What is a cimbalom and how does it work

The cimbalom is a struck string instrument: the player holds two mallets with heads wrapped in felt or cotton and strikes the strings directly, where they run across a trapezoidal soundbox. It is this direct contact between mallet and string that gives the cimbalom its character: metallic yet soft, with a long ring that floats above the whole band.

How the sound is made

The principle is the same as in a piano, only without the middleman. On a piano you press a key and the action throws a hammer at the string; on a cimbalom, you are the hammer. The stroke sets the string vibrating, the vibration travels through the bridges into the soundboard, and the soundboard amplifies it. The player controls force, colour and striking point directly, which is why the same instrument sounds different under every cimbalist.

Modern concert instruments have a damper pedal. Until the player presses it, the strings ring freely and notes bleed into one another; the pedal damps the ring, rather like a piano’s sustain pedal but working in reverse.

How it is built

• Body: a trapezoidal hardwood case, standing on four legs on concert instruments. It can easily weigh more than 70 kg.
• Strings: steel, grouped into courses of three to four strings per note. A concert instrument with a range of C–a3 has 133 of them.
• Bridges: they divide the strings into speaking sections; some strings sound on both sides of a bridge, each section at a different pitch.
• Tuning pins: one per string, turned with a tuning key.
• Mallets: wooden, with heads wrapped in felt, cotton or leather. The hardness of the wrapping changes the tone colour dramatically.

Where it came from

The cimbalom’s ancestors, board zithers played with mallets, are known from medieval Europe and from Asia alike. The small portable folk cimbalom was part of village bands for centuries. The turning point came in 1874, when the Budapest maker József Schunda built a large pedal cimbalom with stable tuning and a chromatic range, an instrument that could walk onto a concert stage. The workshops of Slovakia and Czechia still build concert cimbaloms in that tradition today.

The instrument now lives in two worlds at once: in folk music as the heart of the cimbalom band, and in classical music as a solo and orchestral voice. Stravinsky, Kodály and Kurtág all wrote for it.

Read next

• How much does a cimbalom cost: new and second-hand prices
• How a cimbalom is tuned
• Where to learn to play the cimbalom