The marimba carries a Bantu name and a Guatemalan passport
Its name comes from Bantu words meaning many and xylophone, and instruments like it sound across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the marimba's modern concert form was built in Chiapas and Guatemala, where it became a national instrument, and in 2015 the Organization of American States named it Cultural Heritage of the Americas.
At heart it is a set of wooden bars struck with mallets, each with a resonator pipe below to amplify certain harmonics. It sits lower than a xylophone, and its bars usually run chromatically like piano keys. Close relatives include the marimbas of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the West African balafon. The word appeared in English in 1704.
How it reached the Americas is disputed. Many attribute it to enslaved Africans taken to Guatemala and Mexico; others see it as a Maya creation. A Chiapas landowner described in 1545 an instrument of eight red-wood slats played at a celebration, and in Guatemala enslaved Africans are reported playing it around 1550. By 1680 Maya musicians used versions with gourd resonators, and in 1821 Guatemala's independence proclamation made the marimba its national instrument. In Colombia and Ecuador, Afro-Latino communities treasure it as a symbol of resilience, and UNESCO lists Colombian marimba music as intangible heritage.
Technical leaps followed. In 1892 Corazon de Jesus Borras Moreno in Chiapas added a second row of bars to create the double keyboard, and in 1894 Sebastian Hurtado in Quetzaltenango built a chromatic model of hormigo wood. His sons' group played Buffalo, New York, in 1908, introducing it to the United States, where firms such as Deagan and Leedy fitted metal tube resonators. Paul Creston wrote the first solo marimba concerto in 1940, and Darius Milhaud followed with a concerto for marimba and vibraphone in 1947.
Rosewood gives the finest tone, especially a species found only in southern Guatemala and Belize, roughly three times harder than silver maple, while fiberglass bars trade some quality for durability outdoors. Tuners lower a bar's pitch by shaving wood from the middle of its underside. Players get the fullest sound slightly off centre, whereas hitting the node where the cord passes through gives a weak, muted tone.
Source: Marimba
