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A large wooden hammer or mallet struck on a wooden surface for a heavy, dull, non-metallic blow — famously in the finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.
Appears as Hammer on its own percussion line in the scores that use it, with each blow notated as a single stroke. In Mahler’s Sixth Symphony the strokes fall in the finale, and the score explains the sound wanted, since no standard instrument exists.
A theatrical sound: heavy and dead rather than ringing, which orchestras produce with a large mallet on a wooden box or platform. Use it for a few structural blows — Mahler’s strokes in the Sixth fall at the finale’s turning points, and Berg echoed them in his Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6. Describe the sound you want in a footnote and give the player rests to prepare each stroke.
Mahler, Symphony No. 6 in A minor, finale, percussion: “Hammer” — the first published score has three hammer blows; Mahler removed the third when he revised the symphony.
Hammer is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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