Two recent posts discuss a manual technique for blocking chords on a zither with the fingers of one hand while plucking and strumming the strings with the other. This predates the use of mechanical chording devices on such instruments and can plausibly have inspired their development. I didn’t initially realize how vital that technique still is, or its geographic range, and have reworked both posts.
Rather than suggesting the reader look at them now, since the same technique figures in the present text, I’ll segue into its discussion with a demonstration on a gusli. This term designates a group of Slavic zithers of differing designs, commonly labeled by their shape.
Three such instruments are on stage here. The soloist is playing a modernized form of the archetypal “wing-shaped gusli” (гусли крыловидные). The left hand demonstrates the block chording that may have inspired a mechanized correlate on the autoharp (detailed in the two earlier posts here and here).
This technique both delineates chords when they are actively strummed and controls which strings can vibrate in sympathy. The left-hand fingers also shift in tandem to damp strings that are plucked melodically, further sculpting harmonic resonance. Mechanical means for doing this are at the heart of the “keyboard gusli” (гусли клавишные), which is one of the two large rectangular instruments in front of the conductor.
The other is an unmechanized “rectangular gusli” (гусли прямоугольные) that can be traced back through the 18th century. It developed along the same lines as the modern Baltic and Finnish concert zithers discussed in the posts cited above. It is seen in the next video as typically configured in the mid-19th century.
There are also smaller models of the keyboard gusli, scaling down to the size of this unmechanized one. Reports about the date of the addition of the mechanism vary but the keyboard instrument was in use by 1905. A smaller floor-based form is seen in the following video and a lap-held variant will be presented below.
In February 1888, US patent no. 390830 was issued to Ferdinand Wigand for a “Zither” with a piano keyboard and effectively the same action as that of the keyboard gusli. The patent text describes the functionality of the autoharp (without naming it) and was one of numerous entries in a wave of competition over means for increasing the number of chords the instrument could produce. It is not certain that this cascaded directly into the keyboard gusli but the chronology and substance of the innovations suggests the earlier one provided at least some inspiration for the later.
Wigand changed the chordal arrangement of the damping pads in prior autoharp designs to one based on pitch class. That is, the C bar permits all instances of the note C to sound freely, rather than permitting all notes in a C chord to sound. Playing a C major triad requires the simultaneous action of the C, E, and G bars.
His design keeps damping pads in contact with all strings until a bar is actively lifted, and includes a mechanism for raising all bars simultaneously. The previous (and still prevalent) chordal autoharp design permits all strings to sound until a bar is activated. This intrinsically limits the number of available chords to the number of bars unless some mechanism — of which many have been proposed — permits the dynamic reconfiguration of the damping pads. In contrast, a chromatically tuned twelve-bar instrument with pads ordered by pitch class can play any chord.
Wigand used a trapezoidal body that allowed the bar housing to be close to the left side of the instrument, thereby increasing the pluckable area of the stringbed for a right-handed player. This was made significantly larger on the keyboard gusli by placing the mechanism flush against the left side of a frame that was further altered to extend the bass strings unequivocally to the player’s right. The presentation of the device to the player as a segment of a piano keyboard also propagated from the 1888 patent into subsequent designs. Here are three drawings from it.
Functionally equivalent but mechanically differing implementations subsequently appeared at shorter or longer intervals. The first explicitly for an “Autoharp” is found in US patent no. 559764, issued in 1896. A representative review of prior art is included in US patent no. 2022/0406275 for an “Autoharp Keyboard Mechanism” issued to Ken Ellis as recently as December 2022. There is an independent background narrative about this design and its immediate predecessor (but omitting other relevant historical detail), with a demonstration here.
In May 2007, Philip Brissenden filed a British patent application for a functionally similar “Damping means for strings of an Autoharp/Zither,” issued in January 2012 as GB patent no. 2449459 for a “Reverse Action Piano Harp.” He discusses its development and earlier patents in a PhD thesis submitted in 2015. None of these recent documents mention the keyboard gusli.
