Fingerpick nostalgia

24 March 202626 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

This year will see the fifth anniversary of fretless zithers becoming a major focus of this blog. The upbeat was in March 2021, when I most recently took my trusty 12-bar Oscar Schmidt autoharp back into service after a period of inactivity. This was far from this first time that happened since 1952, when my mother bought it brand new to share with her five-year-old kid.

The reason for the most recent dusting-off was a rekindled interest in Irish traditional music (ITM) that has grown in intensity ever since. One of the thoughts at its outset was to become proficient on the tenor banjo; a mainstay in the performance of dance tunes. My maternal grandfather gave me a four-stringed soprano banjo (a half-sized tenor designed for the early 20th-century banjo bands) not long after the autoharp joined the family. I immediately turned my attention to it but didn’t acquire any particular skill beyond playing chords, before moving on to its five-stringed cousin when I was eleven.

A lesson learned early in the ITM project was that my hands had aged enough in the meanwhile to protest at more than the briefest outing on any necked instrument. Fortunately, there was no corresponding issue with the autoharp. When embarking on what appeared likely to become a protracted involvement, I replaced the serviceable but worn fingerpicks long since acquired primarily for bluegrass banjo, with a fresh set for the new initiative.

I noted that the once dominant brand of metal fingerpick, National, was no longer in production. However, the extensive array of comparable picks made by Dunlop included a model that seemed satisfactorily close to the earlier Nationals. It was (and remains) available in both brass and nickel silver, in six gauges from .013″ to .025″, making it ideal for zeroing in on a set personally calibrated to an autoharp. (The broader exercise included plastic picks but I ended up sticking with metal and am keeping the present discussion mainly to it.)

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Musical Instruments

Grilled autoharps

24 February 202614 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

A lot of material about Charles F. Zimmermann has appeared on this blog. The present post revisits familiar documents but addresses details in them that have not received much attention here or elsewhere. In introductory review, Zimmermann coined the term “autoharp” in an application for a US patent headed “Harp,” filed on 10 December 1881, and issued as US257808 on 9 May 1882.

In it he claims to “have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Harps.” The ensuing description provides information not just about the instrument’s structural details, but also the intended playing technique. Zimmermann explains all aspects of his invention by reference to a (pedal) harp, except for its size and shape which are compared to a “common zither.”

The patent makes four specific claims, all relating to damping bars “arranged transversely across the strings thereof, and provided with depending teeth or fingers designed and adapted to come in contact with and silence or ‘cut out’ certain strings.” They serve two musical functions. In one, “the different trigger-bars render those strings silent which do not belong to the responsive chord.” The number of such bars can vary but the second function is served by a single bar, “placed transversely across the middle of the strings of the harp…so adjusted that when moved its triggers touch them lightly at such point, thereby producing the falsetto or flageolet tone.”

The patent drawings show how each bar moves axially against a single spring, and one of its claims is for bars “resting at one end against springs.” However, the description notes that:

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Musical Instruments

From pantalon to pantalonic

28 January 202624 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

The preceding post examined a large hammered dulcimer with two soundboards, each supporting its own set of strings, one primarily of metal and the other of gut. It was invented in the late-17th century by Pantalon (aka Pantaleon) Hebenstreit who eponymously called it a pantalon. One of his students, Johann Kuhnau, referred to it as a “Pantalonischen Cimbal” – pantalonic dulcimer – in a letter sent to Johann Mattheson on 8 December 1717.

The term pantalon also entered into the musical lexicon as a noun adjunct, with the appearance of Pantalonclavichorde – pantalon clavichords. They were later joined by keyboard instruments with small hammers of uncovered wood or hard leather – Hämmerpantalone – hammer pantalons, often referred to simply as pantalons. (Such instruments have been catalogued in museum collections as nascent pianos and differentiating the two has become a research topic of its own.)

The hammered dulcimers of Hebenstreit’s day did not have damping mechanisms, nor did his pantalon or the hammer pantalon. A core tonal attribute of such instruments is a broad sympathetic vibration of the passive strings, triggered by those that are actively struck. The sound of all strings persists while decaying to inaudibility. The concept labeled “pantalonic” in 1717, appears to have propagated into musical instrument nomenclature to denote a box zither (the classification group to which all the instruments named here belong) deliberately intended to provide this type of resonance.

