Dig a hole in the ground. Then another close by, and another close to that. Place different length pieces of wood across the holes, then strike them in rhythm. Hey, that sounds pretty good...
The holes act like resonating chambers while the suspension allows the wood to vibrate. African oral histories include stories of these in-the-ground instruments, and eventually someone came up with the idea of attaching gourds beneath the wooden keys, allowing the resonating “holes” to travel with the rest of the instrument. Now that sounds even better, and I can take it with me!
Though it’s often argued that similar xylophone-type instruments can be traced to Asia as far back as 2000 BC, the predecessors of what was to become the modern marimba certainly lie in Africa. The word “marimba” actually comes from the Bantu language, which is still spoken across a huge swath of the continent, from the Central African Republic to South Africa. African Marimbas took many forms, evolving as they developed in different areas: the sloping Gyil of Ghana and Burkina Faso; the grand Akadinda from Uganda which was often played for royalty by musicians on both sides of the instrument; the Chopi timbila of Mozambique, which are played in groups of five to thirty instruments of different sizes and tunings; and Mali’s Balafon, which by lore was delivered by a magical genie and plays a central role in the epic middle-ages poems about the foundations of the 13th century Mali empire.
Starting in the 16th century, the slave trade brought not just people to the western hemisphere, but also their traditions and cultures, including their marimbas. In South America, there are rich musical traditions dating back to the African diaspora of the 16th century that utilize similar instruments, especially in Colombia and Ecuador. Another family of marimbas can be found from Costa Rica stretching north through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and into Mexico. In fact, our journey is drawing to a close, as it was there in 1850 where Manuel Bolán Cruz (1810-1863) made substantial contributions to the development of the marimba by flattening the instrument (up until then they were bowed), changing out the resonating gourds with longer wooden resonators, extending the range by adding more bars, and lengthening the legs to make it easier to stand and perform. Towards the end of the 19th century, another Mexican, Corazón de Jesús Borras Moreno, further refined the instrument to something very similar to the marimba of today with a standardized chromatic tuning. By the mid-1900s, marimbas had found their way into American popular and classical music. American composer Charles Preston wrote the first Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra in 1940, followed in 1947 by Darius Milhaud’s Concerto for Marimba, Vibraphone, and Orchestra. Today’s program features the Marimba in a wide range of uses, from reinterpreting the music of JS Bach to Gabriella Ortiz’s Atlas Puma from 1995. –ML