Cymbal

• 1. Introduction

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  Cymbals are one of the oldest percussion instruments still in everyday use. A 7th-century BC relief carved in the Armenian Highlands shows a figure holding what are unmistakably circular plates struck together. That same basic design, thin round plates of copper alloy, turns up in ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Greece and Rome, and across the pages of the Bible, through Psalms and songs of praise. What draws people to an instrument that makes, at its core, a single crashing sound? And how did something that janissary soldiers used to terrify enemies on a Turkish battlefield in the 14th century end up at the heart of a jazz trio, a symphony orchestra, and a teenage drummer's bedroom kit? The story moves through Persian epics, Viennese concert halls, and the early jazz clubs of the 1900s. It raises questions about anatomy, about weight and profile, about what it actually means to "play" a disc of metal. A player of cymbals is known as a cymbalist. What that title contains is far more than first appears.

• 2. Ancient Roots and World Spread

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  Representations of cymbals carved into stone from the Armenian Highlands date to the 7th century BC, placing them among the most ancient of documented instruments. Similar images appear in Larsa, Babylon, Assyria, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome, suggesting the instrument spread across enormous distances before recorded history filled in the gaps. In India, cymbals have remained in continuous use from ancient times to the present. Large cymbals are considered essential at the gigantic aartis held along the Ganges, revered by Hindus worldwide. Buddhist sites across the subcontinent keep the tradition alive as well.

  The Persian epic the Shahnameh, composed in stages around 977 and 1010 CE, mentions cymbals at least 14 times. Most appearances place them in a military setting: their crashing sound was used to frighten enemies or celebrate a victory. The Persian word for them is sanj or senj. The Shahnameh does not claim Persian origin for the instrument; it repeatedly calls them "Indian cymbals." Other descriptions in the text label them "golden" and "brass", and to play them is to "clash" them. Linguists tracing the word sanj generally identify it as a Pahlavi term. One interpretation links it to the concept of weight, suggesting the original phrase may have been sanjkub, meaning "striking weights" against each other. A competing account reads it as a reformed version of the word zang, meaning bell, referring to the plate's bell-like shape.

  China received the instrument later, with evidence pointing to an introduction from Central Asia sometime in the 3rd or 4th century AD. That transmission westward into Europe came through Turkey, where the cymbal entered military use with the janissaries no later than the 14th century. By the 17th century, European musicians had taken up the instrument, and by the mid 18th century it appeared regularly in military bands and orchestras. The Persian Ashura ceremony also adopted cymbals over time, replacing the original practice of striking stones against a mourner's sides. Cities including Lahijan, Aran of Kashan, Semnan, and Sabzevar have hosted this ceremony, where sanj and ratchets now accompany lamentation songs.

• 3. The Physics of the Plate

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  Every cymbal begins with a hole drilled through its center, used either to mount it on a stand or to thread the leather straps that allow hand-playing. Surrounding that hole is the raised section called the bell, dome, or cup. The bell produces a higher, pinging pitch than the rest of the cymbal's surface. Extending outward from the bell is the bow, which can itself be divided into two zones: the thicker ride area nearer the bell, and the thinner crash area that tapers toward the edge. The outermost boundary is the rim.

  Cymbals are measured in inches or centimeters across their diameter, and size directly shapes sound. Larger cymbals are generally louder and ring longer. Weight refers to how thick the plate is, and it pulls in two directions simultaneously. Heavier cymbals cut through surrounding sound more clearly, articulate drum stick strikes with more precision, and project a louder volume. Thinner cymbals trade those qualities for a fuller overall tone, a lower pitch, and a faster response to being struck.

  The profile adds a third variable. It measures the vertical distance from the bottom of the bell to the cymbal's edge, describing how bowl-shaped the instrument is. Higher-profile cymbals, curving more steeply, produce a higher pitch than flatter ones. A skilled maker or player adjusting any one of these three dimensions, diameter, weight, and profile, changes the resulting sound in ways that are predictable but never entirely the same twice. That complexity is part of what has kept the basic copper-alloy disc at the center of percussion for thousands of years.

• 4. Orchestral Life

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  Wagner used cymbals in the Venus music of Tannhauser to evoke frenzy. Grieg reached for them in the Peer Gynt suite. Mozart called on them in Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail to suggest bacchanalian excess. Composers have recognized for centuries that cymbals possess a timbre capable of projecting against a full orchestra even through the heaviest orchestrations, adding color at the quietest dynamic or cutting through the loudest.

