It's possible that the technology of undercutting (i.e. deepening the pitch of a bar by cutting a notch in it) is pretty much universal in all musical cultures that have developed wooden bar percussion instruments. It is extremely useful for two main reasons -- 1) it makes deep-pitched bars shorter, hence instruments are smaller, lighter, more portable. And 2) it makes it much easier to tune a bar to a precise pitch. Without undercutting, a bar has to be exactly the right length (given its thickness, density,etc) to give a particular pitch. Undercutting puts an extra weapon into the tuner's hand -- if a bar is flat to the desired pitch, cut it shorter; if it's sharp, scoop out material from the middle. In practice makers soon discover that it is easier to cut all the bars so they are sharp to the desired pitch, and then approach the pitch incrementally by shaving the scoop and checking from time to time.

Accurate tuning is by no means just a modern concern -- Mandinka balafon makers tune their instruments to an equidistant heptatonic scale and may have been following this tradition for 800 years -- but harmonic tuning was as far as we know not pursued by anybody until the 1920s, when it was introduced by -- well, by whom, exactly?

I guess I've given away the answer in the title of the post ... well, maybe not THE answer, but a possible answer.

We have already discussed the Leedy/Deagan rivalry during the xylophone boom (see the previous Winterhoff post). By the 1920s the Deagan and Leedy companies were turning out large numbers of bar percussion instruments; it follows that, in their factories in Chicago and Indianapolis, there was probably a greater concentration of experienced xylo/marimba bar makers continuously at work than had ever occurred anywhere in the world before. (I don't know how many people we are talking about ... maybe ... four?) In that situation you would expect a knowledge of harmonic tuning to emerge sooner or later.

In so far as this has been discussed, the credit is mostly given to the Deagan company and their head tuner Henry Schluter.

Examples:

1) Bill Youhass of Fall Creek Marimbas says

"I believe the greatest single leap in the ongoing evolution of mallet instrument tuning was the discovery by the Deagan tuners some 80 years ago of the advantage to tuning 4th partials on marimbas and vibraphones and 3rd partials on xylophones. This revolutionized the sound of these instruments"

from The Art and Science of Mallet Instrument Tuning

-- elsewhere Youhass cites 1926 as the crucial year.

2) The Deagan Resource (a useful collection of pictures and text from old Deagan catalogues set up -- possibly -- by LA percussionist Wade Culbreath) says:

"Deagan's Chief Tuner, Henry J. Schluter, perfected harmonic tuning in wood bar instruments in 1927. Quint tuning is used for xylophone bars and is the tuning of the fundamental and the partial an octave plus a perfect fifth above the fundamental. Octave tuning is used for marimba bars and is the tuning of the fundamental and the partial two octaves above the fundamental. Before 1927, only the fundamental was tuned."

3) Century Mallet says:

"In 1927, Henry Schluter developed harmonic tuning for keyboard instruments, which is still practiced today, where applicable. In xylophones, this means quint tuning; in marimbas and vibraphones, this means octave tuning."

NB Century Mallet is the operation of Gilberto Serna, now I believe retired, who trained at Deagan and ran his own workshop in the same building at 1770 West Berteau Avenue, Chicago that had been the Deagan HQ -- the workshop is still active under Andres Bautista.

None of these people give any indication of the source of their information, but we can guess that most likely it comes ultimately from the Deagan company itself -- via personal contact, company documents, etc.

And there is the fact that post-1920s instruments (certainly those of Deagan, but from other makers too) are likely to have had harmonic tuning applied to the first overtone at least, whereas earlier instruments do not.

So, the story makes sense -- the Deagan company (chief brain, Henry J Schluter) were responsible for this "greatest single leap in the ... evolution of mallet instrument tuning".

Except ... it's rather circumstantial (i.e. basically gossip). Is there any contemporary documentation as to what people were up to (or thought they were up to)?

Well, yes -- there is a US patent; patent date June 14, 1927; that describes the advantages of harmonic tuning and succinctly summarises how it is to be done. (Well, not that succinctly, but when you've read a few patent applications you are thrilled to find an explanation that doesn't have to be read four times before you have a clue what they are talking about).

The applicant says

"Taking a bar of desired length and density and uniform thickness, the interval between the fundamental tone and the first overtone will be a musical eleventh approximately. This has been well known for many years.

A desired lower fundamental tone may be obtained from this bar by decreasing its thickness at the middle and the common manner of obtaining this decrease has been by cutting an arcuate notch in one or both faces of the bar, the shape of this cut having heretofore been largely a matter of individual taste because no attention has been paid to the resultant first overtone and therefore, heretofore, the musical interval between the resultant fundamental tone and the resultant first overtone has been a neglected variable ....

I have discovered that by proper proportioning the thickness of the bar approximately at the antinodal points of the first overtone, as compared with the thickness of the bar at the antinodal point of the fundamental tone, i. e. the middle of the bar, I can tune the first overtone so that it will be octavely spaced from the fundamental tone."

And the applicant provides a sketch (rather simpler than the ones I drew for my last post):

Two further points: the application was actually filed way back in January 1923, and the applicant was of course (as attentive readers will have predicted) Herman Winterhoff for the Leedy Company of Indianopolis.

Check out the document here.

Unless someone can turn up earlier testimony, it seems that Winterhoff has priority of invention. By his own account Winterhoff seems to have believed that no-one had even suspected the possibility of harmonic tuning before:

In the type of musical bar heretofore produced, while the bar has been gradually decreased in thickness from its ends toward its middle, no attempt has been made to octavely tune the first overtone of the bar by controlling this graduation, nor, so far as I am informed, has it been appreciated that this accurate tuning of the first overtone of the bar could be produced.

So technically, on my no doubt naive understanding of patent law, once the patent had been issued, the Leedy company were entitled to prevent anyone else in the US from using octavely-spaced harmonic tuning on their marimbas and xylophones for maybe 20 years. Obviously this did not happen.

My assumption is that they made no attempt to enforce it, but possibly there were lawsuits flying in all directions -- at this remove, how would anyone know?

Intriguingly there IS an equivalent patent issued to Henry Schluter and The Deagan company relating to quint tuning (i.e the third partial, in Bill Youhass's terminology above). It is US patent 1838502 -- which however was not applied for until 1930 (granted December 1931).

Schluter's text is less clear than Winterhoff's, but anyone who has peeped under the keys of a quint-tuned xylophone may recognise this shape: --

... which is how you cut a quint-tuned bar over some portion of the xylo range (depending upon the initial pitch of your blank, your target pitch yada yada yada).

Perhaps there was a bit of tit-for-tat? "So!! Winterhoff, you have patented octave tuning! In that case I reply with ... patented quint tuning!!!" (cackle)

.... although nobody seems to have observed the patent rights of their competitors in the slightest, as far as we know (if anyone has evidence to the contrary, it would be interesting to hear about).

My guess as to what actually happened -- is that the possibility of harmonic tuning was known to the practitioners at both companies by the early twenties. Herman Winterhoff was (possibly) the first person to formulate the issue in simple terms, and (almost certainly) the first person to document what he was doing. Neither company wanted to waste time and money in law courts, so an informal patent pool emerged (same situation may have developed with vibraphone technology, see the earlier post).

The live question at the time was surely not Who thought of this first? --  but rather, Is this worth doing? Introducing harmonic tuning would have been costly -- it would take more time to tune each instrument, the tuners would need more training, etc. The first company to make harmonic tuning standard would be at a competitive disadvantage, IF the market turned out NOT TO CARE about this kind of newfangledness. So introducing harmonic tuning is worth it if

1) the musicians out there want it, or can be encouraged to want it

and 2) it sure wouldn't hurt if your major competitor introduced it at the same time, at least you'd be in the same boat.

Of course, if you are ultra confident that your customers are going to welcome your innovation, the more incentive you have to steal a march on your competitors. If you are NOT that confident, then a tacit agreement to act together is increasingly likely, it seems to me.

Unless someone turns up some contemporary discussion in the music press, we're not going to know how it all actually happened. However it's pretty clear that the market had no objection to harmonic tuning; or perhaps all the musicians clapped their hands and skipped for joy? Anyway, before long, if you offered an instrument with fundamental tuning only, it would not have been regarded as suitable for highbrow work. Which is an advance, possibly.

****

It's interesting that both patent applications include some pleasantly crackpot ideas. Winterhoff proposes bars with single-octave tuning, which would naturally have to be cut rather like this --

... and Schluter proposes xylo bars with the wavy notch cut on the upper- as well as the under-side, like this:

and claims that musical effects could be obtained from striking the bar on the declivities (bringing out the harmonics, possibly), a helpful sketch shows how:

NB I don't call these notions "crackpot" because they are wrong; in fact they are both quite correct, but like most innovative ideas that fall by the wayside, they were deemed to be not worth the trouble of implementing, for reasons which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

The post Herman Winterhoff rides again appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

Explanation, and more, follows below the fold. (This is quite a long post, but there are many illustrations to make it even more confusing).