It can be traced back to another relevant event in 1888; the founding of the Great Russian Orchestra by Vasily Vasilievich Andreyev. A number of traditional Slavic instruments were modernized during the group’s establishment. That initiative was led by Andreyev’s associate and successor, the composer Nikolai Petrovich Fomin. His collaborators included the luthier Semyon Ivanovich Nalimov, who devised the modern balalaika and domra in the process.
Fomin added the keyboard gusli to the orchestra in 1905. As noted above, it is unclear when work with it began but one or more piano designers are certain to have contributed to its development. It is also safe to assume that at least one of the participants was familiar with some type of keyboard autoharp. The two stationary instruments are frequently paired in both traditional and classical contexts.
Their mirrored symmetry is a consequence of the keyboard mechanism being placed at the left end of the stringbed as noted above. The direction in which the bass strings then extend permits a right-handed player to hold a pick in their dominant hand. This maximizes technical facility and eases the undulating arpeggiation that is a primary contribution of the keyboard gusli to the various ensembles that include it. This post’s banner image is a graphic representation of how two specimen triads are played, taken from an orchestration manual published in 1962.
The role of the keyboard gusli in the orchestra is primarily tied to this capacity for ornate chordal accompaniment. Nonetheless, the virtuoso capability demonstrated above also brings it to the front of the stage. It appears in that position in the following performance.
The keyboard housing is significantly larger than the one in Wigand’s patent. However, the effect of the enclosed action is the same. Two basic mechanisms are in current use, both built to be quickly and completely separated from the instrument. The one just seen has a separate damper for each string, connected to the keyboard with interlinked rods.
The other action retains the mechanical approach described in the 1888 patent. Its internal design is shown in the next clip. There is no substantive basis for differentiating between it and a keyboard autoharp. If this bar-based action should prove to be the earlier of the two implementations seen here, its relationship to the 1888 design would become all the less a matter of conjecture.
A good amount of savvy engineering went into both alternatives — from the perspective of piano rather than zither design. The scaling of the bass strings is foreshortened to the smallest practicable degree, providing the same audible benefit that makes a grand piano more appropriate than a spinet on a concert stage. The metal reinforcement of the wooden frame minimizes concern with distortion due to string tension, which can also be increased beneficially.
The keyboard action is placed as close to the end of the strings as possible. The bar-based design adds a second damper to those in the lowest octave. The bars are also in a fanned array that is wider on the bass side. The design with separately articulated dampers scales their length, with those for the bass strings about twice the size of those at the treble end.
Both approaches inhibit the undesired but audible harmonics that can beset the sound of a conventional autoharp as a result of dampers touching ostensibly muted strings at nodal points. The device with separate dampers allows the individual adjustment of each, as demonstrated 7’28” into the video. (There is also a second part to it, here.) This effect may have been one of the things Wigand intended to remedy. Whatever influence his work may have had on the keyboard gusli, if piano designers were asked to address the same problem, the current implementations would both be plausible outcomes.
There is a striking similarity between the way the right hand plucks the strings with a flatpick while the left hand operates the keys, and how the hands are used on the wing-shaped gusli. The smaller instrument is the more nimble of the two in several obvious regards, not least its melodic facility, and does just fine with serpentine arpeggios and glissandos.
A lap-held keyboard gusli would therefore not add much to the orchestra but such instruments are encountered elsewhere. They are strung and tuned diatonically and have only the seven white keys. The dampers are aligned in a single row as discussed above. A number of diatonic models are seen in the following presentation.
The pulley-based action is exposed and demonstrated beginning at 45’22”. The instrument in the cardboard box near the presenter’s right hand is a trapezoidal autoharp fitted with ordinary chord bars. He plays it briefly in another video but is clearly unfamiliar with even its most basic technique. It shares the designation “keyboard gusli” and is demonstrated here at the end of a discussion about damping systems based on chords versus pitch class.
The discussion of larger autoharps with both button and keyboard designs, also contrasting Western and Eastern European approaches to them, continues here.