CID1995-001 - ethnographic attestation
Ciudad Rodrigo slate zumbadera
Spain - Tierra de Ciudad Rodrigo - Salamanca - Europe - Iberia
Play / practical
zumbadera
zumbadera: Spanish, 'buzzer,' from zumbar, to buzz; pizarra is slate.
Slate splits into flat plates almost by itself, and in the Tierra de Ciudad Rodrigo, the granite-and-slate frontier country on the Portuguese border, children put that to use: a shard of flat pizarra, a fine cord through it, and a turn of the arm gave the buzz that named it. When José Ramón Cid Cebrián inventoried the region's traditional instruments, the zumbadera opened his chapter on aerophones — those with neither tube nor body — just ahead of a blade of green grass stretched between two thumbs and blown.
Es un juguete de chiquillos compuesto de un trozo de pizarra plana que atado con una cuerda fina se gira produciendo un zumbido característico.
José Ramón Cid Cebrián, Instrumentos tradicionales de música de la tierra de Ciudad Rodrigo (1995), p. 19
- Object
- Piece of flat slate tied to a fine cord and rotated.
- Function
- Children's toy rotated to produce a characteristic buzz.
- Source
- Cid Cebrián 1995 exact definition and aerophone classification
- Source location
- p. 19 / PDF p. 18
- Source confidence
- medium Ciudad Rodrigo district anchor; no village named.
- Toy / secular survival