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Show head made of strips of raw rubber ,f I The marimba has, as a rule, ajlI range of five octaves. It is not ex-w clusively a one-man instrument some being large enough to be played by two or more persons. -cJ" The amazing skill with which Cen-. -tral American artists play the marimba is always admired by ) foreigners. There are families in f which the constructing and play- ;5 h. ing of a marimba has become her-editary. her-editary. Its sound blends particu- : ' larly well with string instruments -s and js frequently played with ac-compaiment ac-compaiment of guitars and violins KNOW YOUR i Xjlii NEIGHBOR THE MARIMBA OF CENTRAL AMERICA The typical musical background to life in Central America and particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador are the notes of the marimba, mar-imba, one of the most purely national na-tional and localized instruments of the world. The question of whether wheth-er the marimba is an American instrument in-strument or brought over from Europe Eu-rope or Africa by either the colonists colo-nists or their slaves, has for years been the cause of much debate. It is a well known fact that marimbas marim-bas existed in ancient times in Africa but "although some may have been brought into Central America during colonial days, it does not necessarily follow that this instrument was unknown in America before that time." That a mountain in Guatemala should have the pre-Columbian native name of Chinal Jul the marimba of the ravines seems to indicate that the instrument may have been familiar to the people of our hemisphere, hem-isphere, before the arrival of the great navigator. The marimba a close relative of the xylophone is an instrument instru-ment made of a series of pieces of wood placed on a base in a certain cer-tain order, giving out a musical sound when struck with sticks. The construction of the marimba is quite a complicated process that has to be done carefully from the choosing of the wood to the last finishing touches on the playing sticks. It is really a labor of love, done most of the time by the players play-ers themselves. "You would never think of Paderwsky constructing his own piano or of Paganini or Sarasate making a Stradivarius to play on, yet in the marimba you have an instrument that has been constructed by the musicians who are about to play on it. The first requisite for a good marimba is the wood, which has to be of the hard kind and pref- erably of the Hormigo species. From this wood, small elongated blocks are carefully cut out with them and submitted to a slow hatchets a saw would harm drying process. When the wooden frame, a sort of long topless table in the shape of a trapezoid, is ready, rea-dy, the slats or keys of wood cut in accordance with a scale of prescribed pre-scribed dimensions and then polished pol-ished and tuned to a certain pitch very much like the one used for the piano are laid on it in a given order. Under these a're placed sounding boxes made of cedar, which have replaced the gourds used for this purpose in more primitive instruments, and at the lower end of which a thin mem-rane mem-rane is stretched over a small hole. The sound waves that come from the upper part of the sounding box when the key is struck, descend, causing the membrane sto vibrate which accounts for that soft melodious melo-dious tone characteristic of the marimba." Finally the playing sticks are about 18 inches long, of flexible wood and with a round |