Most people are aware that a piano string doesn't only give the note it's nominally tuned to but a whole series of higher notes (overtones or partials, in the jargon). Same for the air columns in flutes or organ pipes. This is because any regular vibrating mass combines several different modes of vibration: e.g. a string will have a simple mode of vibration where the string is most active (i.e. whooshing from side to side the furthest) at its midpoint and not whooshing at all at its ends -- this mode corresponds to the lowest audible tone; then there is a whole bunch of higher modes that have two, or three, or more, most-active-points at different locations along its length. The same (pretty much) for the gas molecules in an air column. Strings and air columns produce the same pattern of overtones (approximately) which are dignified with the name the harmonic series -- which means if you tune your piano string (organ pipe, nose flute) to C you will also be producing the C an octave above, the G above that, the next C up, then an E, another G, a (rough) B flat etc etc ...

Now a string, being quite a floppy thing, can only vibrate if it is fixed at both ends, which forces it to have points of least vibration (nodes) at its endpoints; similarly a vibrating air column is for practical purposes "fixed" at the points where it meets the rest of the atmosphere, which is a large unwieldy object and can't be made to conform to the pattern inside your pipe (apart from conveyng the tone to our ears).

A marimba bar (xylophone bar, tubular bell ...) is different, because it is actually free to vibrate at its ends, what is technically called a free bar. Or in fact, and this sounds even more lipsmacking, a free free bar, (i.e. both ends free to vibrate, as opposed to only one as in a kalimba tongue). So when you set it vibrating (e.g. by hitting it with a stick, perhaps, while fortuitously gripping it at a node), the simplest mode of vibration will have a most-active-part -- an antinode -- in the middle, but a lot of movement at each end as well.

A cartoon of a vibrating marimba bar -- first (fundamental) mode of vibration. Someone has drilled holes for the cord right at the nodal points; smart. NB It doesn't actually move this much, obviously.

Skipping the hard sums, the upshot is that whereas a string has a series of overtones that relate to its fundamental tone by simple integers, a bar is much crankier. If the fundamental tone of a string has x vibrations per second, then the second mode has 2x vibes per sec, the third mode 3x, and so on until you run out of fingers (you understand we're talking about an ideal string here ... the real strings we have to make do with in the real world don't actually manage this kind of mathematical perfection, but they get close enough). However with a free free bar, the second mode of vibration is 2.756 times the fundamental, the third mode 5.404 times. So if your fundamental tone is C3, your first overtone will be F4 plus 55 cents or so; and your next overtone will be F5 plus about 21 cents.

Of course this is perfectly natural -- after all nice resonant sticks are probably commoner in nature than strings fixed at both ends; but it doesn't conform to human musical preferences as well as simple ratios do, it seems. So when you make a simple instrument with a bunch of free bars, there will be clouds of non-harmonic overtones accompanying all the notes. With wooden bar instruments, particularly high-pitched ones like xylophones, this hardly matters, as the overtones are very weak and barely sustain at all. However the overtones on metal bars can ring on and on in a most persistent and annoying fashion, as Herman Winterhoff proved with his Leedy Vibratone Bells, and low-pitched wooden bars (i.e. the longer ones) can also have remarkably prominent overtones.

Hmmm. How long does a bar have to be before you need to worry about overtones?  Maybe not that long, because somewhere between the stone age and 1918 people had worked out that is possible (in fact easy) to make a bar longer without making it any longer.

Suppose you are wandering down the beach and decide to make a driftwood marimba from the plentiful supply of driftwood .... and in fact as you are on the Beach of Improbablility, the first eleven logs you pick up give you a perfect pentatonic scale over two octaves, say C D E G A c d e g a c'. Lucky! All these (improbable) logs are pretty much the same width, thickness and density, the only relevant factor that they differ by is length. You are pleased to discover that your low C is exactly twice as long as the C two octaves above. Here at least is a nice simple relationship. You scratch some figures in the sand to help keep it in mind -- if L (length) = f (frequency), then 2L = f/4.

Being an ambitious driftwood marimbist, you set about collecting some more logs to extend your range another two octaves in a bass-ward direction. Now things get less convenient, because your bottom C is (of course) four times as long as your top C; in fact it is nearly a metre long, and the instrument is beginning to look rather cumbersome. You worry that if you take your axe to gigs in the manner of these fellows --

-- you will be too worn out to play when you get there.

But now, more luck! The next log you collect is exactly as long and as wide as your top C, but it is only half as thick -- and astonishingly it produces the C an octave lower! So if t (thickness) = f, then t/2 = f/2. By making the lower notes successively thinner, you can also make them shorter -- you will have the pitches you want, and you will also have an eminently portable instrument (and you won't need mallets two feet long either).

The Beach of Improbability is alas not quite improbable enough to provide you with a bandsaw or a drum sanding machine, but it has plenty of abrasive rocks, so you spend some happy hours experimenting with your bars. You find that a bar does not need to be 50 per cent thinner all the way along its length to give you an octave drop. It only needs to be thinner for about the middle third. Funny! -- but mighty convenient, for these scooped-out bars (thin in the middle, fat at the ends) seem to sound rather better than bars that are thinner all the way. Also, you have ended up with a keyboard that looks rather trim, even elegant -- the bars graduate moderately from longish to shortish, and they look pretty uniform in width and thickness.

You have recapitulated some percussion prehistory.

We are going to leave the beach and bring all of our C bars into the laboratory for further investigation. Here they are in profile, with their pitches and dimensions.

Only the C7 bar has been left untouched from its original state. All the others have been scooped out; the scoops (discovered by trial and error) get more radical as our bars get lower in pitch. Or, to be more accurate, the scoops get larger when we wish to flatten a bar by a greater distance from its original untouched state. Let us repeat our C profiles, this time adding the INITIAL pitch of each bar and the distance travelled in a flatward direction.

The precise shape of the scoops has not concerned us overmuch -- as long as we've ended up with the desired pitch we've been happy. And the exact shape doesn't seem that important. Here are several versions of a C4 bar, all produced from blanks 376mm long with an original pitch of F5.

It seems that a deep cut right in the middle of the bar is equivalent to a shallower cut spread over a wider area. It's as if the "flattening value" of removing bar material is highest at the exact mid-point, and gets less as you move away from it. And now we may as well state explicitly what you have probably guessed -- the mid-point of the bar is of course the antinode; and removing mass here makes the bar less stiff (therefore it will vibrate more slowly; for people more used to strings, think what happens when you decrease the tension in a guitar string).

Here is our C4 bar again, but now it comes with a background of conceptual pitch space (far out!) ... the original pitch of the bar is sitting in a red bubble, vertically in line with the antinode ... superimposed on a ladder of semitones ...

... and as we make our scoop, removing material from around the antinode, the pitch-denoting bubble descends the ladder to a new location, like so:

But we began this discussion by talking about multiple modes of vibration -- overtones. The higher modes are also present in our sounding bar, and they have their own locations for nodes and antinodes, as illustrated here for the first three of them:

So let's represent the first three modes of vibration on our groovy pitch-space diagram. We are shifting to the C3 bar because, in case you have an actual C3 bar to hand, it will be easier to hear the overtones than with a higher-pitched bar. The pitch bubbles are located above the points on the bar that are the antinodes for that overtone (theoretical locations of the antinodes for modes two and three indicated below the bar). Remember, the initial pitch of our C3 blank is C5, so that is where our lowest bubble is located in the pitch-space. For the sake of simplicity I will ignore the exact pitch of the higher partials and just identify them by the nearest semitone.

We cut our normal scoop (the approved technical term seems to be arcuate notch), and guided by an intuition that a nice smooth elliptical shape seems most satisfying, we carry on until our fundamental tone is close enough to C3 to fool most people's ears. [NB a smooth elliptical notch is also easy to make with the kinds of tools one might have to hand -- on the beach, abrasive rocks; in an early-20th century workshop, bandsaws, drum sanders, spokeshaves, chisels ...] Having been improbably provided with a Peterson tuner, we check what has happened to the other two modes, just out of interest. And this is where they ended up:

Perhaps our intuition was being guided by our ears, as the overtones we have are now very close to the harmonic tones C5 and E6. We have overshot somewhat but it looks like it would be pretty straightforward, by modifying the exact shape of our notch, to tune this bar C3 -- C5 -- E6. And in fact it is pretty straightforward, and this is now common practice on the lower octaves of marimba keyboards for all makers, corresponding to this:--

In manufacturers' blurb this is what is called triple-tuning.

NB I have dropped the percentage locations of the antinodes and simply numbered them by the mode of vibration they belong to. When you remove mass from the middle of the bar, and change its length/pitch relationship, the locations of the nodes and antinodes also change -- they start to migrate towards the ends of the bar. There is presumably some mathematics that can tell us exactly where they should move to, but I haven't looked it up. In actual tuning practice, you can easily identify where the nodes of the fundamental mode are -- if you are holding the bar up in one hand and whacking it with a mallet held in the other hand, the bar will sound most resonant when your gripping fingers are at the nodal point. Working out roughly where the antinodes for modes 2 and 3 are is then not difficult.

Can we carry our triple-tuning scheme up the keyboard? Suppose we cut a similar-shaped notch on a C4 bar. What happens? On our C3 bar we lowered the fundamental by 2 octaves (24 semitones or 2400 cents); the 2nd mode was lowered by approximately 17 semitones, and the third by 13 semitones. Proportions of 1 -- 0.73 -- 0.55. On the C4 bar remember, our initial pitch was F5; if we lower all the modes in the same proportions, the diagram comes out something like this:

We have overshot. If we want the bar to be tuned C4 -- C6 -- E7, we need to leave more material in place around the antinodes for modes 2 and 3. A curve like this will probably do it.

Yup....

