Every year I visit my mother for Christmas and make the annual pilgrimage with her to our old church for Christmas Eve services. In the last several years they have had a fellow playing music prior to the beginning of said services as parishioners are coming in to take their seats. He is playing all the familiar traditional Christmas hymns, but... on a hammered dulcimer. Now I have heard some lovely music played on the hammered dulcimer, but regrettably this fellow's Christmas samples are not among them. With but two hammers he tries to hit every note and chord he can possibly hit as quickly as he can, chasing down the melody with one arpeggio after another until every string on the instrument is ringing sympathetically and the whole sanctuary is vibrating to the cacophony. To say it is horrendous is an understatement as it is often actually painful to the ears (at least mine, which are sensitive to loud or discordant sounds).
I have only known one player of the hammered dulcimer to actually have a damping device built into a custom made instrument. She puts one foot on a spring loaded pedal and when she needs to quiet the strings, all she has to do is lift her foot and two felt lined dampers rise against the strings. It is quite effective. Would that this fellow had such a device on his instrument, or learned a more judicious use of arpeggios, or better yet, took up the lute. Regards, Craig To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
