Origins of the Hang
HIS-01Who invented the Hang, and when?#
beginner
Short answer. Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer of PANArt in Bern, Switzerland, developed the Hang during 1999 and 2000 and presented it publicly at the Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 2001.Both were steelpan people first. Rohner encountered a Trinidadian steel orchestra in Bern in 1976, at a city celebration, and began building pans that year. Schärer came into the same Bernese pan scene, playing in and helping to equip the country’s early steel bands. By the mid 1980s Rohner had established a pan workshop in Bern, and between 1985 and 1993 he was supplying and tuning instruments for more than forty school and youth orchestras. PANArt was formally registered in May 1993, by members of a Bernese steelband, as a steelpan manufacturing company.
So the Hang was not the work of hobbyists having an idea. It came out of roughly twenty five years of accumulated experience in a demanding craft, plus a decade of deliberate materials research, plus a specific request from a percussionist. The sequence matters, because “invented” flattens something that was much more like a convergence.
The date is worth being precise about, because sources vary in what they are dating. The concept was prompted in November 1999. The prototypes were made and refined through 2000 and into early 2001. The public debut, and therefore the birth date most people quote, was the Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 2001. PANArt’s own history notes it was offered there at 300 Euros, a figure that becomes almost comic in the light of what Hangs later sold for.
Reto Weber, the percussionist whose request set the whole thing off, is credited in the community’s histories and in press accounts, though PANArt’s own 2013 book on the instrument does not mention him. That absence is noted by others and is a small, real point of friction in the story rather than a settled fact one way or the other.
HIS-02What came before the Hang, and what influenced it?#
beginner
Short answer. The direct ancestor is the Trinidadian steelpan. The shape and the idea of a hand played resonant vessel came from the Indian ghatam, a tuned clay pot. Everything else came from PANArt’s own materials research through the 1990s.The steelpan. Invented in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s out of discarded oil drums, the steelpan is the source of the essential technique: hammering a sheet of steel so that a single note area rings at a fundamental with its octave and fifth tuned in alongside. Without that tradition there is no Hang. Rohner’s own development is described in the Swiss pan literature as advanced by exchange with other European tuners and by study of the work of masters, Ellie Mannette named specifically. Mannette, the Trinidadian tuner widely credited with sinking the first pan face and with much of the instrument’s modern refinement, is therefore an ancestor of the handpan at one remove, through the craft rather than through any direct collaboration.
The ghatam. A large tuned clay pot from South India, played with the hands, fingers, wrists and heels, with the mouth of the pot used against the belly to modulate the bass. The Hang’s convex closed body, hand technique and the resonant hole in the underside all echo it. The connection is not speculative: PANArt’s own history records a visit in autumn 1999 in which the percussionist Reto Weber played a ghatam for Rohner and Schärer and asked whether something like it could be made in steel.
The udu. A Nigerian clay pot drum with a side hole, played with the hands, which produces a swooping bass tone as the hand covers and uncovers the opening. It sits in the same family of ideas as the ghatam and is frequently cited alongside it. The Gu hole in the bottom of a handpan behaves in a comparable way.
PANArt’s own work. The Pang instruments and the nitrided sheet steel that PANArt developed from the mid 1990s were the ingredient nobody else had, and are covered separately.
The result is a genuine hybrid: steelpan tuning, ghatam ergonomics, Swiss metallurgy.
HIS-03What did PANArt make before the Hang?#
intermediate
Short answer. Steelpans, for about seventeen years, and then from the mid 1990s a family of experimental instruments made from their own new material, which they called Pang.PANArt Steelpan Manufacturing Ltd was registered in May 1993, founded by Felix Rohner together with several other members of the Bernese Oelgesellschaft steelband. Its business was ordinary and unglamorous: building instruments for Swiss steelbands, tuning them, and keeping school orchestras supplied. Rohner had been doing that work since 1976 and running a dedicated workshop since 1985.
