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. 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.
Smaller models of the keyboard gusli are about the size of this unmechanized one. There are varying reports of when the device was added but the instrument with which it is now associated was in use by 1905. The small floor-based form is seen in the following video, played in the manner described in the earliest tutorial material for the chord-bar autoharp.
On 9 February 1888, Ferdinand Wigand (a maker of zithers and other string instruments in Brooklyn, New York) applied for a US patent for a “Zither,” issued on 9 October 1888 (US390830). It has piano keyboard with effectively the same action as that of the keyboard gusli. This patent was one of numerous entries in a wave of competition over means for increasing the number of chords that instrument could produce.
It changes the chordal arrangement of the damping pads in prior autoharp designs to one based on note names. That is, activating the C bar permits all instances of the note C to sound freely, rather than permitting all notes in a C chord to sound. It also inverts the force applied by the springs, keeping damping pads in contact with all strings until a bar is raised by pressing a key. Playing a C major triad therefore requires the simultaneous action of the C, E, and G bars.
Conventional autoharp design leaves all strings free to vibrate until a bar is lowered to bring pads into contact with them. This intrinsically limits the number of available chords to the number of bars unless some mechanism — of which several have been put forward — permits the dynamic repositioning of the damping pads. In contrast, a chromatically tuned twelve-bar keyboard autoharp with pads ordered by note names can play any three, four, or five-note chord. Such designs also commonly provide means for raising all dampers together.
Functionally equivalent but mechanically differing implementations of this design subsequently appeared at shorter or longer intervals. The first explicitly for an “Autoharp” is found in a US patent applied for by James Back on 27 September 1895 and issued on 5 May 1896 (US559764).
Peter Renk, a prominent figure in the zither trade, submitted a German patent application for a Chord Zither with Keyboard (“Akkordzither mit Klaviatur”) on 12 November 1895, issued as DE87374 on 30 June 1896. He filed a substantively identical British patent application on 19 February 1896 for a New or Improved Apparatus for Damping the Strings of Zithers and other similar Musical Instruments, issued as GB189603814 on 4 April 1896. It only claims the mechanism, without even a specimen illustration of an instrument to which it might be attached.
This invention relates to an apparatus, which, when placed across a chromatically stringed zither or other similar musical instrument, enables all the chords or harmonies that occur in music to be produced on such instrument… This apparatus is contained in a box-like case, which can be placed over the zither or other similar instrument transversely to the strings.
The keyboard gusli is a direct instantiation of this. A self-contained keyboard-driven damping mechanism is clasped to a rectangular gusli. On many models the device has to be removed for as routine an operation as tuning.
Another pivotal event occurred in 1888; the founding of the Great Russian Orchestra by Vasily Vasilievich Andreyev. (This is alternately reported as having been in 1881; an even more important year in the history of autoharps.) A number of traditional Slavic instruments were modernized during the ensemble’s establishment, in an initiative led by Andreyev’s associate and successor, the composer Nikolai Petrovich Fomin.
Fomin added the keyboard gusli to the orchestra in 1905. This meshes well with the notion of Renk’s 1895 patent having played a seminal role. The two types of stationary gusli are tonally indistinguishable and frequently paired in both traditional and classical contexts.
Prior to this twinning, the bass strings on the unmechanized form extended alternatively to the player’s left or right. Both hands can move freely across the entire stringbed in either orientation. On the mechanized form, one hand is dedicated to the keyboard, and the other to plucking the strings.
Assigning the latter role to a right-handed player’s dominant hand requires the stringbed orientation seen above. For players with that preference, this eases the undulating arpeggiation that is the instrument’s chief contribution 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.)
Both of the floor-based instruments could as easily be built with the same orientation, but mirroring them enables the players to sit face to face. Notwithstanding the keyboard gusli primarily being used in the orchestra for ornate chordal accompaniment, its prodigious virtuoso capability also brings it into the soloist spotlight.
The keyboard housing is conceptually and functionally identical to the one in Renk’s patent. Two basic mechanical implementations are in current use, both built to be quickly and completely separated from the instrument. The one in the preceding videos appears to be an original Russian contribution to the instrument’s development, with an individual damper for each string, connected to the keyboard by interlinked rods.
The other action retains the bar-based approach described in the 1888 and 1895 patents. Its internal design is shown in the next clip. There is no substantive basis for differentiating between it and a keyboard autoharp.
The dampers in the lowest octave are doubled. 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, demonstrated 7’28” into the video. (There is a second part to it, here.)
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, not least in 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 note names.
Keyboard autoharps have remained a focus of developer interest outside Russia throughout, albeit never gaining the same mainstream traction. On 23 May 2007, Philip Brissenden filed a British patent application for “Damping means for strings of an Autoharp/Zither,” published on 26 November 2008 (GB2449459). He discusses its genesis and earlier patents in a PhD thesis titled The reverse action Piano Harp: innovation and adaptation from Piano and Autoharp, accepted at the University of Salford, England, on 1 December 2015.
A representative review of prior art is included in a recent US patent for an “Autoharp Keyboard Mechanism” applied for by Kenneth Ellis on 18 June 2021 and issued on 22 December 2022 (US2022406275). There is an independent background narrative about this design and its immediate predecessor (omitting other relevant historical detail), with a demonstration here.