Autoharp historiography

20 October 202621 October 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

Previous posts have examined the history of the autoharp in a number of musical, technological, and mercantile regards. The present post shifts that discussion into the overarching concern with how such history is written — “historiography.” This spans from the methodology and tools of academic research, to how the message resulting from their application is framed and conveyed.

Scholarly concern with the origin of the autoharp can be traced back to a monograph about the development of the concert zither, published in 1896 in Austria. It was written by the eminent German music critic and historian Julius Emil Gläsmer (under the pseudonym Hans Kennedy) with the title, Die Zither in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (The Zither in the Past, Present, and Future). Gläsmer was the reigning authority on that subject, and presented the autoharp as an utter debasement of the concert zither, invented in Germany in 1884. He made no mention of the younger instrument’s appearance in any other country.

A colloquial comparison of the autoharp with the concert zither appeared in the British daily press four years prior to that book. Examining Gläsmer’s work from a historiographic perspective, it would be reasonable to consider if he was aware of such earlier statements but excluded them from his narrative for some reason that might be worth further exploration. Either way, the newspaper commentary made an opposite assessment of the autoharp’s merits, and asserted that it found its way to Germany from the US. The following passage comes from a supplement to the 13 August 1892 issue of The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle.

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Musical Instruments

The Arrival of the Autoharp in Ireland and Scotland

6 October 202614 October 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

I recently extended the scope of an older post about The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music. The initial version focused on audio recordings and moving images of performances beginning in the 1960s. Photographs have now been added to them, and the text expanded with narrative evidence of the instrument being played in Ireland during the 1890s.

The revision promised a separate post with a more extensive review of how the autoharp found its way there. The following text culls an outline of that process from daily, weekly, and trade newspapers. The first relevant snippet that I’ve managed to locate so far is a classified advertisement in the 21 July 1893 issue of the Dublin daily newspaper, The Freeman’s Journal and National Press [FJ]:

New Autoharp, six bars, cost 45s, only 25s; splendid music for seaside, greenhouse…

The 14 December 1893 edition of another Dublin daily newspaper, the Irish Independent, includes an ad placed by “Pigott and Co.’s Musical Instrument Depot” in that city, offering:

ZIMMERMANN AUTOHARPS, with full Instructions, 21s, 25s, 30s, 63s, 84s, 112s, 152s.

At the beginning of that year, the manufacture of Zimmermann autoharps was moved from the factory operated by Charles F. Zimmermann in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a larger facility established by Alfred Dolge as the “C. F. Zimmermann Co.” in upstate New York. That transition is discussed in detail in another earlier post and its timing suggests that Dolge started exporting autoharps to Ireland as a facet of the expanded undertaking.

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Musical Instruments

Nancy Dawson and the Rights of Man

18 August 20264 September 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

This post’s banner image shows a tune in the third volume of the collection, Caledonian Country Dances, published in London by John Walsh circa 1740. The copy from which it was taken was given to Queen Charlotte of England on her birthday in 1773. In preparation, someone apparently felt it prudent to alter the first letter of the tune’s name (where ſs = ss).

The same tune appears in a Welsh manuscript collection of fiddle tunes from 1752. Its title can be traced back to a compilation of English proverbs from 1678, where it is preceded by, “He that’s afraid of every nettle, must not…”

Several texts have been set to this melody. I learned it as the children’s tune, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, likely not long from when a musical instrument was first placed in my hands (an autoharp, when I was five). Whatever label it bears, comparing successive versions provides useful clues about how the ornamentation of such tunes evolved from the middle of the 18th century. This ones simplicity also makes it a good starting point for testing how traditional Irish ornaments might be played on instruments where there are no established approaches to their use.

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Musical Instruments

Pop’s two harps

21 July 202621 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The oldest recognized recording of an autoharp was made in New York City in September 1924, for a 78 RPM disc that was never released. It was re-recorded in January of the following year and distributed a few months later. On each side, Ernest V. Stoneman alternates between the vocal rendition of a song and playing it on a harmonica, accompanying himself on an autoharp throughout.

This disc has the additional distinction of being the first recording of country music to attain hit status. Some estimates judge it to have sold over a million copies within a year after its release. This called widespread popular attention to Stoneman’s pairing of the autoharp and mouthharp, as well as setting a precedent for the subsequent use of that combination, exemplified below.

The development of the autoharp as a melody instrument is also examined here. As described in the US patent issued for it in 1882, “the instrument may be used for accompaniment to the voice or another musical instrument, or the melody may be played at the same time with the accompaniment, as on any other harp.” Lesser known early recordings of the autoharp in melodic use are presented, along with more recent ones.

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Musical Instruments

Irish music on double-strung instruments

7 July 202628 August 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

A recent four-part series produced by the Irish national television channel TG4, Blas Bluegrass, documents the popularity there of American old-time and bluegrass music. A scene in the first episode (starting at 17m 55s) is devoted to the late Chris Twomey, an Irish singer and multi-instrumentalist who became a noteworthy exponent of the autoharp. The clip shows one such of his instruments in a display case at The Corner House pub in Cork City.

The series is presented by Enda Scahill, one of the country’s leading tenor banjo and mandolin players. I’m as interested in those instruments as in the autoharp, all of which appear in the series. An earlier post discusses a crackpot combined autoharp-banjo patented in the US in 1892. The preceding three posts (aggregated here) deal with a widely manufactured hybrid banjo mandolin rooted in a US patent issued in August 1882 — just three months after the US patent for the autoharp. The present text takes a look at the musical proximity of the autoharp and mandolin, segueing into its discussion with a few additional background details.

This post’s banner image shows a large chromatically tuned autoharp with 21 bars, built in Sweden circa 1898 (Photo: Scenkonstmuseet, cat. no. M4011 — under my curatorial care at the precursor Swedish National Music Museum for over 20 years). The upper 66 of its 73 strings are tuned as unison pairs, also termed double-strung courses. The distance between the strings in each pair is smaller than the distance separating adjacent courses. In zither parlance this is termed mandolin-style stringing.

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Musical Instruments

The 4-string banjolin

16 June 202619 July 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 variant 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 form of the instrument, briefly noted previously, and looks into 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 202627 September 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 on it 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 to have been the type of mandolin Thomas Kiley played 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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The Connemara Fiddle

19 May 202625 September 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 attested prior to the publication of this chronicle. A spoken introduction on each of two wax cylinder recordings announces that the following 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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The Midway Plaisance

14 April 202626 September 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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Fingerpick nostalgia

24 March 20268 September 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-string 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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