Lets move up to C5. At this pitch the third mode of vibration is going to be so high (and faint) that we'll be lucky to hear it at all, so let's forget about it for now. However tuning the 2nd mode is starting to be a bit problematic. Our initial pitch is B5, so the fundamental has to come down by 11 semitones; but the second mode only wants to come down by 4 and a half semitones. We'll need to cut a more truncated curve still, something like:--

to get:--

As you have probably worked out, on our C6 bar it is not possible to tune the second mode to the double octave, because it is already lower than we want on our blank (which has initial pitch F6; second mode technically B flat 7 +55).

So the double-octave tuning system, which seems so satisfactory and easy to produce for bars between C3 and C5, breaks down somewhere between C5 and C6.

But hold it! -- there is another available harmonic tone below that double octave. Our emerging theory of bar tuning suggests that reverting to a nice generous notch on the higher-pitched bars might bring our second mode into tune with the pitch one twelfth above the fundamental, so ... a bit more time on the beach and we produce this:

and its pitch-diagram ...

So all in all it's been a very useful day on the beach -- we have not only invented the modern marimba, but also the quint-tuned xylophone. Because if the double-octave tuning works sweetly over the (approximate) range C3 --> C5, the twelfth-tuning works just as nicely as well over the range C5 --> C7. A little finagling and you can quint-tune right down to C4.

Well, that's the theory -- the next post will be about the how and the who and the when.

****

Extra science credit! --

The simple formulae we discovered for bar size and pitch, i.e.

2L = f/4

and

t/2 = f/2

are outcomes of the real equation for the pitch of a free free bar, which can be expressed:

where --
f is frequency in Hz
a is thickness in metres
L is length in metres
Y is Young's modulus for the material the bar is made of, in gigapascals
d is density of the material, in kilograms per cubic metre

Is this useful information? Well, sure ... but if you have 49 marimba bars to tune by Wednesday afternoon?

NB All the basic physics/acoustics information in this post can be got from standard textbooks, probably going back to the 19th century. A convenient summary of the relevant info for instruments of all kinds can be found in Musical Instrument Design by Bart Hopkin ISBN 1-884365-08-6; check out his web site windworld

The post A driftwood marimba on the Beach of Improbability appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

Well, actually not; although he was -- arguably -- responsible for a crucial innovation, to which we shall return.

The invention -- if that's the right word -- of the marimba was spread over decades; and over continents; and involved contributions from many people, only some of whom are identifiable. One of the most important has the distinction of being celebrated on a banknote (worthy achievement) -- specifically this Guatemalan 200 quetzal note (image from www.banknotenews.com).

The usual story with musical instruments is that we don't know who invented them. Those where we can identify an actual single inventor (and date, location) are quite rare; we could pick out

-- the piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence, about 1700

-- the clarinet, probably invented by J C Denner in Nuremberg, about the same time

-- and the saxophone, invented by the prolific Adolphe Sax, in Paris, in the 1840s.

(I am ignoring the long tally of instruments that were definitely invented but that nobody particularly wanted, like the phono-fiddle, the normaphone . . . )

At a casual glance a modern clarinet or saxophone look like rather complicated objects, they are bristling with keys and rods and feature various carefully interlinked and engineered gizmos; and as for the mechanism hidden between your piano key and its string(s), that is even more ingenious, in fact a quite stunning achievement for one person to have developed alone. However, I feel strongly that these three instruments have been so successful in subsequent musical history because they are conceptually -- and acoustically -- very simple. A clarinet is what you get when you couple a simple tone-generator (single-reed and mouthpiece) with a cylindrical pipe; a saxophone is what you get when you couple the same with a conical pipe; and a piano is a set of strings that come provided with bionic fingers to strike, strum, or caress them (as opposed to a harpsichord, which can only pluck).

However a concept does not actually make an instrument. Denner and his successors had a lot of tinkering to do to before the clarinet was a fully balanced instrument, effective in both registers; and Cristofori's early pianos probably sounded very mute and characterless beside a brilliant harpsichord, so that the full piano-ness of the piano became incontrovertible only as the instrument got beefed up.

Technical issues are only half the picture; because an emerging instrument also needs a musical community for which its existence makes sense. The piano had a headstart, as all of Europe was pretty well-stocked with people, professionals and amateurs, who played keyboard instruments; the clarinet put a startling new sound into the hands of the smaller though still sizeable community of wind players; and the saxophone was specifically developed, it seems, for the definite purpose of enhancing military bands, and was promptly appointed to that very task.

So these three products of genius were born into a fairly warm and welcoming environment; and were accepted fairly swiftly -- which is to say, it took each of them between fifty and a hundred years to become properly developed and established. That's swift, in historical-musical time.

If this is a pattern -- let's assume it is -- then the arrival of the marimba fits it very satisfactorily.

The marimba has no equivalent figure to Denner or Cristofori, because of course the basic musical concept did not have to be thought up by an originator of genius; marimba-like instruments are absurdly widespread throughout the pre-modern world, so that one might even take for granted the arrival of such instruments in any human society that possessed 1) a musical culture, and 2) trees. Perhaps this is just another way of saying that there was an originator, but history never recorded who it was.

If any one personality was responsible for making the modern concert marimba possible, it was Sebastian Hurtado of Guatemala. In Guatemala the pre-modern marimba had undergone various kinds of fancification and was the centre of a thriving musical practice but it was Hurtado who, at the suggestion of the composer Julian Paniagua, added a row of sharps and flats to the hitherto diatonic instrument.

(I believe this is Sebastian Hurtado with his marimba doble in the 1890s.)

Recall a phrase from the biographical note on J C Deagan -- he developed [the marimba] from a novelty from the jungle into an accepted musical instrument -- which is, to put it politely, a rather Yanqui point of view. Hurtado and Paniagua were not unsophisticated forest dwellers, but urban (and urbane?) musicians who I suspect knew perfectly well what they were doing -- making the marimba suitable not only for folk and popular music but turning it into a plausible participant in "art" music and the music -- whatever it might turn out to be -- of the future, of the twentieth century.

Standard practice for a Guatemalan marimba band is to have (at least) two marimbas, one tending to the treble end of things and one to the bass, each with two, three or four players standing elbow to elbow; today a bass and drums are commonly required, with optional guest soloists on saxophone, cornet, etc. A band of Hurtado's relatives (The Hurtado Brothers Royal Marimba Band) began touring abroad about 1908 and brought musical civilisation to the jungle of the US shortly after, recording many sides for the Victor company in 1915 and 1916. And they were just one of several central american marimba ensembles that toured, recorded, and in some cases settled permanently in El Norte.

Naturally US manufacturers (i.e. J C Deagan) saw an opportunity, and started producing marimbas about 1918. Early Deagan instruments look very spartan and functional compared to Guatemalan marimbas, which tend to have massive and opulently decorated wooden frames and box-section wooden resonators (replacing the traditional gourds). Basically Deagan stripped the instrument down to its essentials and re-purposed it not only for modern factory production but also for a very different musical community, though in 1918 I doubt anyone had much of a clue as to which musical community was out there wringing its hands and longing for the marimba ....

But the early US instruments, though possibly more uniform and reliable than what you'd have found in Quetzaltenango, were no real advance on Hurtado's work. The next step forward was not made until the introduction of harmonic tuning, which is a subject for the next post.

***

A closer look at that banknote. Sebastian Hurtado (1827 - 1913) is on the left. The others are the musicians German Alcantara and Mariano Valverde. Read about them here (in Spanish, naturally).

The post So who invented the marimba? appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

When I started making marimbas and xylophones someone said "So where do you get the bars?" --  I was tempted to reply "Ikea" but the real answer is I get them from a tree.

I must admit I didn't select and fell and mill and season the tree myself, that was done by helpful people in Central America. The resulting sawn boards came to the UK (probably years ago) as a teeny part of the international timber trade.

(There's a lot one could say about the particular species of tree, but I'll leave that for another time.)

And so --

you just select the boards most appropriate for tuned percussion purposes (having learnt what that might be);

prepare stock planed all round to the desired sizes (having decided upon your keyboard design -- the length width and thickness for the various pitches, degree of graduation, etc);

drill lateral holes for the cord (having worked out the rail angles appropriate to your design, predicting the likely location of the node of the fundamental mode of vibration etc);

tune every bar (having decided upon your tuning scheme) by creating the arcuate notch (continually checking resulting effect upon fundamental and overtones)

(remembering that a keyboard is not by itself an instrument; how will you configure the notebars, the support system, the resonators, to meet the requirements of playability, portability, longevity, and -- might as well tick all the boxes -- elegance, beauty, efficiency, affordability, yada yada yada ...)

-- the point I am making is not that you have to be a prodigious talent to do all this, but rather that if you could buy a set of bars off the shelf, you would have let someone else make all these decisions for you.

For this instrument, I decided to go back in time to the xylophonic golden age and so prepared a set of large and heavy bars; not because bigger is better, but, as discussed in What is a xylophone Part Two, to see if this produces a more xylophone-like xylophone, something that's definitely NOT a "piccolo marimba".

To give a bit more presence to the lower octave the keyboard is graduated quite radically; the top notes are 44 mm wide, but the lowest note bars are 60 mm wide, matched with two and a half inch resonators. Paradoxically this means that it ends up looking much more like a marimba, and when disassembled it will take up a marimba-sized space in your car:

The frame is made of ash, a temperate hardwood that is inexpensive, strong, stable and not too heavy. I also like the way it looks -- even when finished (oil, polish etc) to a good joinery standard, it never looks la-di-dah, but ...well, just like wood, you know?

