringing rocks.” Bang on the rocks in different places, and different tones emerge. Some of these large rock arrangements are created in recent centuries, like the musical stones of Skiddaw, England and several sites in Pennsylvania. But there are places identified as ancient settlements, particularly near the Fertile Crescent, where the rocks sing.

I’ve mentioned Göbekli Tepe several times, the 10,000-year-old settlement in Turkey with stone pillars and carvings. Acoustic studies were performed on the rocks and pillars and found intense resonant tones, which the researchers think point to where religious rituals were performed. Then, there’s a spot in Azerbaijan, roughly the same part of the world, known as Gobustan. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, Gobustan hills have sections where archaeologists think people banged on the rocks. Tones vary, and there are indentations that seem like people hitting them, thousands of times. Tourists still test them, so the indentations continue.

All of this is speculation, to be sure. The problem with identifying whether anything was used for percussion is the lack of evidence. Someone has to carve flute holes in a bone for it to be called a flute, and even those examples have been hotly debated. Without a video, it’s hard to know if Homo erectus was banging on the walls in Turkey or Azerbaijan or not. There have been cave paintings of people who appear to be dancing, and archaeologists now think that fire might have animated those wall paintings. Maybe they drummed on the walls and danced–we don’t know. I like to think so.

Maybe Moses Was Testing a Xylophone

Along with considering an appropriate soundtrack for this post, I was musing about that Bible story where Moses hit the rock, instead of speaking to it as Yahweh ordered. He hits it twice, and God becomes angry because he told him to talk to it, not hit it. As a result, Moses is not allowed to go to the Promised Land, which always seemed especially vindictive on God’s part. But maybe Moses was just being a rebel musician, early punk-style? If the rock made a great sound, maybe it was worth it!

The ancient Vietnamese people might have thought so. Lithophones that date back to nearly 2000 BCE have been found in archaeological digs in Southeast Asia. French anthropologist Georges Condominas, who worked extensively on researching the Mnong people of Vietnam, identified a variety of examples of rocks believed to be lithophones.

The story goes that a series of differently-sized rocks were found during–what else–construction of a freeway. Because these rocks had been shaped and could be arranged in a sequence of ascending tones, Condominas identified them as lithophones. The Vietnamese people still play these, referring to them as dan da, So archaeologists have been encouraged to keep looking and, since the mid-20th century, over 200 sets of rocks, many several centuries old, have been confirmed as lithophones.

Vietnam isn’t the only place where people created lithophones, although perhaps the oldest. Another set of rocks recently were found in the United States, in Great Sand Dunes monument in Colorado. These were found in pueblo settlements dating from the mid-1400 CE, so not as old. However, they were originally thought categorized as grinding tools, such as pestles for grinding. The re-classification, according to work done by Marilyn Martorano, reaffirms that some of what might have been considered “a bunch of rocks” might have had other qualities.

If lithophones gained a foothold in Southeast Asia, it may be why examples of rock-tone based percussion instruments are found all over China, Korea, and Japan. Several religions use instruments where bells, stones, or other objects are suspended or placed in sequence and struck. They take many names: bonan, gamelan, or bianqing, for example. These are also cousins and ancestors of an instrument heard in many towns on Sundays–church bells are also idiophones.

The Trees Can Also Sing

They call them ranat or pong lang in Thailand, claquebois in France, mokkin in Japan, and marimbas in Africa and Central America. Stones were found objects in Neolithic settlements, already collected to make tools. Wood would have to be cut and shaped–and kept out of the fire.

Still, wood-based musical instruments are native to dozens of cultures. They would not have turned up in archaeological digs because the wood doesn’t survive. But the frequency of their appearance around the globe, and the fact that lithophones have been found, imply that perhaps these were companion instruments. You play the rocks, and I’ll play the wood.

It’s certainly the case that arranged bits of wood struck with mallets are easier to make than church bells or harpsichords. Many find that, as simple as they are, these marimbas are just as likely to make you dance.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxEKrX4BkrUajcEJiR3Oc-yRdn7lpDF1Qb?si=TdW5-Ia5MM6pCgXT

The marimba solo I remember best comes from a one-hit wonder band called Starbuck. In 1976, the bands sported spandex jumpsuits and shaggy hair. Too much chest and not enough face, to my mind. But some of these guys could really play. This song is “Moonlight Feels Right,” and while you can track down this short-lived Top 40 hit on Youtube, the link here is just the marimba solo. It should still leave you satisfied. Wonder if anyone’s ever done a lithophone solo?