The turn came from a piece of luck he chose to take seriously. In 1989 Rohner built a steelpan out of an old Hungarian barrel and found the tone markedly better than what he got from new steel. He concluded that the ageing of the metal was doing something acoustically useful, and set out to reproduce that ageing artificially rather than wait decades for it. That question, how to make new steel behave like old steel, drove the next ten years of research.
From 1995, Rohner and Schärer worked on deep drawn and nitrided sheet steel, which they eventually named Pang. Alongside the metallurgy they collaborated with acousticians, including Thomas Rossing and Uwe Hansen, on measuring what the vibration modes of tuned steel actually do, which put the workshop’s intuition on a firmer footing than most instrument making enjoys.
The instruments they built from Pang in the second half of the 1990s were the immediate predecessors of the Hang: hammered, tuned steel forms exploring what the new material could do. PANArt still uses “Pang” as the name for the material and for the wider instrument family, which is why later instruments carry names like Pang Sui, Pang Sei and Pang Sai.
The company changed its name to PANArt Hang Manufacturing Ltd in April 2003, formally recognising that the business was no longer a steelpan workshop. That renaming is a neat marker of how completely one instrument redirected a twenty year old craft business.
See also: HIS-06
HIS-04How did the Hang actually come about in 1999 and 2000?#
beginner
Short answer. In November 1999 the percussionist Reto Weber visited PANArt, played a ghatam, was shown the Pang instruments, and asked for a sounding pot in steel with a few notes he could play with his hands. Rohner and Schärer answered by joining two Pang half shells into a closed body, and refined the result through 2000.The account is consistent across PANArt’s own history, Weber’s material and the community archives. Weber was a Swiss percussionist with a serious interest in the ghatam. The wording usually quoted for his request is a “sounding pot in steel with some notes to play with the hands”, which is about as concise a design brief as an instrument has ever had.
What made it answerable was that PANArt already had the pieces. They had deep drawn Pang half shells. They had twenty five years of experience tuning multiple partials into a single field of hammered steel. What they had not previously done was seal two shells together to make a closed cavity and put the note fields on the outside of a dome rather than inside a bowl.
That inversion is the invention. It changes almost everything at once. A convex surface radiates far less energy than a concave one, which is why the instrument is quiet and warm rather than loud and bright. A sealed body with one hole becomes a Helmholtz resonator, adding a low breathy note that belongs to the air rather than to any tone field. And a domed top invites the hands, because you can reach every field comfortably with a shell resting on your lap.
Rohner and Schärer worked through prototypes over the winter of 2000, then took the instrument to the Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 2001. Reports of the debut describe curiosity rather than a sensation. The Bernese press summed the new sound up in a line PANArt still quote, “the new sound for cultures and cows”, which captures the mixture of the exotic and the entirely Swiss rather well.
By 2002 roughly a thousand Hangs had been made. The slow explosion had begun.
HIS-05What does the word “Hang” mean?#
beginner
Short answer. It is a Bernese German word with a double meaning: “hand” and “hillside” or “slope”. Both readings describe the instrument. It is pronounced with a short vowel, roughly “hung”, not like the English verb.The pun is deliberate and very characteristic of PANArt’s approach to naming. “Hand” points at how the instrument is played, which was the entire premise of Reto Weber’s request. “Hillside” or “slope” points at the convex dome of the upper shell, and, in a Swiss context, at the landscape itself.
A few practical points follow.
Plural. PANArt use “Hanghang” as the plural, formed by reduplication. In English the community generally writes “Hanghang” when being careful and “Hangs” the rest of the time. Neither will get you into trouble.
Pronunciation. The vowel is the German short a, so it sounds closer to the English word “hung” than to “hang”. English speakers almost universally say it the English way, which is one small reason “hang drum” sounds so wrong to people who know the origin: it takes a Swiss German pun about hands and hillsides and turns it into an English verb about suspending things.