To fit into the back seat of your mini, the rails are of course hinged -- and a marimba/xylophone rail hinge is something else you can't get at Ikea or Home Depot. I make mine of steel, and fit them within the body of the rail itself.

The frame goes together in a few minutes (an easy one-person job);

The rails slot into precisely cut locations in the end frames (no bolts or screws needed); a central alignment block and integral steel braces keep the geometry of the frame rigid (and support the modular resonator assemblies). This frame will not sag or go out of true.

And the rails are helpfully colour-coded at the narrow end; it takes a lot of determination to put it together wrong:

I'm always happy to demonstrate instruments to any interested parties; do get in touch if you want to check it out.

This xylophone is designed throughout to be true to the original concept of presenting a particular style of keyboard. It is of course possible to start the whole process from the other end ... what would you get if your main aim was quite different? If you decided that portability and compactness were the priorities, what decisions would follow then?

Of course a small, light xylophone would not be a surprising thing to produce. A small, light bass marimba, that would be something else ....

The post THIS is a xylophone appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

I would have liked to head this post with a striking photo of the talented Winterhoff, but the first image the internet turned up for me was this one:

Never mind, he will appear alive below the fold.

During the 19th century musical instrument making became a mass-production, factory-based business. The little ateliers of luthiers of all kinds continued to thrive -- or at least to get by somehow -- but the 1860s, when Steinway in New York went from producing 500 pianos a year to producing 1800 pianos a year, can be regarded as a tipping point. For the first time, the musical instrument business offered  the possibility of becoming rich, or at least becoming a captain of industry and achieving prominence, respect and very large debts. If you didn't want to compete with Steinway, you might find some other instrument with the potential of becoming as ubiquitous as the piano, perhaps an instrument not yet taken seriously by the musical toffs (the banjo? the saxophone?) -- perhaps an instrument not even invented yet.

At this point one ends up telling basically the same story several times over; the characters change but the legend is the same. It goes like this; [energetic man] develops [minor musical oddity] and hires [smart boy] to help him build [business empire] producing [various innovations] ....

Item: C G Conn branched out from the grocery business with the slightly kookie idea of adding a rubber rim to a brass instrument mouthpiece (easier on the lips) and in ten years became the busiest employer in Elkhart, Indiana, and the biggest band instrument manufacturer in the world. His smart boys included Gus Buescher (who persuaded Conn to start making saxophones, the first to do so in the US, and then left to set up on his own).

Item: John Calhoun Deagan started in 1880 as a one-man operation offering a better-tuned glockenspiel, expanded into xylos, marimbas, enormous carillon installations and (would you have guessed?) dinner chimes; his Chicago factory (opened 1912) was advertised as the -- um -- largest musical factory in the world; his smart boy was Henry Schluter, who supposedly joined at the bottom rung and became head tuner and all-round boffin.

Item: Ulysses G Leedy invented a folding snare drum stand and started making them in his apartment in 1898, and by 1920 his Indianapolis factory was (naturally) the largest manufactory of percussion instruments in the world. He had at least a trio of smart boys; George Way (general manager), Cecil Strupe (chief engineer), and Herman Winterhoff (workshop maven).

So, the early 20th century saw two big beasts in the percussion world.

Deagan ... and Leedy...

and Deagan ...

.. and Leedy

and Deagan --

... and although this looks like Judgement Day at the pharmacists' convention, it is a smart attempt by the Deagan PR people to project the company as a gleaming world-of-science-staffed-by-furrowed-brow-eggheads. Leedy falls behind here, at least iconographically, All the internet can provide is some rather gloomy pics of drums and tuned percussion gamely pushed together into a "display".

NB I will credit picture sources at the bottom of the post.

Of course if you have a factory (the largest in the world, even) and a sizeable number of employees, you need to keep on selling a LOT of instruments. So your market has to stretch far beyond the needs of those pros who actually use your instruments to make a living. You have to appeal to the up-n-coming cohorts (students, schoolchildren) but also as widely as possible among the general public. This pressure leads to constant change and "innovation" in your standard products (I put "innovation" in quote marks because it also includes UN-ovation, i.e. stepping smartly backwards to the good old days and bringing out models that evoke the true old fashioned values that our competitors are failing to maintain blah blah blah). It also encourages the hunt for brand new products.

Deagan had a particularly busy streak.

The PAS Hall of Fame entry on J C D quotes the  National Cyclopedia of American Biography (vol. 43, 1961) ...

"[J C Deagan] developed many other musical instruments, including the xylophone, organ chimes, aluminum chimes, aluminum harp, Swiss handbells, and orchestra bells. The marimba he developed from a novelty from the jungle into an accepted musical instrument. He evolved the original marimbaphone with metal into the vibraharp, the drawn tubular cathedral chime for pipe organ and orchestra use, and the steel bar celeste and wood bar harp for pipe organ use..."

Without derogating from Deagan's personal talents we should probably see this as an example of credit accruing to the nearest prominent personality. Deagan founded the company, it bore his name, ergo he personally did all this stuff. In reality many other people were involved, some probably had greater involvement in the process than Deagan himself, and if the Deagan company hadn't done it, someone else would.

As far as the vibraphone is concerned, someone else did.

In John H Beck's Encyclopaedia of Percussion we can find ...

"Beginning about 1916, Herman Winterhoff of the Leedy Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis experimented off and on with a variety of motor-mechanical arrangements in his quest for a vox humana or tremolo effect from the bars of a three-octave F-F steel marimba, a novelty vaudeville instrument with thin, steel tone bars mounted to the keybed on tapered felt strips. He succeeded in 1922 by mounting a motor on the frame at the narrow end beneath the bars to drive dual shafts fitted with metal discs centered in the tops of each resonator tube. As the discs (pulsators) revolved in the resonator columns under sounding bars, a tonal phase shift was created resembling a vibrato."

There is a little more detail about the initial (wrong) steps Winterhoff took. In the Smithsonian Collection is a box of photos from the Leedy archives (not yet digitised) where the prefatory material states

"Winterhoff ... produced a device called the Vibratone, which had two rows of resonators moving up and down alternately. This and another model, with butterfly fans in the tops of the resonators which rocked back and forth in a semicircle, were unsuccessful due to noise."

I would like to see this Vibratone, it sounds entertaining in every way. Eventually --

" ... in the 1920's Winterhoff and the Leedy engineers devised a practical instrument with rotating fans in the resonators which made complete, even revolutions."

It is not an easy thing to come up with the obvious solution, it seems.

NB The Smithsonian also provides the name of at least one of the "Leedy engineers", Leroy Jeffries.

About 25 of these earliest vibraphones were sold, under the name of the "Leedy Vibratone bells" and they allegedly caused a minor sensation in the vaudeville world; Edison xylophonist Signor Lou Chiha ("Friscoe") recorded two sides Aloha Oe and Gypsy Love Song on the Vibratone Bells and if you get to hear them (at least one of them is somewhere on YouTube) be prepared for a special listening experience. The bars were steel and only the fundamental was tuned; the clashing overtones wobble along bravely giving an air of genial derangement.

However the minor sensation was so minor that in 1927 Leedy decided to chuck in the towel, at which point the Deagan company stepped in. Beck's Encyclopaedia again:--

"The previous April [of 1927] the vibraharp had been introduced by J. C. Deagan, Inc., . . . The Deagan vibraharp was developed by chief engineer Henry J Schluter, who conceived the design as an entirely new mallet instrument, not a modification of an existing design. He drew upon his experience with such earlier Deagan devices as aluminium-bar song bells and the large organ vibrato harp ..."

Er -- what? An entirely new mallet instrument? Not a modification of an existing design? Hmm, not credible. I don't believe that Schluter (demon king of the pharmacists in the photo above) was ignorant of the Leedy vibraphone; if he didn't know it well he wasn't doing his job. The passage from Beck reads like a press release dictated by a copyright lawyer. And, ahem, the vibraphone chapter in Beck's encyclopaedia was contributed by Hal Trommer, who had been --  the sales manager at J C Deagan Inc.

Schluter definitely brought a half-developed concept to a (reasonably) perfect state. He replaced steel bars by aluminium, introduced harmonic tuning, and added a damper bar, thereby removing the obvious defects (or the exciting original features) of Winterhoff's creation. "Vibraphone" being a protected Leedy trademark, the Deagan instrument made its bow as the "vibraharp". Leedy in turn copied Schluter's improvements and brought out their own competing version. The Deagan instrument was the better seller, and was the model chosen by Red Norvo, Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, the artists who proved that the instrument actually belonged to a different world than that of the vaudeville stage that prompted its birth. In a minor victory for Leedy, however, only pedants preferred the name "vibraharp", and the instrument will be known as vibraphone until the end of time, except among those groovy people who call it "the vibes".

So Schluter perfected what Winterhoff began; but Winterhoff was the begetter -- he developed, and brought to market, a new instrument with an immediately identifiable character of its own, a viable metallophone for modern music of all kinds; and he and his team developed the basic gadgetry (electric-motor-driven rotating vanes) that made it what it is.

