The following image comes from a mid-15th century panel painting attributed to the workshop of Jan van Eyck. I’m aware of the pitfalls of assessing pictorial representations of musical instruments and might question a few details of the lute seen here. The psaltery and harp appear to be quite credible.
The bass strings of the psaltery are placed closest to the body of the player, who holds a quill in each hand. The right one is positioned to move across the entire stringbed, while the left one is centered on the bass strings. This asymmetrical design is termed a “wing shape.”
The Standard German word for wing is Flügel, which also designates a grand piano. A list of musical instruments in a German treatise from 1404 includes a flegil, together with a psalterium and two mechanized variants — the clavichordium (clavichord) and clavicymbolum (harpsichord). An illustrated description of an upright form of the latter appears in another treatise on musical instruments written ca. 1440. It fits a wing-shaped psaltery with a single quill for each string, increasing the number available for simultaneous use.
With the possible exception of the flegil, the instruments named in the preceding paragraph all belong to the generic category of “box zithers.” The present text will make its way toward a later facet of their mechanization, after considering what the difference between a flegil and a psalterium might have been. Since the harpsichord and clavichord are named with them on the same list, two plausible suppositions would be that the flegil was an early implementation of a hammer mechanism on a keyboard zither (something that has left other footprints), or an unmechanized relative of the psalterium that differed enough from it to merit a name of its own.
If the latter, it could reasonably have been the form in the panel painting. A number of similar instruments with various shapes seen in contemporaneous images would then be candidates for the designation psalterium. One of them differs from the others in that it is often held by players standing upright, rather than invariably requiring the support of their laps or an external flat surface.
What is now colorfully referred to as a “pig’s head psaltery” (or hog’s, nose, face, and snout in varying combinations) appears among the illuminations of psalteries with differing profiles in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, attributed to King Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284). The rounded segment resting between the player’s legs appears to be attached to the short side of the instrument rather than being an integral part of the soundbox.
The Flemish artist Hans Memling placed a pig’s head psaltery in the hands of an angel in several portrayals of heavenly musicians, all standing. The following instance is from a panel painting commissioned in 1483 and installed in 1494.
It shows the instrument in what is often referred to as “near photographic” detail. It would require support further up on the player’s wrists but the hands hold the plectrums credibly. The 61 strings that span the full width of the instrument are too many to have been tuned in a diatonic or even chromatic sequence. This indicates their arrangement in multi-string courses as was commonplace on psalteries, albeit with equidistant rather than clustered string spacing.
The curved row of hitch pins on the soundboard above the player’s right hand appears in other of Memling’s depictions of the instrument. The strings affixed to those pins could be low enough on them to reach the string support without meeting the pluckable surface of the stringbed. They would then vibrate in sympathy with the main strings, but 22 sympathetic strings is an unduly large number. The more plausible alternative is that they add a pluckable string to each course, most likely a fifth above the adjacent one. If so, only the left hand can pluck the short strings, thereby assigning fixed hand positions on an instrument that would otherwise be fully symmetrical.
Pig’s head psalteries are also seen in various orientations toward the player’s body, some constraining the positioning of the hands, others not. It is placed on a flat horizontal surface with the long side toward the player in the manuscript Sforza Hours begun ca. 1490 in Milan, and completed about 30 years later in Ghent.
A German Dance of Death drawn no later than 1488 includes a more barebones depiction of a player standing upright, suspending the instrument on a strap. As in the preceding image, this eliminates the restriction that holding it on the wrists imposes on the movement of the hands. It additionally brings that freedom to an ambulatory player.
Straps are useful with reasonably small instruments but larger ones require additional support. A further variant rotates the vertically-held instrument 180° and rests its long side on the player’s lap. Here is a “helmet-shaped” psaltery in a 14th century miniature representation, taken from a history of the Russian gusli (alternately translated as harp or zither) published in 1890.
Skipping ahead a few centuries, Michael Praetorius includes the following illustration of “a very old Italian instrument” in his Syntagma Musicum from 1618 (angled to fit the layout of the plate on which it appears).
Another two centuries later, the following drawing of a pig’s head instrument was part of a well-known patent applied for by Charles Zimmermann in 1881 and issued to him in the following year. This is where the designation “autoharp” is attested for the first time and also marks the initial appearance of damping bars. A central “flageolet” bar touches all strings at their midpoints, raising their pitches by an octave. The patent states that “this requirement rendered it necessary to change the shape of the common zither to that shown in the drawings.”
Trotting out one of my hobby horses, autoharp chord bars mechanize a far older playing technique that remains pervasive in the Baltic States and adjacent areas of Russia. It uses the fingers of one hand to mute strings that don’t belong to a chord being strummed with a pick held in the other. This “closed” style is commonly intermingled with an “open” one where the fingers of both hands participate equally in the production of melody and arpeggiated chords.
This was introduced in an earlier post that includes video snippets demonstrating the blocking of chords on a wide range of Baltic and Russian psalteries. They are all wing-shaped and normally leave the strumming to the player’s right hand. This position is also seen in the following performance on a helmet-shaped gusli. However, here it would make no difference if the pick were in the left hand and the damping done by the right. Although not demonstrated, the production of octave flageolet tones by lightly touching a string at its midpoint while plucking it, is another common technique on such instruments.
Taken with the pig’s head profile of the 1881 autoharp, I’m of the increasing belief (now approaching conviction) that the German instrument makers involved in the effort toward making the concert zither more accessible, were aware of and influenced by the designs and playing techniques of its northeasterly European kin to a greater extent than is generally realized.
Zimmermann inverted the orientation of his pig’s head autoharp in subsequent illustrations. He also changed the action of the damping bars described in his patent, which move parallel to the strings, to the design in the following drawing, where the motion is perpendicular to them.
The Novelties Exhibition mentioned in the drawing’s caption was held in Philadelphia from 15 September to 15 October 1885. The design actually exhibited there is seen in the next drawing and had previously been exhibited at the New Orleans World’s Fair from 16 December 1884 to 31 May 1885.
The bars on this model are significantly more complex mechanically and the diagonally shifted housing only permits the strings to be plucked on one side. It seems likely that the projected nine-bar model in the colorized drawing was envisioned as being more amenable to larger-scale production and, whether intentional or not, ambidextrous use. However, Zimmermann changed the profile of his production style instruments to a wing shape before starting their manufacture. This is discussed in greater detail in another previous post that includes a photograph of an autoharp of the design in the preceding drawing. (It also cites specific sources for the exhibition documents and illustrations of the instruments displayed at them.)
Zimmermann returned to a symmetrical nine-bar design in his final patent, applied for in September 1895 and issued in May 1897. It is for an autoharp with bars laden with every imaginable adjunct device.
An instrument with an ornate pig’s head profile harking uncannily back to the Sforza Hours appears in a French patent issued to Pascal Henner in 1978. The text compares it to “an Anglo-Saxon system (autoharp) which has the disadvantage of only allowing 12 or 15 chords” and notes further that the patented “instrument is suitable for both left-handed and right-handed users.” It also brings keyboard-based barring systems (detailed here) into the realm of pig’s head design.
I’ll repeat the tale told above in a coming post but with the wing-shaped rather than the pig’s head instrument in the featured role. That path also leads to chord bars being affixed to a zither, in a device patented in Germany in 1884 that differs significantly from Zimmermann’s 1881 design. This leaves a gaping question (that I’ll also be revisiting separately) about whether the earlier patent influenced the later one, or both coincidentally implemented the closed chording technique demonstrated above on a helmet-shaped gusli.