Ciudad Rodrigo slate zumbadera

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.

Particulars

Object

Piece of flat slate tied to a fine cord and rotated.

Function

Children's toy rotated to produce a characteristic buzz.