The 4-string banjolin

16 June 202616 June 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

This is the final installment in a discussion about the banjo mandolin (aka mandolin banjo depending on the musical context). It is anchored in two independent US patents, from 1882 and 1885. The latter was issued to John Farris, who named his invention a banjolin. Both patents are detailed in the first part of this series along with the instrument’s initial commercial manifestations.

It entered into the realm of Irish traditional dance music early on, and the second part examines how its use there ultimately abated. The present text deals with a 4-string variant of the instrument, briefly noted previously, including a tutorial manual specifically for it. That book does not directly address Irish-style performance, but provides a relevant description of the instrument’s technical capabilities, including practical details about its setup.

By the end of the 19th century, banjo mandolins were available from several manufacturers. It was “to all intents and purposes a mandolin, being strung and fretted to the exact mandolin scale” but with the body of a small banjo. Farris’s design fits that description, with eight strings arranged in unison pairs. His patent was issued on 7 April 1885 (US315135) and he advertised the new instrument shortly thereafter in The Hartford County Directory for 1885–86.

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Musical Instruments

Banjolins, taterbugs, and bouzoukis

2 June 202615 June 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The preceding post examined early audible evidence of the mandolin in the performance of Irish traditional music (ITM). The first attested association is on two wax cylinders recorded ca. 1905. Each begins with an announcement of the tune being “played on the violin, mandolin, and fife, by Messrs. Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill.” The post then considered the richer subsequent evidence of the banjo mandolin in the same musical environment and concluded that Thomas Kiley played that type of mandolin on the recordings.

The present text continues with an identical situation just over a half century later. On the occasion of the National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, in 1957, Frank Wisenor was recorded playing several tunes on what was announced as a mandolin. Four of them were in a small group and two solo.

The way the recordings were announced suggests that they were of entries in the All-Ireland Championship competition held at the Fleadh. Snippets from all can be heard here. A solo performance of the reel, The Sligo Maid, indicates with particular clarity that Wisenor was playing a banjo mandolin.

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Musical Instruments

The Connemara Fiddle

19 May 202616 June 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

Francis O’Neill provided detailed biographical information about the contributors to his collections of Irish traditional music, in a book titled Irish Minstrels and Musicians, published in 1913. The fiddler Edward Cronin was one of the more prolific of them. He was a native of County Tipperary, born about 1838, who emigrated to Troy, New York, before settling in Chicago. With reference to Cronin’s residence there, O’Neill observed that:

Visits to his home were fraught with pleasure, especially when he played in concert with two young friends from Troy – Patrick Clancy on the flute and Thomas F. Kiley on the mandolin. Clancy, Mrs. Cronin’s nephew, possessed a most wonderful voice, powerful and mellow, and to our unscientific ear the most delightful we had ever heard. On the violin the genial “Tom” Kiley swung the bow with a freedom which many professionals might envy. “The Connemara Fiddle,” as we facetiously termed the mandolin, was his favorite instrument, however. In playing Irish dance music he displayed a facility of execution almost inconceivable. To him “The Flogging Reel,” a lively, three-part dance tune, with its turns and graces, presented no more difficulties than “Home, Sweet Home.”

Kiley’s use of the mandolin is also attested prior to the publication of this chronicle. Spoken introductions on two wax cylinder recordings announce that the tune is “played on the violin, mandolin, and fife, by Messrs. Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill.” The date of those recordings makes them the earliest association of the mandolin with Irish traditional music that has yet come to light.

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Musical Instruments

The Midway Plaisance

14 April 202616 April 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

This post bridges the favorite topics here of Irish traditional music (ITM) and the autoharp. Two links will be considered, both geographical, but of vastly different extents. The more compact of the two spans a part of South Chicago and is mapped in the banner image. It was regularly traversed by Francis O’Neill, whose seminal collections of Irish dance tunes are well known in ITM circles.

His work is perhaps less immediately familiar to autoharp folks but any who play such music are likely to have material from O’Neill’s The Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907, somewhere in their repertoires. There is no basis for suggesting that he had a reciprocal interest in the autoharp. However, he was involved with the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 and would all but certainly have noted the display of autoharps there (detailed in an earlier post).

The present text is not intended to inflate the significance of that encounter. From the autoharp perspective, the aim is to whet further interest in O’Neill’s work. Where his monumental role is already recognized, a bit of biographical and contextual detail is added to its discussion.

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Musical Instruments

Fingerpick nostalgia

24 March 20261 June 2026 Cary KarpLeave 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-string banjo mandolin (described in a separate post) 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 either the tenor or five-string banjo. (The even wider neck of a guitar excluded it entirely as an alternative, but a more recent reacquaintance with a mandolin has raised hope that it may prove tractable.) 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 Cary KarpLeave 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 Cary KarpLeave 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 Cary Karp2 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 20254 April 2026 Cary KarpLeave 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 April 2026 Cary KarpLeave 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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