Related names. PANArt’s later instruments continue the pattern. The Gubal takes its name from the Gu, the round opening, combined with elements of the instrument’s own vocabulary. The parts of the instrument have their own names too: the Ding is the central dome, the Gu is the hole in the underside, and the ring of elastic steel around it on later instruments is the Ringding. Much of that vocabulary was invented by PANArt and has been adopted wholesale by makers who have never built a Hang.
The naming is not decoration. PANArt have consistently used it to insist that this is not a drum, not a pan and not a copy of anything, and that insistence runs through the rest of their history.
HIS-06What are Pang steel and nitriding, and why did they matter?#
intermediate
Short answer. Pang is PANArt’s name for their deep drawn, gas nitrided sheet steel. Nitriding is a heat treatment that diffuses nitrogen into the surface of the metal, forming hard iron nitride. It made the shells harder, more stable in tuning and more resistant to rust, and it gave the instrument its characteristic grey black surface.The problem it solved goes back to Rohner’s 1989 discovery that an old Hungarian barrel made a better sounding pan than new steel. Ageing steel changes its internal stresses and surface, and those changes were audible. Waiting decades was not a business model, so the workshop spent the 1990s looking for a way to induce comparable properties deliberately.
Gas nitriding was the answer. The shells are heated in a nitrogen rich atmosphere so that nitrogen diffuses into the surface layer and forms iron nitride. Wikipedia describes the Hang’s shells as deep drawn and nitrided; PANArt describe the resulting composite, with iron nitride needles embedded in the steel, as having “inner energy higher than steel”, which is their language rather than a physicist’s but points at something real.
Three practical benefits follow, and all three are why almost every serious maker since has used some form of hardened or high grade steel.
Tuning stability. A harder surface resists the slow relaxation of hammered stresses that pulls a soft steel instrument out of tune, and resists being knocked out of tune by an accidental impact.
Corrosion resistance. Nitrided steel does not rust nearly as readily as plain mild steel, which matters enormously for an instrument played with bare, sweaty hands.
Timbre. A harder shell has different damping characteristics, giving a longer, clearer decay.
The material also explains PANArt’s later trajectory. Once they had Pang, the Hang was only one thing they could make from it, and their whole subsequent output, the Gubal, the Hang Gudu, the Hang Urgu, the Pang string instruments, is presented as the Pang family rather than as Hang successors.
Modern makers use a range of approaches, including nitrided mild steel, various stainless steels and proprietary treatments, and they disagree genuinely about which is best. That argument is a separate topic in its own right.
See also: Anatomy and construction, HIS-14
HIS-07Why did the instrument spread so slowly at first?#
beginner
Short answer. Because two people were making them by hand, one at a time, in a Bern workshop, and because PANArt actively resisted scaling up. Supply was never allowed to meet demand, deliberately.The debut at Frankfurt in 2001 produced interest, not a stampede. Around a thousand instruments had been made by 2002, which for a brand new instrument is respectable and for a global market is nothing. Distribution was through a small number of dealers, and PANArt later terminated those relationships in order to sell directly and to control who received instruments.
Several things kept the growth slow through the early years.
Craft constraints. Every tone field is hammered and tuned by hand. There is no economically sensible way to automate it, and there were, in essence, two people doing it.
Deliberate refusal to grow. This is the part outsiders find hardest to believe. PANArt did not want to be a factory. They saw their instruments as sound sculptures rather than products, and they repeatedly took decisions, ending distributor relationships, reducing the number of scales offered, eventually requiring handwritten letters from prospective buyers, that reduced sales rather than increasing them. They were explicit that they did not wish to serve demand.
No one else was building. For the first six years or so, PANArt were effectively the only source on earth. Nobody had reverse engineered the process, and the material and tuning knowledge were not public.
No obvious channel. Before YouTube, there was almost no way for someone in Manchester or Melbourne to hear the instrument at all.
The consequence was a decade of scarcity that shaped the entire culture that followed. Waiting lists ran into years, second hand prices ran into many multiples of the original, and the community developed a set of habits, patience, direct relationships with makers, suspicion of resellers, that persist even now that instruments can be bought off the shelf.