Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts
wbur.org
wbur.org
The company’s proprietary alloy was alchemized 13 generations ago in Constantinople (now Istanbul) by Debbie Zildjian’s ancestor, Avedis I. He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin. “The mixing of those metals produced a very loud, resonant, beautiful sound,” she said.
Debbie explained that in 1618 the Ottoman sultan summoned Avedis to the Topkapi Palace to make cymbals for elite military bands. The metalsmith’s work pleased the ruler, who gave him permission to found his own business in 1623. The sultan also bestowed Avedis the family name "Zildjian" which actually means cymbal maker. He went on to craft cymbals that were widely used, including in churches and by belly dancers.
> Cymbals and bells had been made of bronze for centuries; the formula of eight parts of copper to two parts of tin was well known, but at some point Avedis stumbled upon a process of making a bronze alloy which held its strength and temper even when hammered and worked to a previously unimaginable thinness. The technique he discovered allowed cymbals to be made which had a distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved. The bronze alloy itself was no mystery, but the mixing process, the method of combining the metals in molten form to create the castings from which the cymbals was made, was a secret held only by Avedis. The resulting cymbals, said to contain traces of gold or silver, must have pleased the Sultan enough to commission Avedis to make cymbals for the Janissaries, the superior fighting forces of the Ottomans. The music of the Janissary bands relied profoundly on the striking of the cymbals, and Avedis became the official supplier to the Sultan.
Bells ring when you hit them, but cymbals have a thin bow which vibrates wildly and crashes when hit. It's a radically different sound, and apparently a radically different physical behaviour, though I don't understand the physics. So what I suspect happened was this: thick-walled, bell-like zils had long been manufactured in Constantinople, in various different sizes. But Avedis I's alloy turned out to be (again, I assume) the first (at least in the Middle East or Europe) to allow zils to be made thin enough to crash like a cymbal, not just ring like a bell. This is presumably what the talk about "distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved" actually refers to. Since making thin-bowed cymbals is apparently a very tricky procedure which involves subjecting the blank to high pressure and high temperature at the same time, it seems plausible that Avedis' accidental breakthrough in metallurgy was necessary to make this possible. (OTOH maybe his real breakthrough was in that cymbal-making process; maybe his special recipe for the blanks was in fact less necessary than he realised, even?) A leap from ringing bell-like zills to crashing cymbals would be the kind of thing which could be dramatic enough to get the sultan to notice and to hand out a title, a trade monopoly and a cash prize. If the crash was a new sound, it must have seemed absolutely otherworldly at the time. (However I don't know when China started making crashing cymbals, whether some crashing cymbals from China might have made it to Constantinople by the early 1600s, and so on.)
It's not a Crapper situation where cymbals are named after this guy
Just like Uranus (and everybody else's)
It's a day's work in the right spectroscopy lab. A bit more difficult to figure out is how to turn the cast blank into a cymbal.
And, finding a place in a mature market.
Robert Zildjian explained it's not the formula that's the secret, but the process for manufacturing cymbals without cracking since B20 is so brittle.
All of this to say: there's an n=1 elsewhere for this happening to Ottoman Armenians.
More like people didn't have last names in the Ottoman empire, so they were usually called by their fathers' names, or nicknames. Surnames were officially started to be enforced in 1934, long after the Ottoman empire collapsed and the Rebublic of Turkey was founded.
I don't know if the original word was a occupation back in the old world or not. (the dialect my family spoke is no longer spoken so it would be difficult to research)
This is also the naming process for some places in the new world like Cuernavaca in Mexico
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Occupational_surnames
So it's very likely it is just a normal thing humans tend to do. Except I don't know much European history so I can't tell if those places got it from England
it means, literally, son of the cymbal maker
Zil actually comes the Persian word (زیر) that means (1) below, and (2) treble.
What's fascinating is that Tamdeger and master smith Agop Tomurcuk preserved these methods by founding "Istanbul" cymbals. Initially exporting to the US under "Zildjiler" before switching to "Istanbul" in 1984, each cymbal was personally signed by both masters. After Agop's unexpected death in 1996, Mehmet continued under "Istanbul Mehmet", maintaining the 17th-century hand-crafting methods with the philosophy "Machines don't have ears."