It could be objected that if Winterhoff was behind Schluter, so the Deagan company and its steel marimba was behind Winterhoff. However the steel marimba, though undeniably a physical object that one could use to play music on, is not actually an instrument -- it has no intrinsic character that could capture a musician's interest. This is evident from the Deagan catalogue copy for the marimbaphone, that adventurous version where the bars can be tipped up 90 degrees to allow easy playing with a bow, like so:

The Deagan copywriters go all out to flog a dead horse:

A Deagan Steel Marimbaphone is a most valuable addition to any orchestra in which it will replace the Italian Harp, having all the desirable tone qualities of the Harp with the additional advantage of always being in tune.

Deagan Steel Marimbaphone blends perfectly with the voice and has a tendency to build it up and many of the more prominent singers carry a Deagan Steel Marimbaphone with them for accompaniment purposes.

Deagan Steel Marimbaphones can be played by from one to four people, according to size and range and as two separate sets of selections can be played on an instrument, one with bows and one with mallets, the instrument is practically two instruments in one.

Deagan Steel Marimbaphones are also very adaptable for home use, as the instrument is very simple to play and the tone is of absolutely the very finest quality, being similar to that of Musical Glasses, it makes and ideal instrument for a Music Room.

Wow -- replaces the harp, invaluable for the singer, two instruments in one, absolutely the very finest tone quality and VERY SIMPLE TO PLAY. When PR gets this frantic you can assume that we are dealing with that dreariest of all things, the musical novelty.

So as far as I am concerned, Herman Winterhoff invented the vibraphone. In part two of this post I will explain how he also invented the marimba.

I promised you his picture. Here he is disguised as a vice-president of the Leedy Manufacturing Company:--

And here he is in his natural habitat, demonstrating to Grant Hamilton Green how to drill a hole in a piece of wood....

Picture sources:

HEW's grave from:
http://www.heathraps.com/

J C Deagan, Henry Schluter and Deagan staff: 
from http://www.centurymallet.com/

U G Leedy:
http://www.findagrave.com/

Deagan factory postcard:
https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com

Leedy factory:
http://historicindianapolis.com/

Lou Chiha:
http://www.pas.org/resources/research/GerhardtCylinder/CylinderRecordings/LouFriscoe.aspx -- picture cited there as coming from the 1925 Leedy Xylophones and Marimbas catalog. Gerhardt Collection

steel marimbaphone:
http://www.percussionservicesltd.com/

Winterhoff in suit and tie:
http://historicindianapolis.com/

Winterhoff in the factory:
from a thesis by Ryan C Lewis on G H Green:
available at georgehamiltongreen.com/files/Ryan-Lewis-GHG-dissertation.pdf

And the steel marimbaphone blurb with pictures and model designations is at:
www.deaganresource.com

The post Thank you, Herman E Winterhoff appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

Discounting the fact that he died of tuberculosis at the age of 31 (over a thousand miles from home, and possibly having just suffered the theft of his celebrated instrument) Gusikow seems to have had an outlandishly fortunate career.

The TB supposedly forced him to give up playing the flute, so he turned to the strohfiedel. An odd choice? -- perhaps not; Gusikow was familiar with the tsimbl, a small cimbalom (hammered dulcimer) widely used in klezmer, Ukrainian and Roma music making -- indeed his father played both the flute and the tsimbl -- and it would have been relatively easy for him to adapt the longstanding musical practice of tsimbl playing to the new instrument. Possibly he had a precursor (or mentor, or colleague, or rival) in one Samson Jakubowski, or maybe he worked it out for himself. Or -- just possible -- there was a whole school of players who had mastered both the tsimbl and its wooden cousin the gelachter, the holz- und stroh instrument, the strohfiedel . . . and played whatever was to hand.

Gusikow however was alone in ascending (or descending?) from the shtetl to the salon. He was presumably an exceptionally gifted player, but he surely had other talents beside, um, talent.

For one, he had a knack for being assisted by distinguished and influential folk. His first concert tour in 1834 took him (accompanied by some of his brothers on fiddles and bass) to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, where he was heard by and gained the respect of -- world number two violinist Karol Lipinski; poet, academician and future head of state Alphonse de Lamartine; and academician and historian Joseph Francois Michaud. Lipinski and Lamartine are said to have encouraged him to tour western europe, and from 1835 to his death in October 1837 he played Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris . . . .

In Vienna he drew the attention of the journalist Moritz Saphir. If Gusikow was an example -- a pioneering example -- of the itinerant jewish musikant, Saphir had followed another emblematic path, the yeshiva boy who cannot resist the lure of ... well, in the case of Saphir the irresistible forbidden was gentile learning, Latin and Greek and modern literature, and he plunged into a career of satire, theatre reviewing, poetry, setting up journals, having them suppressed by the authorities, popping up in Munich, Berlin, Paris, a gadfly who wrote, argued, provoked and wrote some more, who seems to have written ceaselessly because he couldn't help it.

Gusikow's first gig in Vienna set the pen of Saphir dancing. By Saphir's own account -- possibly overstating his own importance -- he was crucial in securing the ear of the Viennese public, by publishing articles such as: --

"Variations in Wood and Straw

on the straw- and wood-instrument of Joseph Gusikow

. . . . Give me your hand, most learned Gentlemen, Connoisseurs and Patrons. Give me your beautiful hand, Madam, gracious protector of the arts, come with me, you beautiful spirits, beautiful souls, beautiful hearts all, take your binoculars and opera glasses, don't be afraid, we shall attend the concert of the poor Jew from Poland, who has never learned that you need a write-up in the local paper to introduce yourself in the best houses, who has never learned to print the tickets for his performances with a finely cut gilt border, never learned to wear silk stockings when calling at the home of a benefactor, and never learned how to raise the interest of the female sex.

.... Joseph Gusikov, the Polish Jew, plays the Wood and Straw instrument. Modesty itself could not be more unassuming than this man, his instrument, and the name of both ...

..... there he steps forward, dressed in the national garb of Polish Jewry, wearing the black cassock, the black hair divided into two sidelocks, a black Jewish hat covers his head. His low gaze makes for a moving elegy, and he has set this elegy into music, transposed it into notes, brought it into wondrous sounds. On wood and straw, from wood and straw he teases sounds, sounds of the innermost melancholy, sounds of great pathos .... From wood and straw he extracts the most exquisite vibrations, the most sensitive oscillations, the softness of elegy."

Projected into the public eye by the efforts of Saphir, or himself, or both, he became the closest available thing in 19th century Vienna to an internet sensation; his portrait was published by Josef Kriehuber, who was responsible for popular images of every notable personality from the Emperor on down. The Wikipedia entry on Kriehuber, with uncharacteristic wit, claims "His success probably [stemmed] from the fact that he is a master of portraying men as more distinguished, and women as prettier, than they are in reality." The Gusikow portrait is based on a lost painting by one Eustache Choinski, so maybe he provided the extra distinction. I prefer to believe that Joseph Gusikow was just as beautiful as Choinski/Kriehuber's pencil makes him. Here he is.

Yiddishkeit and impossibly debonair.

February 1836, and Gusikow has played Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn heard him. Mendelssohn wrote to his mother:--

"I am curious to know whether Gusikow pleased you as much as he did me [Gusikow had moved on to Berlin]. He is quite a phenomenon, a famous fellow, inferior to no virtuoso in the world, both in execution and facility; he therefore delights me more with his instrument of wood and straw than many with their pianofortes, just because it is such a thankless kind of instrument."

Felix carries on with a little story that reveals that Gusikow had something of an entourage.

"A capital scene took place at his concert here. I went out to join him in the room where he was, in order to speak to him and compliment him. Schleinitz and David [Schleinitz was a tenor, an ex-lawyer, and was to be Mendelssohn's successor as director of the Leipzig Conservatoire; Ferdinand David was concertmaster at the Gewandhaus and the soloist in the premiere of Mendelssohn's violin concerto] wished to come with me; a whole group of Polish Jews followed in our wake, anxious to hear our eulogiums, but when we came to the side room they pressed forward so quickly that David and Schleinitz were left in the rear, and the door shut right in their faces; then the Jews all stood quite still, waiting to hear the compliments Gusikow was about to receive. At first I could not speak for laughing, seeing the small room crammed with these bearded fellows, and my two friends shut out." 

Hmm. Is there a little disdain for the "bearded fellows" here? Or just amusement? Hard to tell.

We don't know what mum thought of Gusikow, but sister Fanny heard him and wrote to family friend Klingemann:--

"A Polish Jew, said to be quite a virtuoso on an instrument consisting of bundles of straw and wooden sticks, is exciting much interest here now. I should not have believed it unless Felix had written about him, but I have seen him and can assure you he is a very handsome man."

But Fanny is no pushover. She thinks the "virtuoso" is not as simple as he seems.

"He is a regular Jew in his dress and his habits, which makes his fortune at court."

Hmm. Maybe a touch of disdain there.

"I could give you a very appropriate Jewish phrase for this, only you would not understand it."

What was she thinking of? Anyway, she gives him his due:--

"I have now heard the phenomenon, and without being ecstatic, like most people, must own that the skill of the man beats everything that I could have imagined, for with his wooden sticks resting on straw, his hammers also being of wood, he produces all that is possible with the most perfect instrument. It is a complete riddle to me how the thin sound the thing gives, like Papageno's flute [is this a mistranslation, or Fanny's mistake? -- because Papageno of course had no flute, but rather a quaint musical box] can be produced with such materials. One of his clever tricks is putting together his instrument before the eyes of the audience..."

