There have been many and varied interesting developments and innovations within the world of HandPan, since the day we first stumbled across the Hang ourselves many years back now. Yet, while this endless stream of baby steps forward is what has kept us interested across the years, it’s important to look back from time-to-time, to where all of this has come from, and from where everything you’ll find spoken of on this website began.
Shortly prior to the year 2000 (the date given as the birth of the Hang), one, ‘Reto Weber’, visiting PANArt (the Hang makers), expressed a desire to play an instrument that combined the Ghatam (a hand played percussion instrument), with the resonant PANG instruments that PANArt were working on at the time. A dream
shared, that would ultimately lead to the birth of the PANArt Hang, and later, both HandPan, and Hank drum, in turn.
Every new invention though, of course, needs its prototype - and the Hang is no different. And it is believed that all Hang sprang from womb of the creation that is often referred to as the ‘Mother Hang’. Like the Alien Queen from the Sci-Fi movies starring Sigourney Weaver, the Mother Hang is somewhat larger, and somewhat more monstrous, but as the instrument that is believed to be the very first functional crossover from PANG to Hang, without it, none of the beautiful UFO-shaped singing steel ‘sound sculptures’ that we have come to love would exist at all.
Unfortunately, there is very little media to be found online of the Mother Hang, but you can see an interesting photo of this prototype, surrounded by both later generation Hanghang, and a Ghatam: HERE, in addition to the only short YouTube clip we can find online (also embedded above): HERE
[Update 2015] Hangblog informs us that: 'Sabina Schärer and Felix Rohner call it the "baby", not the "mother". Read more: HERE
Every new invention though, of course, needs its prototype - and the Hang is no different. And it is believed that all Hang sprang from womb of the creation that is often referred to as the ‘Mother Hang’. Like the Alien Queen from the Sci-Fi movies starring Sigourney Weaver, the Mother Hang is somewhat larger, and somewhat more monstrous, but as the instrument that is believed to be the very first functional crossover from PANG to Hang, without it, none of the beautiful UFO-shaped singing steel ‘sound sculptures’ that we have come to love would exist at all.
Unfortunately, there is very little media to be found online of the Mother Hang, but you can see an interesting photo of this prototype, surrounded by both later generation Hanghang, and a Ghatam: HERE, in addition to the only short YouTube clip we can find online (also embedded above): HERE
[Update 2015] Hangblog informs us that: 'Sabina Schärer and Felix Rohner call it the "baby", not the "mother". Read more: HERE