The cymbals they make are particularly sought after by jazz drummers for what's known as the "old K sound" - referring to the original K Zildjians made in its place of birth.
Here is one for sale:
https://soundsanatolian.com/products/istanbul-mehmet-22-mika...
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/ZP4PK--zildjian-plan...
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/K0731--zildjian-k-sw...
It's also generally accessible to get the same <guitars, bass guitars, keyboards> used by professional musicians. "Concert instruments" less so yes
I guess not shockingly inexpensive, but seems like a prerty damn good deal
Based on various interviews about the history of Zildjian & Sabian brothers splitting up, the Sabian Canada factory was originally a Zildjian 2nd site purposely placed outside of the USA.
The brothers felt the Zildjian Canada factory solved 2 problems:
1) contingency factory that wasn't affected by unionizing labor in Boston MA.
2) easier (cheaper?) export logistics to Europe market from Canada. Don't remember the exact details.
Deep link to Robert Zildjian interview talking in "polite language" about the union labor unrest as one motivation for creating the Canada factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv30TRytOk4&t=13m28s
Another interview talked about the Europe market but I can't find that video.
That Sabian interview always stuck with me because it isn't just the big companies like Amazon, Tesla, Starbucks, etc avoiding unionization. It's also the small family companies like Zildjian that worked around unions. Another video somewhere had the other Zildjian brother (Armand) talk about the unions but he wasn't as polite.
EDIT to add another interview from Paul Francis (podcast mp3) about Zildjian opening the Canada factory in 1968 in response to the Teamsters unionization efforts in the USA. Relevant section starts at 45m20s : https://www.discussionsinpercussion.com/home/2020/2/5/162-pa...
It's surprising to you that no businesses of any size like unions? It's like finding out mice don't like cats regardless of size.
Most unions think their job is to fight management though and so are full of anti-management propaganda and so workers who are well treated convince themselves they need to stick it to the evil management. Thus ensuring management and the union cannot get along.
Don't read the above as saying that management is all good. Only that unions often needless make things worse.
Which are these companies?
Employers dont like instability, period. They want continuous, headache-free production. Unions can cause instability. (Whether it's justified or not is a separate matter.) So...
Of course, unions in the US are an extremely weird beast, and for all the good that some of them do, there are or were many that simply took the dues and bought nice houses for the leadership. When anti-union legislators started poking about in the 1970s there were plenty of workers all too happy to give the union the middle finger, based on their own experiences of being ignored, mistreated, or horrified by the local union. (That's not to imply that the legislators had workers' interests at heart, of course.)
Which is an interesting perspective in its own way, as for example when Volkswagen came to the US, they demanded that employees unionize as they felt it would allow greater stability by having content employees and a single entity to negotiate with.
Every union is different, though. Learn your history!
It isn’t just in the US that there are weird beasts. In Australia, there is this union called the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA). They are the main union for retail and fast food employees. The employers like them because they are rather moderate and keen to reach “understandings”, plus they will fight hard to keep more radical unions off their turf. Employers would even encourage their employees to join it. For many years they were controlled by socially conservative Roman Catholics, who used the union as a political and financial base to oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, IVF, etc, despite the fact those most of their members (who skew younger and the clear majority of whom aren’t Catholic) didn’t share those views and didn’t realise their union dues were paying for views they probably didn’t share. It is only in the last decade or so that the tension between the leadership and the membership over social issues got to the point that the leadership realised they had to move to neutrality or risk losing control of the union, so they did what they had to do
Each union is different. Not all of them have the above. However many unions are in areas where the business cycles affect them, some years there is more demand for their work than others and when there is a down year they can't provide stability for all members. When times are tight companies first stop building new buildings and so anyone in construction will have years of low demand.
Unions cause cost and bargaining.
If all you want is simplicity, stability and throwing money at the problem, instead of dealing with each of your employee's individual asks and try to gauge what's the most common complaint, you deal with a single entity.
Now I'm sure the US have a ton more baggage regarding unions, but we'd then come down to feelings and history, more than arguable reasons.
I skooped this article randomly, but I see it as common knowledge that as long as the mob is powerful enough, anyone with money and enough to lose will either be pray or collaborating with mobs:
https://deadlinedetroit.com/articles/9488/henry_ford_s_gangs...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
No clean hands, frankly.