Yes, if the audience were all as ignorant as Fanny of the actual acoustic nature of "wooden sticks", that would be a clever trick, or rather a venerable one, as the magician traditionally demonstrates that the top hat is empty before producing from it a rabbit. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing but wood and straw, I am not concealing a piano in my sleeves .... Fanny concludes:

"Altogether he seems to be a sly fox of the highest order. I direct your attention to this Gusikow, if he comes to London. We all agree that father would have been much interested if he could have heard him."

So Moritz Saphir presents Gusikow as an innocent, clueless about promoting himself; but for Fanny he is a sharp operator with cunning PR. Perhaps he cottoned on quick. Or perhaps there simply was no artifice; the "regular Jew" saw no reason to stop being himself just because he was in the public eye.

I have the impression that Saphir knows very little about music, though he can go on about it any length you like; perhaps he is the first rock critic. The Mendelssohns of course know their own business inside out, but unfortunately they say nothing about what music Gusikow actually played, and little about his actual playing beyond the stunning impact of his skill. However, we can learn more from an anonymous writer in the Allgemeine Musicalische Zeitung who ended a round-up of musical events in September 1835 (in Vienna) with:--

Finally we have to mention the concert of a hitherto unknown Mr Joseph Gusikow, who could be heard by invitation, even repeatedly, on the so-called “Straw fiddle”, or as it is called in Austria, the “Wooden laughter”. For the benefit of the uninitiated it is hereby stated, that this almost forgotten instrument consists of nothing but 26 wooden bars, laid out upon five bundles of straw; the bars, struck with a pair of wooden hammers, give different tones according to whether they are long or short.

Upon this rustic dulcimer – which is by no means delicate, nor pretty, nor endowed with much sonority – which he had spread out upon a little table before him, Gusikow, accompanied by two violins and a cello, played an aria of Rossini’s, an Allegro by Hoffmeister, some variations and a potpourri, with a level of technical skill that had to be heard in person to be believed, the kind of skill only continuous years of practice can achieve. Passages in the fastest possible tempo, every nuance between forte and piano, crescendos and diminuendos, precise trills, everything was executed with purity and taste, even elegance ­– playing which necessarily evoked not just surprise, but admiration, even astonishment.

The novelty of the thing, and the truly quite extraordinary technique, brought forth tumultuous applause, and the artist (a native of Russia, who, along with his companions, performed in a traditional national costume) was able to programme a second concert directly.

In January 1837 Gusikow was in Paris, where La Revue et Gazette Musicale printed a very similar assessment:

M Guzikow presented his musical evening last Tuesday, in M Pleyel’s salons. It was very well attended. Monsieurs Kalkbrenner and Lee, Mlle Nau, Monsieurs Derivis and Wartel were charged with completing the programme; and they performed, as always, like the skilled artists they are. The sweet voice of Mlle Nua, and the style with which M Kalkbrenner executed a Pensee de Bellini, a virtuoso fantasy for piano, excited lively applause .... As for the beneficiary himself, he has justified his reputation, which is saying a lot. The virtuosity he demonstrates upon his instrument is truly prodigious; and we regret that his skills are not expended upon a less thankless object. We regret it all the more because M Gusikow’s musical sensibility seems to be very good; his playing is always supremely elegant; his melodic lines phrased with taste and purity, and one can scarcely imagine how he obtains such distinct and powerful control of dynamics, such nuances of forte and piano, from nothing but little sticks of wood, feeble in tone and sometimes with little discernible pitch. It is a most piquant musical curiosity.

So in Paris Gusikow not only wowed the public in his now customary fashion, but seems to have won ready acceptance from the established musical world. Not everybody would be able to put on a benefit at Pleyel's (and pack the place). And though I don't know who Lee, Nau, Derivis and Wartel were, Kalkbrenner was at the very top of the musical tree, a composer and pianist with an enormous reputation (with which he completely concurred), the man who offered to accept Chopin as a pupil; (if Chopin studied with him for three years, Kalkbrenner thought he could make a great artist of him).

The writer for the Revue gives the impression that he came quite prepared to puncture Gusikow's balloon, but was totally disarmed by the obvious sincerity of his playing. Someone who thought otherwise was Franz Liszt:

Immediately upon my arrival [back in Paris] I stumbled across a marvel, a glory of wood and straw, across Mr. Gusikow, the musical juggler who plays an infinite number of notes in an infinitely short time and draws the greatest possible sonority from the two least sonorous bodies. It is a prodigious example of ‘the difficulty overcome’ which all Paris is applauding right now. But what a pity it is that Gusikow, the Paganini of the Boulevards, did not apply his gift, one might even say his genius, to inventing an agricultural instrument or to introducing some new form of husbandry to his country. In which case, he might have enriched an entire nation, whereas his talent, being misguided, has produced nothing but musical inanities to which the charlatans who write feature articles for the newspapers will ascribe incalculable value.

One might think it a bit rich of Liszt, of all people, to wrinkle his nose at playing "an infinite number of notes in a infinitely short time" but in fact we are here entering something of a hall of mirrors ... for that last smack at the charlatans who write feature articles for the newspapers may be aimed precisely at the man who -- quite probably -- wrote the notice of Gusikow's concert above -- F-J Fétis, the founder of the Revue, the same F-J Fétis who had written (in 1828) the following cool appreciation of one F Liszt (then 16 years old):

How sad that natural gifts as rare as those possessed by M Liszt are only used to convert music into a shell-game and a conjuring show! That is not at all the destiny of this enchanting art. It should touch us, move us, not astonish us. The emotions are inexhaustible, but astonishment soon wears off. M. Liszt, you are very young; you are an excellent sight-reader and already a very skilled musician; you possess wonderful fingers; unfortunately, however, you were born at a time when pianists have made music into silliness and you have been carried away by the torrent ….

Francois-Joseph Fétis was an enormously energetic figure; critic, journalist, composer, professor of counterpoint, theorist, historian, musicologist, something of a colossal highbrow and just possibly a bit of a crank. He founded the Revue Musicale and wrote and published it virtually single-handed from 1827 to 1835, when he sold out to his colleague Schlesinger; but remained a major contributor thereafter. In 1833 he took up the post of Kappelmeister and Director of the Conservatoire for Leopold I in Brussels (returning to his homeland), but he surely remained a major figure in the musical life of Paris.

Apart from scads of musical journalism and reviewing, Fétis produced extensive treatises on counterpoint and fugue, on the theory and history of harmony, on Stradivarius and the development of the violin, a general history of music, and his single greatest monument, the Biographie Universelle des Musiciens, the product of decades of research and writing; and I am telling you all this not because Fétis himself is so fascinating (though he is) but because the little two-column entry in the Biographie Universelle is not only our main source for Gusikow's life and career, but is almost part of the story itself. Because Fétis, who scolded Liszt for affectation and grandstanding, and who wrote that Berlioz "lacks the most basic capacity" in the art of music, and who "corrected" the harmony in his edition of  Beethoven's symphonies, was utterly captivated by Gusikow and wrote him an eloquent tribute that breathes nothing but respect and affection:

GUSIKOW (Michel Joseph), artiste d'un talent prodigue .... Fétis commences .... an artist of prodigious talent, was born to Jewish parents, on 2 September 1806, at Sklov, a small town in White Russia.... His father, a humble folk musician, played the flute and the cimbalom, an instrument of metal strings struck with light wooden beaters, which is in use among the jews of Poland and Russia. Joseph’s education consisted of little more than learning from his father how to play these same instruments to accompany village weddings and dances; but nature had formed him to be a great artist, and from his childhood he was faithful to the rare and beautiful feelings that animated his humble vocation. Knowing not a note of written music, he played nothing but popular Jewish, Polish and Russian melodies; but the grace of his playing bestowed upon these simple tunes a new and unsuspected character. At seventeen he was married, and lived quietly alongside his brothers, having no occupation beyond that of village musician, only disturbing the uniform pattern of his life by short trips to Moscow. His physical constitution was weak; a serious respiratory illness beginning in 1831 would not allow him to continue with the flute, and from that moment he and his family fell into deep misery. However Gusikow had occasionally played a rather crude instrument, originating from China and India, and widespread among the Tartars, Cossacks, Russians, Lithuanians and even in Poland; this instrument, made up of bars of resonant wood, such as pine, is known by the Jewish denizens of those countries as Jerova I Salomo. It is usually built to the major scale of the Chinese, with the fourth degree raised a semitone. Gusikow, forced by necessity, set himself to perfecting this instrument and using it to ensure his livelihood. He increased the number of tone bars to two and a half octaves, fully chromatic, arrayed not in a simple ladder of semitones, but in an arrangement specially adapted to facilitate execution. Looking also to improve the tone of the instrument, he thought of positioning the bars upon lightweight sewn straw rolls, and succeeded in isolating the vibrations and making them more powerful. It took nearly three years of continuous work for the artist to gain the marvellous facility that we have witnessed at Vienna, at Paris, wherever he has been heard, and to perfect his natural gift for drawing expressive and passionate utterances from his singular instrument .....

This account is quite detailed and circumstantial, and no wonder -- it came from the most authoritative source. As Fétis (rather snippily) remarks at the end of the article:

A biographical notice on Gusikow inserted into the supplement of Michaud’s Universal Biography differs, in regard to many facts, from mine; however the information I am following was provided to me by Gusikow himself, during his long sojourn in Brussels.

