The tambú is played with the bare hands and both the fingers and the palms are used. High notes are achieved by striking the rim of the drum with the finger-tips or with the palms of the hands in a vertical position. The lower notes are created in the middle part of the skin. When playing, the bottom part of the palm is in contact with the uppermost hoop. The way in which the player holds the drum between his knees can also affect the notes.

The tambú is accompanied by the heru, an iron idiophone, which creates a shrill, piercing sound. The heru is found in various forms and under various names: the only essential is ’any kind of metallic object’. The combination of the sound of the drum and the shrill metallic noise form the characteristic and required sound of the ritual tambú . The agan is a very old iron idiophone. There is also the chapi, a hoe or spade, the triangle, and the wiri, a rasp. Iron instruments play a special role in ritual African music. The main reason they were created was because of the tendency of Africans to combine sharp iron sounds with the sound of wooden idiophones and membranophones in their heavily percussive music. The heru is also important for the ’time-line’ or basic rhythm. Besides the traditional magic motifs, others motifs also play a role. An important element, for example, is that Africans have a tendency to ’thicken’ their music by interweaving many rhythms together. Iron instruments and rattles are played at rituals and ceremonies in order to stimulate intensity of feeling and to increase the participants’ sensitivity. Sometimes though, they are used to summon particular gods and to release energy.(6) Practically all these motifs apply to the tambú.

Like the tambú , the heru is played by a man. Only one iron idiophone was used in the original tambú ensembles in previous centuries. At first this was the agan that was later replaced by the chapi. A wiri or triangle was also used sometimes. In the second half of the twentieth century the number of iron idiophones used together on Curaçao increased from one to two and sometimes three. In the eighties the number rose to five and sometimes more. A combination of chapi and wiri or chapi and triangle is also found. The current ensemble consists of a drum with an accompaniment of three or more chapis, a singer and a ’choir’. The iron idiophones which have been described are never used all together. One reason more iron instruments have been used from the sixties onwards was the introduction of the microphone. The singer’s voice was amplified which made it possible to increase the sound level of the heru. Another phenomenon was the element of participation, or the social element – for the boys of the time playing the heru was also a form of taking part in social life.

So far as the nineteenth century is concerned we can say that the tambú – in at least one of its manifestations – was accompanied by a drum, an iron instrument and hand clapping. In the seventeenth century the hoe was already used as an iron tool on the plantations. The use of iron instruments in tambú music is not accidental.

People make music with all the ingredients they consider necessary and the deeper bass of the tambú requires a shriller iron sound to be incorporated in the music. Of course, the natural environment and other circumstances can limit what is available, but people scour their surroundings and use whatever they can find to achieve their ends. It is therefore perfectly possible that the chapi was already in use in the eighteenth century as an accompanying idiophone, replacing the African beaten metal idiophones. This thesis is strengthened by the following quotation from Brusse’s Curaçao en zijne bewoners (Curaçao and its inhabitants). In his report on the slave rebellion of 1795 he wrote: ’They moved forwards to the rattle of the tamboer (drum) and freed their fellows who, because of bad behavior or at their masters’ whim, were in chains.’ In a footnote on the same page he explained the word tamboer as follows: ’Tamboer is what the Negroes here call a small barrel with a skin stretched over it. Such a small barrel, which is struck with the hand, a piece of iron which is jingled with a nail or other iron object, and hand clapping, accompanied by a song or actually monotonous shouting, form the music of the tamboer dance.(6)

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