Employers don't like to pay their employees more than the bare minimum, period. Whether that is out of greed or "just economics" is in the eyes of the beholder.
Zildjian
Sabian (started by Robert Zildjian)
Meinl (German)
Paiste (Swiss)
But like all matters of taste that's arguable, and someone will probably come along and argue it. That's my impression of how drummers view the brands though.
I thought Istanbul was amazingly rich in terms of culture, food, etc as well as fairly liberal and safe. Didn't think twice about who's in charge nor cared. Can't wait to go back.
Musicians. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t shoot ‘em.
They moved the business to the US before the genocide though (and in good time too!), so not sure how they would have been affected.
There's a good reason why Reza Pahlavi's move to rename Persia (itself a foreign-derived name) to the original name of Eran/Iran was extremely popular amongst the Iranians.
Especially considering that the Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on the Persian variant of the Arabic script also didn't map all the sounds that are required in Turkish. They also probably didn't pick the arabo-persian script because of those commonly found sounds in Indo-Aryan(European?) languages considering that Turkish isn't an indo-european language and is in a family of its own... So there's a very loose link here.
And while I'm not sure about the circumstances of the adoption of the Arabic script in Iran, the Turks were conquerors basically from the beginning and chose the Arabic script entirely willingly. There's no colonial or imperialist implications to calling Turkish arabic script... arabic.
(Not that it wouldn't even really matter, the letters in question are unquestionably arabic script anyways. The Romans sure did subjugate Britain and france, and brutally repressed them, but that doesn't make the script they use any less Latin!)
There are also lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Latin; for example, most of the vowels (English has roughly 15-20 vowel sounds; Latin has 5 or 6).
In particular, the reason why modern English are not really descended from ancient Romans is because the people who were (at least partially; they were known as Romano-British) got displaced by larger numbers of other people, principally Norse and Germanic peoples from the continent (especially Anglo-Saxons and Normans).
Moreover, the history of Italy is quite different in the specifics but actually has some similarities in the broad strokes. Germanic peoples from the north, Norse peoples from the sea, and (more uniquely) North African peoples from the south, have all through migration, displacement, and interrelations shaped the ancestry of modern Italians.
As for the main point: no serious historical linguist argues that English is descended from Latin. Yes, English superficially has lots of Latin vocabulary, but the phonology, syntax, basic words, etc. are still thoroughly Germanic. Phonology being particularly relevant since this thread is about how well an alphabet matches a language's sound inventory.
There was definitely a strong drumming community in the area; there were some fantastic players and teachers around (i.e. Steve Smith from Journey was born in Whitman). Not sure if that's because of Zildjian, but it was a fun place to grow up and play music. It might just be that there are so many strong music universities in the area.
I'm not sure if this is an atypical experience with the brand or not.
that said I've not seen too many people using zildjian drumsticks, vic firth, pro mark tend to be the two big names.
the cymbal thing is a whole different ballgame. if you're whacking the cymbals really hard and you're looking for a clean sound, you'd want to get thicker cymbals with less hammering that are more oriented towards hard rock playing. because yes if you have a pricey zildjian crash and you're slamming it all the time, it will crack eventually (sooner for a thinner cymbal) and that is not too abnormal of an incident. you might get more bang for your buck with a Paiste Rude cymbal.
Recorded drums sound very different from live drums. It's just something you get used to after a while, but for years as a young drummer it really bothered me until I finally mic'd my kit and was like "oooohhhhh".
The "ZBT" cymbals I started on were not great (cheap, meant for beginners), but over time I've switched to the "A" series which sound comparatively great.
The "K" dry sound is even more impressive, albeit with an accompanying price tag.
Fun fact, Vic Firth nowadays is part of Zildjian.
These days I'm playing Sabians, mostly AAX. Not out of brand loyalty, just cause they all sound pretty good for what I do (loud, fast rock). But I've had a handful of Zildjians that I really enjoyed (wish I still had the 24" A Ping Ride that I broke in high school), some Paistes, a Meinl here, a Byzance there...
