Sambuca

What it means

Sambuca is the name of an ancient string instrument mentioned in Greek and Latin sources. According to the descriptions, it was a harp-like instrument with several strings of differing length and a high sound. Exact details of construction, number of strings, and tuning are not established, since no instruments survive and the sources' statements are brief and partly contradictory. The same name is used in later centuries for quite different instruments, which additionally complicates identification.

Musical use

The mentions place the sambuca in the context of the entertainment and festive music of antiquity; it is sometimes named in the same breath as other plucked instruments. Because harp-like instruments have no fingerboard, their stock of notes is fixed by the tuning, and the music moves within this frame. Little more can be said about its use without speculating: notated sources from antiquity are rare, and from them it cannot be inferred which instrument was meant in each case. The term is therefore of interest above all as evidence for the variety of ancient string instruments. Ancient authors such as Athenaeus mention the sambuca as an instrument with a high, bright sound; pictorial evidence, however, cannot be unambiguously assigned to one instrument type. In the Book of Daniel, the Aramaic sabbeka appears among the instruments at the court of Nebuchadnezzar; it is identified with the sambuca and was wrongly rendered as sackbut in English Bible translations. In the Middle Ages the name was applied on the one hand to a string instrument that can hardly be identified more closely and that glossaries equate with the cithara or harp, and on the other to a wind instrument made of elder wood, Latin sambucus; Isidore of Seville already calls sambuca a brittle wood from which pipes are made.

Performance practice

An established performance practice cannot be described. Whoever works with reconstructions of ancient plucked instruments works with the general principles of such instruments: the stock of notes is fixed by tuning before playing, the deliberate damping of individual strings is as important as the plucking, and the tone colour is controlled through the point of attack. Statements in catalogues and reference works about this instrument should be checked against the source situation, since they often carry forward older conjectures.

For programme texts it holds to disclose the source situation and not to present reconstructions as established tradition.