88.1 KDHX Saint Louis

this is a show of music for the hammered dulcimer/cimbalom. It all began with the Persian Santur, but I will begin with one of my favorite pieces

This is the instrument that started it all - the Persian santur. Here it is solo, but in the following tracks it is part of an ensemble

Chinese music for the ErHu, but accompanied by a Yang Qin. The name means "foreign instrument", and it originally had silk strings, but they were replaced by bronze about 150 years ago, and, most recently, steel.

this starts a group of tunes played on the Greek sandouri, hammer dulcimer of small-to medium size and strung a bit differently than the larger Romanian/Hungarian/Ukrainian instruments

This starts a group of tunes by Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe. Very few of the "tsimbl" players made it over to the US, but a major player was Joseph Moskowitz, here in a historic recording. Following this will be some of the revival groups that have taken the instrument up

This LP was produced in Poland in the 1970s to showcase music groups from Rzeszów province of southe eastern Poland, up on the Ukrainian border

The Hutsuls are a Ukrainian dialect group living in the Carpathian mountains

music from Slovenia

Pal Tendl was a very prolific cimbalom player from northwestern Hungary. His compositions are still played today

The player is Hungarian, and young when he did this. The Hungarian folk revival, mostly by non-Roma, would have been very different without him. Here is he playing a Transylvanian tune

Elemar Balogh was the uncle of Kalman Balogh, in the previous selection. This is the way most Hungarians heard their own music - an urban, Roma , style, and not at all "folk revival" - Magyar Nota, from an old Qualiton LP from the 1970s

1983