On the whole the account is in conformity with what we have learnt from the press reports and the testimony of the Mendelssohns. Obviously the statement that he played "nothing but popular Jewish Polish and Russian melodies" is misleading, unless it is taken to refer only to his repertoire before he undertook his tour; apart from the review in the Allgemeine Musicalische Zeitung which specifies pieces by Rossini and Hoffmeister, the Polish press (cited in Grove) claims he always gained huge applause for his performance of Paganini's La Campanella. Hmm, wonder if Liszt heard that one.

The one new claim is that Gusikow himself was responsible for the specific design and construction of his instrument. As far as I know there is no other evidence for this. It is also the kind of myth that one might expect to adhere to a story like Gusikow's. But it might be true.

Let's reflect for a moment on the technical issue of the straw-filled sewn rolls. We are told this was an innovation of Gusikow's, to improve the tone; as Fétis puts it, he succeeded in isolating the vibrations and making them more powerful. Translating into modern acoustics, if the bars are laid upon the straw rolls so that each bar is supported at its point of least vibration (i.e. the nodes of the fundamental mode of vibration), then there will potentially be more volume and sustain. The published pictures of the instrument are consistent with this intention.

What was the previous system, which presumably was prone to muffling the potential vibration? Nobody seems to have discussed this, but possibly it was done with twine, tying the entire instrument together with string passed around each bar (ideally at the nodal points, as players would have discovered), like the customary way of constructing African balafons. Or maybe the modern system of drilling holes through the bars and passing cord through had already been discovered. The internet provides pictures of some fairly rustic-looking instruments which look quite primitive but are probably not actually that old, for example:

This instrument (picture from here) combines the straw rolls dating back to Gusikow's time (or before) with the pass-through cord system possibly copied from a more modern instrument.

In the contemporary engravings of Gusikow's instrument there is no indication of cord or twine at all. In fact the implication of the pictures (and of Fanny Mendelssohn's account) is that he simply placed the straw rolls on the table and laid the separate bars upon them in the desired configuration. If you have ever played something like a cheap Gear4Music xylo, where, even though the tonebars are nominally held on pegs, they will, when struck with force, leap promptly off the frame onto the floor -- then you will have even more respect for Gusikow's technique.

And as palaeontologists become more cool if they can provide video of cgi dinosaurs instead of lame photographs of fossilised vertebrae, at this point I would love to insert a reconstruction of M J Gusikow dashing away on his holtz und stroh. The nearest I can find, however, is this.... (the mallets are right, the instrument is close enough, and the music IS by Paganini:)

Bravo Bena Havlů!

Fétis summarises the sad end of Gusikow's story with the detachment of the encyclopedist:

Unfortunately his declining health often confined him to bed for months, in a state so weak that it was widely believed his end was imminent; along with his pale aspect and the habitual melancholy imprinted on his features it all added to the interest inspired by his prodigious talent. A long and painful illness detained him in Brussels for more than four months. Barely convalescent, he tried to head back to his homeland; but he had arrived at the terminus of his career, and he died at Aix-la-Chapelle on the 21 October 1837.

An unhappy detail is provided by two further paragraphs on Gusikow that appeared in the Revue Musicale during 1837.  It is likely Fétis wrote them, or at the very least provided the facts. On June 23rd:

We have news of the interesting Gusikow, who played music of such astonishing difficulty upon an instrument of his own invention, which he called “Holz und Stroh”, as it is made of nothing but wood and straw. This inventive artist has just experienced a cruel loss, of that very instrument, which has been stolen from him in Brussels. It is alleged that the person guilty of this theft is a german teacher, named Rosenstein, who fancied introducing the harmonious billets to America to make a fortune from concertizing there. The sympathy of all friends of music can not fail to reach out to the unfortunate Gusikow.

And I cannot withhold sympathy from the also unfortunate Rosenstein. Gusikow may only be a footnote to music history, but Rosenstein is nothing but a footnote to a footnote, and all that is recorded of him is his infamous conduct. Well, lets hope things turned out ok in the USA.

On October 29th the Revue gave Gusikow his last notice:

Gutzikow, the inventor of that curious instrument called Holtz und Stroh (wood and straw), and from which he obtained such extraordinary effects, has just succumbed to a disease of the lungs, its ravages perhaps increased by the distress of having lost his instrument. Readers may recall that it was stolen from him last spring, in a despicable abuse of trust. The unhappy artist died at Aix-la-Chapelle, aged just thirty-two years.

To which Fétis -- if it was him -- added one final and touching salute to his friend:

He departs this life regretted by all who could appreciate his artistry, his musical genius, and the goodness of his heart and of his character.

******

If you have managed to read this far, you are probably the sort of person who likes references, footnotes and lists of further reading. So --

The translation from Moritz Saphir was made by Michael Cahn of Plurabelle Books. Thank you Michael. The other translations are by me, and are in places quite free -- when a literal rendering came out in English as impossibly unidiomatic , I allowed myself to imagine what a 19th century English-speaking writer might have put had he or she been writing the piece in question.

The marimbist Alex Jacobowitz has a page of Saphir's articles about Gusikow (in German) on his site. According to this site, at one time Mr Jacobowitz was collecting information on Gusikow with a view to writing a book, but it does not seem to have materialised.

The scholar Janet Wasserman has a couple of pages on Gusikow's biography and iconography. Some outdated links unfortunately.

Scans of the original issues of La Revue et Gazette Musicale and the Allgemeine Musicalische Zeitung can be found on the web; also the greater part of Moritz Saphir's collected works.

Discovered while I was writing this post -- the excellent book Jewry in Music by David Conway. Small cameo role for M J Gusikow.

The post M J Gusikow appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

Well, I am just having a little fun with the view of Paul Jefferies that xylophones

1) need thick bars to give a staccato sound

2) should be "quint-tuned" to have a jarring sound ("that is what it is for musically")

3) should preferably not have bars of padouk or other cheaper alternatives to rosewood

4) must not be "piccolo marimbas".

Let's take it step by step ...

Thick bars. Going back to the strohfiedel, the bars are rather small -- certainly narrow, and not particularly deep (the modern reproductions by Lefima have bars 30mm by 20mm). I seriously doubt that early European concert xylophones were any more massive, and they were acceptable to Strauss, Stravinsky and Bartok. It's likely that heavier bars began to appear as the Deagan and Leedy companies sought competitive advantage in the vaudeville era in the USA. The most steroidal xylophone ever was possibly the Deagan de Luxe, with bars 2 and 1/4 " wide and 1 and 1/4 " deep (57 x 32 mm). Here it is in close-up with some namby-pamby normal bars piggybacking on it for purposes of scale:

Image from here, and thanks to Scott at Olympic.

It was originally developed for xylophonist "El Cota" (known to his mother as Lawrence Albert Coates):--

But not every piano is a Steinway D, and the ones that aren't Steinway Ds are still pianos. Most xylophones are not like the Deagan De Luxe, but they are still xylophones. Consulting Deagan catalogues (as you can do at the Deagan Resource) you find that on most of their models bar width varied between 1 5/8" and 2" (41 to 51 mm) and bar thickness was usually 7/8" or 15/16" (22 or 24mm, give or take).

Let's concede that going under about 22mm thick may start to compromise the longevity (and "repairability") of a xylophone bar. And the tone may become more PLINK than PING, which will be distressing to some players (and listeners). Other players (and listeners) may not notice, or care.

Quint tuning  Nobody tuned any overtones on xylophone bars until about 1927, when the head tuner at Deagan, Henry Schluter, introduced quint-tuning (fixing the first audible overtone at a twelfth above the fundamental of the bar).

(At least that's what I've read. I haven't had the opportunity to check it for myself. Someone please send me a prewar Deagan to repair.)

It can't be said that this innovation immediately became the rule. All modern xylos have (some of) their overtones tuned, but they are by no means all quint-tuned. I've heard that the majority of European instruments are octave-tuned. On old(ish) instruments I've examined (Premier, Bergerault) the only intentional overtone tuning was octave tuning, and it really didn't extend very far.

Paul says "octave tuning just sounds wrong – a xylophone has a jarring sound, that is what it is for musically" Hmmm. Schluter was trying to make the sound sweeter; if perceptible overtones are accurately tuned you minimise clashes between the fundamentals of high bars and the overtones of low bars. Suppose a bottom F has a prominent overtone that is 40 cents sharp to the C a twelfth above, this may make a triad on F rather more piquant than is desirable. But whether you align that overtone to a twelfth or to a double octave -- consonant intervals both -- doesn't seem to me to make a great deal of difference. There is certainly a difference in sound between quint-tuned and octave-tuned instruments, and I wouldn't disagree if you told me that octave tuning is blander. But either way you are no longer in the wildwood where the jarring cry of the xylophone rings out from its hidden nest in the undergrowth. If you want the true wild xylo untamed, leave its overtones untuned.

NB I doubt Schluter chose quint tuning over octave tuning for aesthetic reasons. Given the basic design of the instruments he was working with it may have been the most obvious solution. I may discuss this in a future post.

No padouk thank you Current practice is pretty uniform across the industry. Professional-level instruments have keyboards of honduras rosewood (Dalbergia stevensonii); the universal second choice, for entry-level and student instruments, is African padouk (Pterocarpus soyauxii). For the manufacturer padouk has various advantages; it is inexpensive (for a tropical timber), it is widespread and not endangered, and it comes from whopping great trees that provide great chunks of timber with straight grain and consistent density, easily machined into quarter-sawn bar stock. All of which would be beside the point if it sounded terrible, but actually it sounds pretty good.

