Lithophone:
Exploring the Music of Stone

By Tom Kaufmann
Edited by Kyle Brill

I am delighted to have installed one of my lithophones at the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art this May. The piece is composed of eight pieces of Absolute Black Granite, a type of gabbro mined in India, tuned to a C-major scale and mounted on a stainless-steel stand.

Litho is Greek for stone, and phone means sound, so a lithophone is a musical instrument made of stone. We know that ancient civilizations around the world made and used stone instruments, yet these ancient instruments have often been overlooked. For example, in 2013 Duncan Caldwell¹ analyzed microscopic wear patterns on sets of stones found at prehistoric North American sites that had previously been identified as grinding or digging tools. He found that the wear patterns were more consistent with use as musical instruments. Even Stonehenge has been shown to have special acoustic properties².

Stones that ring when struck can be found in natural settings, including Ringing Rocks Park in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania and a site near Butte, Montana. I visited Ringing Rocks Park in 2018 and discovered that about half of the boulders rang when struck, while the others produced a dull thud, like most stones. It was easy to distinguish between them: the ringing stones were covered with hammer marks, and the others showed very few signs of use.

In Vietnam, a stone instrument called the đàn đá is believed to be more than 3,000 years old. In China, the sound of stone has long been considered as elemental as the sounds of wood or metal. The bianqing is a percussion instrument consisting of hanging L-shaped jade stones cut to varying thicknesses to produce different pitches. The instrument was essential to the imperial court and has been used in ritual music since antiquity. Mastery of the bianqing was considered a mark of a distinguished gentleman, and even Confucius was reputed to be an accomplished player.

The first reference to a lithopone in modern Western history comes from Peter Crosthwaite’s memorandum of June 11, 1785. He described the “Music Stones of Skiddaw”, effectively rediscovering the lithophone and creating an instrument that remains in a museum in Keswick, England³. Several other examples of stone instruments can be found through the Classical, Romantic, and Modern periods of Western music history.

During my Zoom presentation later this year, I’ll share my personal history with “Rock Music” and tell more fascinating stories about one of the world’s earliest musical instruments.

 Join us on September 19 for “Rock Music: The Original Sound,” a special Zoom presentation by Tom Kaufmann, where you can learn more about Tom and the remarkable stories behind these ancient instruments. You can register here.

References

¹Caldwell D. A Possible New Class of Prehistoric Musical Instruments from New England: Portable Cylindrical Lithophones. American Antiquity. 2013;78(3):520-535. doi:10.7183/0002-7316.78.3.520

²Cox, T., Fazenda, B., and Greaney, S. Using scale modelling to assess the prehistoric acoustics of Stonehenge. Journal of Archaeological Science. 2020;122:105218. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2020.105218

³Adcock, M. Music Stones: The Rediscovery of Ringing Rock. Arhaeopress, 2025. doi:10.2307/jj.33941355