This post focuses on the intersection of the pantalon with the clavichord. They initially crossed paths in the workshop of the renowned German keyboard instrument maker, Gottfried Silbermann. He both manufactured pantalons for Hebenstreit and invented an extremely wide clavichord with two separate soundboards, named the cembal d’amour.

That instrument has been discussed extensively in scholarly publications, as have the archetypal pantalonic dulcimer, pantalon clavichords, and hammer pantalons. The present text re-examines some of the detail in that narrative. It also provides links to online facsimiles of frequently cited source documents.

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Musical Instruments

The Pantalon and Irish hammered dulcimers

23 December 202522 January 2026 stringbed2 Comments

In 1713, the German composer and music theorist Johann Mattheson published a book titled Das neueröffnete Orchestre (The Newly Revealed Orchestra). It includes commentary on individual musical instruments, with remarks about a harp, a hybrid harp-zither, and two hammered dulcimers, in immediate succession:

The pleasantly buzzing David’s harp [“Davids-Harffe/Harpa”], with its gut strings, is fully suited to accompaniment and its merit won’t be questioned; if only there were more who wished to make it better known. The harsh harpanetta, [“Harffe/‌Harpanetta”] with its attendant long fingernails, has already been given its honest farewell. The frivolous hammered dulcimers [“Hackbretter”] should be nailed to the walls of houses of ill repute, except for the large gut-strung one called a Pantalon, which is highly esteemed.

The David’s harp was a double-strung chromatic instrument, with a “bray pin” at the base of each string causing it to buzz. The comment about fingernails with the harpanetta suggests that it was the wire-strung arpanetta demonstrated below. This can be seen as a harp with a soundbox between two parallel stringbeds. In more rigorous analytical terms, it is a wing-shaped zither strung on both sides, played in vertical position.

Hammered dulcimers were and remain in widespread use, in a range of configurations, also labeled with the word stem “cimbal.” They are wire-strung zithers that, by definition, are played by striking the strings. The same instruments can also be plucked, and in cases where that is the predominant technique, are commonly called psalteries (or some variant of that term). The pantalon was an exceptionally large hammered dulcimer with two stringbeds, strung with metal and gut.

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Musical Instruments

Pairs of harpers and pipers

2 December 202529 January 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

A late-18th century production of the ballet pantomime Oscar & Malvina, at Covent Garden in London, featured a duet played on the union bagpipes and pedal harp. It is considered from the perspective of the pipes and piper in the preceding post. The present text adds further detail to this and widens the focus to include the harp and harpers. Here is a snippet from the playbill for the 20th performance of the premiere season, on 14 December 1791:

A New Grand Ballet Pantomime (taken from OSSIAN) called,
OSCAR and MALVINA:
Or, The HALL OF FINGAL
…
The Harp and Pipes to be played by Mr. C. MEYER and Mr. COURTNEY

Denis Courtney was introduced in the earlier post, as Charles Meyer will be further below. The 12 May 1792 performance of another Covent Garden production (Inkle and Yariko) included an afterpiece titled, The Irishman in London. Among the features listed in its playbill was “a Duetto on the Union Pipes and Harp by Courtney and Weippert.” John Weippert replaced, or alternated with Meyer in Oscar & Malvina, which ran for decades. A press review of the 31 May 1792 performance notes:

Oscar and Malvina, May 31, went off remarkably well, though Courtney, the piper, was not present. Weippert, with his harp, undertook the whole piece by himself, with wonderful execution and taste.

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Musical Instruments

Irish bagpipes and 18th-century tuning systems

21 October 20254 December 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

John Geoghegan published The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe in London in 1743 (also discussed in an earlier post). He described its chanter by comparison with the oboe, illustrating that instrument on the final page of the book.

The cited copy does not have a frontispiece but the one in another copy shows the bagpipes.

This instrument has three drones but the one described in the text has two. Additional illustrations include a fingering chart for the basic diatonic scale, and another that adds accidentals to it. The expanded chart prescribes the same fingerings for adjacent sharps and flats, except for A^♯ and B^♭. Geoghegan expressed the hope that this approach to tuning would “not be unacceptable to the profesers of this ancient pastoral musick or to the makers of the instrument,” thereby suggesting that it differed from the established system(s) of his day.

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Musical Instruments

Zither tablature in 890 and 1890

17 March 20252 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

The use of parallel lines to indicate pitch in written music can be traced back to the late-9th century. It developed from an older approach to the description of musical intervals and scales by reference to the strings on two instruments — a single-stringed monochord and a multi-stringed cithara. The latter provided the model for what would become the definitive attribute of staff notation.