  Orchestral clash cymbals are traditionally held in pairs by straps set through the bells. From that basic hold a percussionist can produce a range of distinct sounds. Rubbing the edges together in a sliding movement creates a sizzle. A direct strike produces the crash. Tapping the edge of one against the body of the other gives a tap-crash. Scraping from inside the bell to the edge produces a scrape, also called a zischen. Clamping the two plates together and choking the vibration is called a hi-hat or crush. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 requires the percussionist to open by playing pianissimo, adding color rather than impact. A composer wishing the sound to decay naturally may write laissez vibrer, often abbreviated l.v., or the Italian secco.

  The traditional pairing of cymbals with the bass drum has deep practical roots. An older convention had a single percussionist mount one cymbal to the bass drum shell, crashing with the left hand while striking the drum with a mallet in the right. Stravinsky specifically calls for this arrangement in his ballet Petrushka. Mahler calls for it in his Titan Symphony. The modern standard gives the two instruments independent parts, though in kit drumming a cymbal crash almost always lands with a simultaneous kick to the bass drum.

  Berlioz supplied one of the most unusual orchestral cymbal moments. For Romeo and Juliet he requested two pairs of ancient cymbals modeled on instruments found at Pompeii, some no larger than a large coin, tuned to F and B flat. Those instruments belong to what the source calls the crotales tradition: small, disc-shaped cymbals of definite pitch, the exception in a world of indefinite-pitch instruments.

• 5. The Suspended Cymbal

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  Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique contains the first known instance of a sponge-headed mallet being used on a cymbal. That single final chord marked the beginning of a new approach to the instrument, one built around allowing the plate to ring freely rather than crash and stop. The suspended cymbal takes its name from the original method: a leather strap or rope let it hang freely, maximizing vibration and sustain.

  Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this suspension technique during the early 1900s. Later drummers mounted the cymbal horizontally, replacing the leather strap system with felt-padded metal clamps, and the modern ride cymbal descended from that line of development. When played with yarn-, sponge-, or cord-wrapped mallets, suspended cymbals can move between extremes of texture. Struck forcefully, they produce bright and slicing tones. Played quietly, they emit what the source describes as an eerie, transparent, "windy" sound. A roll played with two mallets alternating on opposite sides of the cymbal can build from near silence to an overwhelming climax, a quality Humperdinck used in the Mother Goose Suite.

  Percussionists have found other surfaces and tools. Some players in the fourth movement of Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 scrape a coin or triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal to create a "zing" sound. Drawing a bass bow across the edge produces something the source compares to the sound of squealing car brakes. Composers sometimes call for felt mallets or timpani mallets when they want a different balance of attack and sustain. Striking the edge with the shoulder of a drum stick produces a sound closer to that of clash cymbals. All of these techniques emerged from a single innovation: letting the plate hang free.

• 6. From Orchestra to Drum Kit

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  The hi-hat's lineage runs directly from crash cymbals. The intermediate stage was a device called the low-sock, which then evolved into the modern hi-hat pair. Even in a contemporary drum kit, the hi-hat and the bass drum retain the linked relationship they shared in the pit orchestra of an earlier era: both are controlled by the player's feet. Hi-hat cymbals, however, tend to be heavy with little taper, making them function more like a ride cymbal than a crash cymbal in terms of sound and playing feel.

  A standard drum kit builds outward from that pairing. It includes at minimum a crash cymbal, a ride cymbal, or a combined crash/ride, along with the hi-hat pair. From those essentials players have developed a range of additional types: bell cymbals, China cymbals, finger cymbals, flat ride cymbals, sizzle cymbals, splash cymbals, swish cymbals, and the Indian taal. Each carries a different diameter, weight, and profile chosen to produce a specific sound within a kit.

  The terminology across languages underlines how widely the instrument has traveled. Orchestral scores mark cymbals in French as cymbales, in German as Becken, Schellbecken, Teller, or Tschinellen, in Italian as piatti or cinelli, and in Spanish as platillos. Several of those words, piatti and platillos among them, trace back to the word for plates, the same everyday object the instrument physically resembles. That plainness of description, plates that ring when struck, sits alongside the instrument's presence in Beethoven's ninth symphony and the janissary battalions of 14th-century Turkey.