Though one-note xylophones are fairly rare, they do exist. For example, in the Basque regions of northern Spain and southern France, the txalaparta is a wooden beam played, somewhat competitively, by two players who pound it with a wooden club held in each hand. The interlocking rhythms they produce are highly complex and exciting to listen to. One-note instruments are also found in Central Africa in Zaire, where a single xylophone bar suspended over a resonator is, apparently, played by elephant hunters (presumably for ceremonial dance rather than to attract elephants), and in Fiji, where women lay the lali ne meke, a wooden bar with a resonance hollow carved out on the underside, across their legs to accompany singing.
The use of two or three bars laid across the legs is found in many areas, as is a few bars laid over a pit in the ground, the pit or the space between the legs and the ground acting as a resonance chamber. A pair of wooden logs provides support for a larger number of bars. In East Africa, these logs are frequently banana stems, a fairly soft material into which it is easy to push thin sticks to hold the bars apart. More elaborate is the use of a trough resonator, a built-up box or a hollowed log over which the bars are placed, to form a single resonating chamber. Such instruments are common in Southeast Asia, including in the Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestras, where the bars are of bronze as well as wood, and also in our children’s school percussion bands. The most elaborate form is that which we see in many parts of Africa, in Central America, and in all our orchestral instruments, where each bar has its own resonator, sized and tuned to match the pitch of the bar above it.
Is it justifiable to see this as a developmental sequence? There would seem to be a steady ergological sequence from the leg and pit xylophone through the log and the trough to the individually resonated. However, the fact that each type exists in various areas, to the apparent satisfaction of its community—sometimes, as in central Java, in coexistence in the same gamelan or orchestra—argues against such an idea: the trough is found to be the best for the wooden-barred gambang and bronze-barred saron, whereas the bronze gender is better resonated with individual tubes, traditionally of widebore bamboo but now usually yellow-painted tin-plate. The argument is reinforced in East Africa with the log xylophone that is often played by three or more players, one providing a bass part at one end, another a treble ostinato at the other end, and two players facing each other in the middle playing an elaborately interlocked melodic pattern. No other pattern of xylophone would have the space or layout to permit this.
The question is rendered more complex by theories that the xylophone originated in Southeast Asia and was carried to Africa by Indonesian traders. There is no doubt at all that there was such contact, for the Indonesian influence in Madagascar is strong and there is good evidence in other parts of Africa also. But the strongest argument against such theories is the existence of all these forms of xylophone at both ends of the axis. If this was a developmental sequence, then we would expect such a sequence to be evident in only one of the areas, whereas we see it in both, and no one could seriously propose development at one end and retrogression at the other. So we are left with strong xylophone cultures in two areas, separated by the Indian Ocean, and none anywhere else in the world, for we know that the European use derived from African contact and that the Central American arose from the reconstruction of that instrument by transported African slaves.
The xylophone is widely used on the Southeast Asian mainland, in the same area as the stone instrument that we described in the previous section, and has a number of forms, the most spectacular being a horseshoe frame curving high into the air above the seated player. Horizontal forms, on trough resonators, are also common, and it is this pattern that we see repeated in Java.
Friction Drums