The step from plucked string to drawn line is documented in two treatises. One was written ca. 890 by the French monk, Hucbald (b. ca. 840 – d. 930), who in it derived a lined system from a six-stringed instrument. The other is of less certain 9th-century date and unknown authorship. It shows a lined system derived in the same manner and adds a set of symbols called “daseia” to represent notes. (Early manuscript illustrations of both are shown below, as are daseia taken from a font packaged with current music notation software.)

Hucbald was once believed also to have been the anonymous author of the second volume and therefore the deviser of so-called daseian notation. However, none of its symbols appear anywhere in his named work. Both his and daseian notation employ an otherwise identical system of lines. His description of how it was derived from the strings on a cithara is more detailed than the one in the anonymous work, suggesting that lines and daseia appeared successively in the two treatises.

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Musical Instruments

Obvious and familiar when used for notes

18 February 202519 November 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

The preceding post examined the first system put forward in the USA for writing music without the graphic complexity of conventional staff notation, published in 1785. It used letters numbers and a few common typographical symbols. The present post takes a look at a method with the same purpose, based solely on the numerical representation of notes. It was published in London in 1638, with a claim of having been devised ca. 20 years earlier.

William Braythwait presented it in a compendium of 27 sacred pieces he culled from a larger collection published by Georg Victorinus in Munich, in 1622 (1st ed. 1616), both titled Siren coelestis (Celestial Siren). The upper half of the earlier title page is reproduced on that of the compendium, which is advertised further as “the easiest method of teaching and learning music by far.” (All translations in this post are my own.)

Braythwait explained this method and the rationale behind it in a narrative adjunct to the music, adding further detail in 1639 (also changing the spelling of his name to Braithwaite). He represented the seven notes of a diatonic scale with the Arabic numerals 1‍–‍7 and the octave with diacritical marks. This was also a basic feature of an earlier Spanish tablature that first appeared in a text titled Libro de cifra nueva para tecla, harpa, y vihuela (Book of new numbers for keyboard, harp and vihuela) published by Venegas de Henestrosa, in Madrid, in 1557 (to be discussed further in a separate post).

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Musical Instruments

So simple as scarcely to perplex the youngest child

28 January 202519 November 2025 stringbed1 Comment

Several discussions of musical performance practice on this blog are illustrated with snippets of staff notation, often as facsimiles taken from historical sources. When focused on instruments for which alternate forms of notation came into common use, the instrument-specific ones are employed preferentially, or both appear in parallel. This approach to writing about music and musical instruments has been commonplace for centuries.

When the graphic representation of music is itself the topic of discussion, it is obviously difficult to avoid reliance on staff notation or some widely understood alternative to it. Countless such systems have been put forward over the past centuries. The overwhelmingly greatest number of them attracted only fleeting attention, at best. However, a few have come into persisting use.

One of more widely encountered is the “ABC notation” used both in parallel with staff notation and as a replacement for it. It has standard and informal forms, with the shared barebones attribute of representing the notes in a melody by their single-letter names — A, B, C, D, etc. If the octave is also indicated, standard ABC does so with lowercase and uppercase letters for two adjacent octaves, adding a subscript or superscript index for an additional octave below and above each. Note lengths and rhythm are conveyed by numbers juxtaposed with the alphabetical pitch indicators.

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Musical Instruments

There and back again

30 December 202426 December 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

When coming across new information of substantive relevance to a post that is already online, I usually edit that material into it without separate announcement. If its topic is explored further in a later post, retrospective attention is called there to the revision, with summary details and a link to the modified text. The present post does a bit of both and then proceeds into new territory. I’m bundling these tasks here because they are particularly interrelated and to wrap up loose ends as the blogging year draws to a close.

The preparation of the preceding post entailed a general search for zither-related patents issued to the German musical instrument manufacturer Peter Renk. Those relevant to that post are detailed in it. An additional two patents necessitated significant changes to another post that had been available for a longer while. It is headed The Keyboard Autoharp and Gusli, and has been reworked to reflect the new documents.

The initial version traced a path between a US patent issued in 1888 for a variant form of the autoharp with a piano-type keyboard, and a further variant of that design which became a mainstay of the traditional Russian orchestra early in the 20th century. It is also widely encountered there in solo use and a variety of smaller ensembles. The cited post illustrates that breadth with several video demonstrations, adding another here.

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