Ottoman Empire Archives - New England Historical Society

When it came time for Aram Zildjian to pass on his family’s 300-year-old secret for making superior cymbals, he looked to Massachusetts’ Armenian community.

Display of cymbal makers in the Zildjian corporate lobby

Since the Zildjians started their business in 1623, family tradition required Aram to tell his oldest male heir just how to make the cymbals with the unique purity of tone. That relative, Avedis Zildjian, had immigrated to Greater Boston, a haven for Armenians persecuted by the Ottoman Empire.

Today, the Zildjian factory makes cymbals in Norwell, Mass., for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the E Street Band, the Foo Fighters and many others.

Zildjian

Cymbals were long used in Greek and Armenian religious ceremonies and by Ottoman military bands. On March 23, 1618, Sultan Mustafa I authorized an immigrant named Avedis to make cymbals.

Mustafa I

Avedis, a metalworker, had fled the wars in Eastern Anatolia for the Ottoman Empire, which tolerated Armenians. He dabbled in alchemy at night, and one night he melted copper, tin and a mystery alloy. When it hardened, it made a sound that would make Avedis rich.

The Sultan gave Avedis 80 gold pieces, a contract with the Ottoman Army and a name: Zildjian, meaning “son of cymbal maker.”

Avedis Zildjian then left the sultan’s palace in 1623 to set up a cymbal factory in Constantinople. The family for generations kept the formula for making the cymbals a secret.

Starting in the late 17^th century, European composers began using cymbals in opera, inspired by the sound of the Ottoman martial bands. Composer Richard Wagner once said, “That is the real music.”

Avedis Zildjian’s descendant, also Avedis Zildjian, realized the potential for his company and brought his cymbals to European trade shows. European composers were said to specify that only Zildjian cymbals were to be used in opera productions.

An Ottoman military orchestra

Revolt

By the late 19^th century, the Ottomans were growing less tolerant of the Armenians in their midst. The Armenians began to flee and to revolt. In 1880, the first Armenians came to Massachusetts.

Ottoman persecution then culminated in the Armenian massacre of 1915. Aram Zildjean joined a plot to kill the Sultan with a homemade bomb. The plot failed when the bomb exploded too early and evidence pointed to Aram and his co-conspirators. So he fled Turkey and moved to Bucharest. But then he returned to Constantinople in 1926.

From there, Aram wrote to his nephew Avedis in Boston, where he had opened a candy store.

Many survivors of Ottoman oppression landed in Boston and Watertown, Mass. Today the commonwealth is home to as many as 70,000 people who claim Armenian descent. It commemorates the Armenian massacre to this day on April 24. Only California claims more Armenians (which include the Kardashians).

Avedis in front of his cymbal factory

Around 1928, Aram Zildjian and his nephews, Avedis and Puzant, opened a cymbal factory in Quincy.

Zildjean Designs New Cymbals

Avedis then passed the company on to his eldest son Armand. The Jazz Age was well underway, and together they worked with jazz drummers like Chick Webb and Gene Krupa to adapt cymbals for drum sets. They did it by making them thinner.

Then Armand’s younger brother Robert decided to move to Canada and start his own cymbal company, which he called Sabian after his children Sally (Sa), Billy (bi) and Andy (an).

Life Magazine in 1944 reported that cymbals satisfying symphonic and operatic requirements are difficult to find. “Nobody today manufactures the cymbals but a single family of Armenians whose purity of tone is unlike any cymbal ever made,” the magazine concluded.

Life also reported the New York Philharmonic had to hire a new cymbal player because he owned cymbals and the orchestra’s had gone missing.

More recently the company collaborated with Frank Epstein of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to design orchestral cymbals, lighter and thinner than those used by rock and roll bands.

To see a demonstration of Zildjian orchestral cymbals, click here.

In 2010, Avedis Zildjian Company merged with Vic Firth, Inc., a company founded by a BSO percussionist who started making his own drumsticks.

Image: Avedis Zildjian in Quincy, By Avedis Zildjian Company http://www.zildjian.com, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16960807. Mustafa I By Unknown painter – https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/mustafa-i, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97553913. This story last updated in 2023.

George Perkins Marsh

Marsh ushered in a new way of looking at the world, one that understood humans don’t really dominate nature. He inspired the reforesting of the Northeast. He did it by showing how denuded hills and dammed rivers caused erosion and flooding and depleted fisheries.

In his book, Marsh demonstrated how humans connect with nature in unexpected ways. He described how wetlands increased in North America because of a new Parisian fashion. Beavers were nearly extinct on the continent because of the popularity of beaver hats. But then a Parisian manufacturer came up with silk hats, which quickly became the rage. Demand for beaver fur fell off and the beaver population came back. More beavers meant more dams – and more wetlands.

Perhaps of all the people in the world in the mid-18^th century, George Perkins Marsh was uniquely qualified to connect Parisian fashions with the American environment. He was at once a cosmopolitan world traveler and a Vermont farm boy, a scholar immersed in abstractions and a businessman (although not a very good one).

Mount Tom

He was born March 15, 1801, to a wealthy landowner in Woodstock, Vt. His father owned much of Mount Tom. As a boy, George Perkins Marsh watched the clearing and planting of the hills around Woodstock for pasture and fuel. He noticed the erosion, the increased flooding; later in life, he wrote a report about the depleted fisheries.

George Perkins Marsh

As an adult, he tried his hand at businesses that interfered with the environment: a woolen mill that depended on dammed streams, a marble quarry that cut stone from the earth, a farm with sheep that cropped the grass, a lumber dealership. He made a failed investment in a railroad that stripped the land of trees.

Perkins was more successful at politics. He was elected to the first of thee terms in Congress in 1843, where he helped create the Smithsonian Institution. Later he was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire. During his five years living in and touring the Middle East he observed how man had made barren the once-lush region. He also sent samples of fish, flora, fauna and rock to his friend Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution.

Man and Nature

In 1864, he wrote Man and Nature with little expectation it would be noticed. He was wrong. It was the Silent Spring of the 19^th century, a book that launched the environmental movement. Man and Nature led to passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act, which encouraged homesteaders on the Great Plains to plant trees. It laid the groundwork for the creation of Adirondack Park and the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. It also had a profound influence on environmentalists such as John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Marsh revised his book several times while serving as a diplomat to the Kingdom of Italy. He spent 21 years in that post, the longest serving chief of ministers in U.S. history.

Today, you can visit his boyhood home in Woodstock at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller State Park. You can appreciate his legacy at the Smithsonian Institution – or simply by enjoying the fall colors of the trees in New England.

We are indebted to George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book) by David Lowenthal and William Cronon for this article. This story was updated in 2022.

Ottoman Empire

Zildjian, the Sultan’s Cymbal Maker Who Moved to Massachusetts

Zildjian

Revolt

Zildjean Designs New Cymbals

George Perkins Marsh, The Vermont Farmer Who Founded the Environmental Movement

George Perkins Marsh

Mount Tom

Man and Nature