I don't know when padouk ascended to the number two slot. In my workshop I have a random selection of bars from trashed instruments that I've picked up here and there. I'd guess some of them date back to the 70s and 80s, but some could be considerably older. None of them are padouk. The ones which aren't rosewood tend to be made of woods I can't identify, but which look and feel more like african or far eastern "mahogany".

Padouk is considerably less dense and less hard than rosewood. Density and hardness are not particularly correlated with musical virtues (many woods are close to rosewood in density but sound hilariously duff) so this is no great surprise, but as Paul Jefferies points out, padouk will not be as durable. However it is "good enough" for the job, unless you want to serve only the most demanding and discriminating customers, not necessarily the best way to succeed in the music biz.

As for the situation in the early 20th century ... Deagan used honduras rosewood and cocobolo ("Nagaed" and "Klyposerus" in Deagan-speak) from ... well, I assume from their earliest models. But I wonder if rosewood was so promptly adopted in Europe, where after all xylophones had surely been constructed of local temperate timbers for centuries.

I would hazard that the xylophones of Saint-Saens, of Strauss, Stravinsky and Janacek, the xylophones recorded on the earliest cylinder recordings, most likely

-- had narrow, light bars;

-- were not quint-tuned;

-- were not made of well-seasoned top-grade rosewood (and weren't constructed in climate-controlled environments with computer assisted tuning).

Oh, and they probably didn't have any resonators.

So having picked holes in Paul Jefferies' views, I just have to add that actually, I agree with him and think he is absolutely right. Because after all

Xylophones are not piccolo marimbas

Looking through the Deagan catalogues we find a wide array of models varying in range, pitch and designation. Xylophones, marimbas, marimba-xylophones ... 3 octave, 3.5 octave, 4 octave, even 5.5 and 6 octave instruments (though no images seem to exist of these, quite possibly they were never built) .... Competitors followed the same path, with Besson providing Teddy Brown with a 5 octave xylophone, Leedy producing a 5 octave "marimba xylophone", and Premier and Bergerault offering "xylorimbas".

However although these fossil organisms crop up in the deposits with bewildering frequency, evolution seems to have left us with the two fittest species; the 4.3 or 5 octave marimba, highest note C7, and the 3.5 or 4 octave xylophone, highest note C8.

Organologically identical (wooden, idiophonic, mallet-struck, with aerophone resonators, Sachs-Hornbostel class 111.212) the musical community has accepted the two instruments as distinct voices; one high, one low; one bright, one mellow; one is dancing skeletons, the other the voice of the forest.

It is interesting (but not surprising) that such a simple thing as shifting the pitch centre by an octave should have such considerable effects. Perhaps it is slightly surprising that the development seems to have taken so long, as what now seem to be central characteristics of the marimba -- a graduated keyboard with wide bass bars, extension to low A, then C -- didn't become canonical until quite recently.

And the more like a marimba the marimba becomes, the more the xylophone has to remain, defiantly, a xylophone.

Which is why I have decided to dedicate a batch of old stock rosewood to making an honest, chunky, traditional xylophone. Here is the bar stock waiting to be drilled and tuned...

I

It's not quite De Luxe, but it is definitely old school. As far as I know, no one but Musser Malletech makes a xylophone with bars this size any more. Come back to check out my progress ....

I'm not sure if I've answered the original question. What is a xylophone? Well, it's not a marimba. Any other answers?

The post What is a xylophone? — Part Two appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

(You don't have to take my word for this as he has repeated the point on his blog.)

Which got me thinking about what it is that makes a xylophone a xylophone.

I'm not going to bore on about definitions and derivations (xylos + phonos -- yup, it's an idiophone of wood, let's move on) and I'm not bothered with the worldwide history of xylophone-type instruments ... In the 19th and early twentieth century a European folk instrument, no doubt with a rich prehistory of its own, was remodelled into a modern concert instrument. How and why did this happen? -- and what was seen as distinctive about this instrument? -- something that was worth introducing to (for want of a better term) art music.

In the 1830s the klezmer Joseph Gusikov wowed audiences in Western Europe with his "Instrument of wood and straw". Here they are together:

(Image from here).

Gusikov's instrument had tone bars (of fir, reportedly) laid across tightly wound bundles of straw -- Fanny Mendelssohn reports watching him put the instrument together in view of the audience before a concert. The bars were struck with spoon-like wooden mallets. It looks like a fairly standard example of the strohfiedel (German) or facimbalom (Hungarian) and presumably instruments of this type could be found throughout central and eastern Europe. It was referred to as the holzernes gelachter -- "wooden laughter" as early as 1511. In The Magic Flute Papageno's instrument is called in the original libretto "a machine like wooden laughter" (though Mozart, in the wings, played the music it purportedly made on a proto-celesta); at about the same time "laughter" was featured in another Viennese singspiel, Wenzel Muller's Sisters of Prague. So even before Gusikov, -- and long before its celebrated appearance in Saint-Saens Danse Macabre (1874) -- the instrument was known by the musical establishment and regarded as an effect that could be called upon if desired.

The examples with four rows of note bars, like Gusikov's, were fully chromatic. John H Beck  or his contributor says "Generally the two center rows form a diatonic scale while the two outer rows contain accidentals, some of which are located on each outer row to enable the performer to play them with either hand." Which would be 1) a sensible way to construct such an instrument, and 2) a logical development from a notional one- or two-row diatonic layout. However at a first glance the instruments I've seen (in photos only, I'm afraid) don't seem to be arranged quite like that, but rather something like this:-

or, if you went for the pro version with extended compass:

I'm using H for B natural because we are in Europe, after all, and Bb for Bb because ... well we don't want any misunderstanding. The arrangement looks quite odd ... the chromatic scale goes snakewise up the ladders, with duplicate C and F, and each octave has a different configuration. But I'm guessing the additional Fs are there so that you can play a scale of C with alternate right and left sticks without crossing the hands. And the middle two rows provide a similarly straightforward G major scale -- so if you conceive of this instrument as being "in G" then Beck's description is sort of correct, if you count F natural as an accidental. The key of F is a pain, though, unless you swop the F/F sharp and H/Bb keys, in which case G is a pain. (By "pain" I mean "requires a more advanced technique").

If anyone out there is an accomplished strohfiedler, do tell us about this. Of course there may have been several competing keyboard layouts due to regional traditions, individual preference, etc.

The Gusikov-style instrument (let's just call it the strohfiedel from now on) was what Saint-Saens expected when he specified xilophone. And it is by no means obsolete. If you can stand to wear the Tyrolean uniform, there are career opportunities in the tourist trade:--

As you can see, the stroh (straw) has become purely conceptual. At some point in its history, the straw bundles gave way to cord passing through holes drilled in the tone bars. I would love to be able to give credit to someone for this development, which has been adopted universally by professional-quality tuned percussion, but I don't think it is known who first thought of this. Some village genius, or some smart but unsung instrument maker. If anyone has light to throw on this, please leave a comment.

One Albert Roth, in his xylophone tutor of 1886, proposed a two-row piano-style layout as an alternative to the cimbalom-style layout. According to Beck it was still assumed the player would stand at the bass end and reach over the instrument to hit the top notes, but presumably it was not long before players worked out that standing sidewise was preferable. Which would also mean that makers could now extend the range ad lib., or make the bars wider. The piano layout also makes adding resonators temptingly simple.

So between the 1870s and the early 1900s (when J C Deagan in Chicago started producing xylophones from a factory) a whole bundle of features that were typical of the folk heritage of the strohfiedel were amended. I intend to write a whole post on this question of the passage from folk music instrument to art music instrument, but for now will simply allege that the changes (which surely included regularizing the tuning) were in the direction of uniformity and reliability, allowing the performer to concentrate on the music as opposed to mastering the quirks of an instrument oversupplied with character and charm.

Coincidentally -- or ahem, NOT coincidentally -- the xylophone now began to appear regularly as a featured instrument in art music. Or maybe it just seems that way, because of its prominent cameo roles in pieces that are accepted as cornerstones of the 1900s repertoire; e.g. Strauss's Salome (1905), Janacek's Jenufa (1908), Stravinsky's Firebird (1910). And it was represented in recorded music virtually from the beginning, with cylinder recordings appearing as early as 1893, contributing to the widespread popularity of the xylo in vaudeville and light music (and home music-making), principally in the US. I can't say that Charles P Lowe (20-odd recordings before 1900), George Hamilton Green ("world's greatest xylophonist"), Harry Breuer ("Boy Wonder of the xylophone") or Teddy Brown are exactly household names, but even if forgotten (by some) they were characteristic celebrities of the modern musical world, somewhere between Paganini and Bert Weedon. In the 1920's the xylophone seemed on the point of being as ubiquitous as electric guitars in the 50s and 60s.

Strangely, this leap from obscurity into distinction happened before the xylophone was even a xylophone.

Which I will discuss in Part Two.

The post What is a xylophone? appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.

I'm going to use this blog to explore some of the wider issues that crop up when you're involved in this corner of the world of music. I hope it will be of interest to percussion players, teachers, makers ... or anyone else who comes by.

The post Welcome . . . appeared first on Hope Street Marimba.