I have been playing for 10+ years that was a huge problem for me, but eventually your mind will adapt to dynamic nature of keeping time. I feel most people think keeping time as a singular action, but its mostly managing dynamics and spacing of music. Cymbals are fundamental to accomplish that.
I will say that I personally prefer Sabian since I am a rock/metal drummer. But Zildjian cymbals are thinner and softer they will have less volume but a brighter and more lush sound. Most of their products are designed for softer Jazz and Pop playing. If you want something in between Paiste and Meinl try to fill that gap.
I also use the Sabian AAX line and it works great. I like to play along with rock, hip-hop, and pop. I found the Sabian's to be a good middle ground for now.
Judging by the feedback I'm getting in other comments, I guess the Zildjians are not any less reliable than the Sabians (and I understand the Sabians are derived from Zildjian anyway?). I'll have to give them another go at some point.
One good way to hit cymbals properly, especially crashes, is to have them not totally horizontal and making a "woosh" movement rather than a straight attack.
Another secret about drums in general is that, counterintuitively, hitting them hard often choke the sound rather than making it louder (all about projection).
And it's the best instrument there is ;)
If you're interested in more unique sounds from cymbals, Meinl makes some great stuff.
Sometime within the last ten years, it was knocked down and replaced with an apartment building even bigger than the plant.
Drums are actually made to be able to fill medium sized halls, not so much to be used in a small garage. Drums are the reason why rock bands have to be so loud _still today_. Back in the days loud tube amps were also the reason..
I do not like drums, especially cymbals and snare drums, anymore.. But drum machines are great! :-)
But it's really not the same thing, so we have to accommodate.
They lost their Jews, Armenians & so much else.
Bizarre that we think of Italy, Japan even Korea for good coffee but rarely Turkey which is where it started.
Yes, and no. Mikael Zildjian stayed in Istanbul and made cymbals until his nephews asked him (in 1977) to stop making them and exporting to the USA.
Today, Mikael's apprentices Mehmet and Oksant are still manufacturing cymbals (under different brands, obviously, as they are not from the same family).
Nothing a little mass spectrometry won't reveal... and metallurgy has advanced a lot in 400 years.
It's interesting that in the first picture with the cymbal being cut on a lathe, there doesn't seem to be any precision measuring instruments visible. I suppose they've already simplified the process to preset stops and go/no-go gauges.
It's not easy to summarize. I really recommend reading the whole thing.
> The company was founded in Constantinople in 1623 by Avedis Zildjian, an Armenian metalsmith and alchemist.
...
> After the death of Avedis, the business, and the secret for producing the metal, was handed down to several generations of male heirs.
...
> In 1850, Avedis II built a 25-foot schooner, in order to sail cymbals produced in Constantinople to trade exhibitions such as the Great Exhibition in London, and to supply musicians in Europe.
...
> Haroutune II's son Avedis III had left Armenia for the United States in 1909, and settled in Boston, where he established a family and a confectionary business. In 1927, he received a letter from his uncle Aram, informing him that he was to become heir to the family business, and Aram came to the US.
...
> Avedis III sought out jazz drummers like Gene Krupa to understand their needs.
I used to do IT for a vendor that injection-molded low durometer plastic washers for Zildjian. They placed a single large PO annually.
99% of the population would identify these as 'rubber' washers. Nope, they're polyurethane.
Maybe a company that predates most existing nations has bigger priorities than "perfect our profit spreadsheet by cutting every corner".
How much space do you think a year's worth of washers take up? They could easily be doing more frequent purchases for their larger inputs.
Seeing as they also predate science, they might have experience with things changing over time and how that affects supply. Or they don't, and it's much easier to weather bad events and business mistakes when your focus is on reliably producing high quality product for reasonable prices for centuries, to the point where your name is nearly synonymous with the product, your customers will always wait for you or come back.
Maybe, instead, those pushing "Just in time" everything should learn a thing or two from the company that has produced a reliably quality product for centuries.
under the radar? maybe its because I'm a former Marching band kid that played the cymbals. but Zildjian is THE brand when it comes to cymbals.
> Even in Massachusetts many people have no idea an industrial factory outside of Boston designs, casts, blasts, rolls, hammers, buffs and tests at least a million Zildjian cymbals each year.
