From the Balafon to the Orchestra: The Story of the Xylophone
In the early 1350s, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta reached the court of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Among the music he described was an instrument made of reeds with small gourds hanging beneath them, played with sticks. Historians generally take this as one of the earliest written descriptions of the balafon, the West African ancestor of the xylophone family.
Wooden bars that ring when struck are among the oldest and most widespread musical ideas in the world. Long before the xylophone appeared in European concert halls, musicians in Africa and Southeast Asia had refined it into sophisticated instruments with rich repertoires. This is the story of how that idea travelled, changed and found its way into orchestras, early recordings and school music rooms.
Wooden bars in Southeast Asia and Africa
No one knows exactly where or when the first xylophone was made, and historians debate whether the instrument developed independently in several places. What is clear is that wooden-bar instruments have long and deep histories in both Southeast Asia and Africa.
In Indonesia, the gambang, with wooden bars set over a boat-shaped box, is part of the Javanese gamelan orchestra. In Thailand, the curved ranat ek plays fast, ornamented melodies in the classical piphat ensemble. Across sub-Saharan Africa, wooden xylophones appear in many forms: the gyil of northern Ghana and Burkina Faso, the large amadinda of Uganda played by several musicians at once, and the timbila of the Chopi people of Mozambique, played in large orchestras and recognised by UNESCO as cultural heritage.
The balafon and the griots
In West Africa, the balafon became the instrument of the griots (or jeli), the hereditary musicians and historians of the Mande world. A typical balafon has wooden bars tied over a frame, with a gourd resonator beneath each bar. Small holes in the gourds are covered with thin membranes that buzz when the bar is struck, giving the sound a characteristic rasp.
Tradition holds that one particular balafon, the Sosso Bala, belonged to the thirteenth-century king Sumanguru Kanté and passed to the followers of Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire. This story comes from the oral epic of Sundiata, so it should be read as tradition rather than documented history, but the instrument kept in the village of Niagassola in Guinea is honoured as a sacred object, and UNESCO has recognised its cultural space.
African musicians carried their knowledge of these instruments across the Atlantic during the era of the slave trade. In Central America, it contributed to the development of the marimba, which became a national symbol in Guatemala.
A slow arrival in Europe
In Europe, the wooden xylophone long remained a folk curiosity. A German book on organs from 1511, by Arnolt Schlick, mentions an instrument of wooden pieces, often cited as one of the earliest European references. For centuries, versions were played by travelling musicians, sometimes with the bars resting on bundles of straw, which gave rise to the German nickname Strohfiedel, or "straw fiddle".
In the 1830s, a Polish-Jewish musician named Michał Józef Guzikow toured Europe playing an improved straw-fiddle xylophone with remarkable virtuosity. He drew large audiences and impressed musicians including Felix Mendelssohn, and he helped show that the xylophone could be a serious concert instrument.
Rattling bones: the xylophone joins the orchestra
The xylophone's big orchestral moment came in 1874, when Camille Saint-Saëns used it in Danse macabre, his tone poem about skeletons dancing in a graveyard at midnight. The dry, clattering sound of the wooden bars suggested rattling bones so vividly that the effect became famous. Saint-Saëns reused the idea in "Fossils" from The Carnival of the Animals in 1886.
Over the following decades, composers increasingly wrote for the instrument. Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich and many others used its bright, cutting tone for colour, wit and menace. Instrument makers in Europe and the United States, such as the Deagan company of Chicago, developed modern keyboard-style xylophones with the bars laid out like a piano and tuned resonator tubes underneath.
The ragtime xylophone stars
In the early twentieth century, the xylophone enjoyed an unexpected period of popular fame. Early acoustic recording equipment captured its crisp attack unusually well, and xylophone records of ragtime, marches and novelty pieces sold widely. Vaudeville stages featured xylophone soloists who played at dazzling speed.
The best-known of these players was George Hamilton Green, an American virtuoso who made many recordings in the 1910s and 1920s and composed ragtime showpieces such as "Log Cabin Blues" that percussionists still play. Players like Red Norvo later brought the xylophone into jazz before many musicians moved on to the vibraphone, with its sustaining metal bars.
Classrooms and concert halls
In the mid-twentieth century, the xylophone found another important home: the classroom. The German composer Carl Orff and his colleague Gunild Keetman made small, simple xylophones central to the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education, and millions of children have played their first melodies on them. At the other end of the scale, modern percussion soloists such as Evelyn Glennie have shown how expressive and virtuosic the whole mallet family can be.
The xylophone today
Today the xylophone rings out in orchestras, film scores, marching bands, school music rooms and pop productions. Traditional balafon, gyil and timbila players continue their own living traditions, and percussionists cross between them and the Western concert instrument.
Anyone can also tap out a first melody right away: HarmonyHub lets you play a virtual xylophone free in your browser, and you can explore its relatives in the percussion instruments collection. From Ibn Battuta's account at the court of Mali to a child's first song, the ringing of struck wood has kept its magic for centuries.