marimba

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For more information on marimba, visit Britannica.com.

(Marimba, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, www.marimba.com) A software company founded in 1996 by four key members of Sun's original Java development team. In 1996, it introduced Castanet, a family of Java-based delivery systems for publishing and automatically distributing application updates and other published materials via the Internet and intranets. Other Marimba products addressed the key areas of security management, infrastructure management and change and configuration management.

In 2004, BMC Software (www.bmc.com) acquired Marimba and rapidly integrated its products and technologies into its line of business service management (BSM) software.

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It sounds Spanish. It looks Spanish. The marimba has long been popular in Spanish-speaking Central America, and Mexico's southernmost province of Chiapas is said to be the "land of the marimba," with annual marimba competitions as fiercely contested as soccer matches. But at least its name, and quite likely its origin, is African.

There is no question that a musical instrument with the name marimba has deep roots in Africa. Like the present-day versions of the marimba, the ancestral African instrument was a kind of xylophone, but more resonant. On a marimba the bars, supported on cords, are made not of metal but of rosewood or a similar synthetic material; the mallets are covered rather than plain wood. Wooden "fingers" between the bars hold the cords up. Resonators may be metal or locally grown gourds.

The marimba was described in English as long ago as 1704 in a book about the Congo: "The Instrument most in request us'd by the Abundi...is the Marimba; it consists of sixteen Calabashes orderly plac'd along the middle between two side-boards join'd together, or a long frame, hanging about a Man's Neck with a Thong." Today's marimbas are larger and set on their own tables.

The marimba may have been brought to Central America by African slaves in the 1500s. Then again, perhaps Central Americans had already developed similar instruments to which the African name and perhaps details of construction and performance were applied.

In both places, now as earlier, each resonator of the marimba is covered with a membrane which buzzes when the key is struck. The Chiapas style involves teams of two, three, or even four performers at one instrument, while elsewhere each player has a separate marimba.

North of the border in the United States, and in Japan and Europe, there is generally no membrane and no buzz to marimbas. That allows the marimba to be accepted even in symphony orchestras, thanks to percussionist Keiko Abe, who worked with Yamaha to develop a clear-sounding symphonic version.

Kimbundu, the likely language of origin for marimba, is a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo language family. It is spoken by three million people in Angola, about a quarter of the population. Kimbundu may have had a hand in bringing us banjo (1739), and it could also be the source of goober (1833).

• Percussion - marimba: xylophone with wood resonators under bars (Latin America)