It was just a comment on the oddity that what the Egyptians were using had not yet been figured out, but that he knew. Despite all our vast current knowledge, there remain bits of arcane knowledge still hidden away in obscure corners.
It's definitely NOT the case that "any competent chemist could figure it out".
He'd also told me about an MIT team who had gotten closer than others to figuring it out, but gave up after the mixes/processes kept exploding on them. Definitely no lack of competence there, but maybe they did run out of budget or motivation to keep unintentionally blowing things up. It's not as trivial as you'd like to think.
:cough: I mean, they're not... that hard to beat... :cough:
From my extremely limited searching (Wikipedia) it's almost as old as the state itself.
That said, Fender lists hundreds of guitar models available on their website.
That is for just one pattern, but there are many different patterns. Then we get into acoustic vs electric.
Of course it isn't hard to create a new alloy for your cymbals either. The real question is how many different models is it worth putting into your catalog. There is a cost to each one - even if it never sells you have to be ready to make it which means keeping anything specific to that around (or at least have suppliers that commits to making whatever you would need on-demand)
I suppose that the cymbals makers just cut their models more thinly.
It's surprising how much there is still a difference in cheap and expensive potentiometers and switches. One would have expected someone to have cracked high quality and cheap by now?
I have no idea how accurate that is, but it's a testament to their brand recognition just how firmly they grabbed a hold of my impressionable young mind.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zildjian%20live
The top few videos have amazing music (mostly Snarky Puppy and J D Beck)
What do you think they study at the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice ?
Because 15 year olds who don't wannabe something, generally don't turn out interesting. And most 15 year olds who already have their life figured out are either wrong or boring.
But these are perspectives from a few decades later. At the time, I too had strong opinions about people who wore their aspirations on (or between) their sleeves. We called them poseurs. Because we had more opinions than knowledge. Like 15 year olds. :)
(Aside: you have to admit though: The Zildjian logotype is pretty great. Also, because you'd often get a free t-shirt with purchase, it was hard to tell the legit from the poseur without getting them to sit at the kit.)
Been really impressed with Meinl's rise to competitiveness also. Used to not even exist in music shops when I was a teenager.
Either way, cloning an established leader isn't always a good strategy for success. You might just end up making a name for yourself as a cheap clone.
At college I was acquainted with one of the family and I asked him just that question. He said it is actually very difficult and some MIT people had gotten closer than others to figuring it out (but not very close), and gave up after the mixes/processes kept exploding on them.
ie impulse response hit depending on intensity scaled 0 to 1 > makes the sound
AFAIK, what you're talking about would probably fall into the category of physical modelling, and there's quite a bit of development happening there currently.
I used to crawl around drum sets when I was a baby as my father was a professional musician. I mounted the set as soon as I could and it was the only instrument I was was ever really interested in. Alas, I was heavily discouraged from pursuing music as a child by my mother. She blamed our shit life on my father and his obsession with music and he basically quit after the divorce and went into entrepreneurship (funded by my grandfather's GE stock) to pay our child support. I digress.
Sounds like there was some truth in what your mom said?
Simulating the sound of a cymbal to high fidelity is equivalent to simulating the physics of the atoms making up the cymbal.
If you want to hand wave away the complexity, sure, Nintendo regularly simulates the sound of a cymbal with a white noise generator modulated by an intensity envelope.
Yeah wow, they have some of the world's absolute best drummers using their symbols.
> Lars Ulrich of Metallica
Also some so-so ones.
Although Zildjian is undeniably iconic, the same could be said about Bosphorus Cymbals and a few other companies I won't name.
Here I found a news story in English summarizing the situation [1]:
> The Zildjian company moved to the United States in 1929, while Avedis III moved the Zildjian factory to Quincy, Massachusetts, and then to its current location in nearby Norwell for Zildjian’s 350th anniversary.
> ... As one arm of the Zildjian family was building a huge brand in the U.S., those who remained in Turkey continued making cymbals until 1978, when Mikael Zildjian died.
> Tamdeğer said he felt desperate after his master’s death. Following two years of jewelry business in Kuwait, he re-founded the old business with his former colleague, Agop Tomurcuk, another Turkish-Armenian.
1. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/zildjian-family-apprentice...
So this is arguably the original company.