The International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures was held in Philadelphia in 1876, celebrating the centennial anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. It was a massive undertaking and the Main Hall alone had more floor space than any other building then in the world. The accompanying documentation was prodigious, ranging from formal reports and directories, to independently prepared narratives.
The host city made an extensive, if not to say disproportionate, contribution to the US utilization of that space. A particularly detailed description of the event, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876, (online here) says this about it:
A peculiar feature of this important portion of the Exhibition is the noticeable frequency with which one meets exhibits from Philadelphia houses…fully two-thirds of the best American exhibits are the result of the well-known energy and enterprise of Philadelphians…and whatever may explain the circumstance, there is no doubt that much energy is displayed.
The Official Catalogue of the International Exhibition of 1876 includes the following listing for one such display in the Main Hall:
DEPT. III.—EDUCATION AND SCIENCE
Scientific, Philosophical, Musical Instruments
Zimmermann, C. F., Philadelphia Pa.
Musical Instruments.
Adding a bit more context, here is a drawing from Leslie’s Register of an exhibit by a maker of chamber organs. If its size and disposition were typical for such businesses, the one Zimmermann operated may have resembled it.
The occasion was intended as a platform for exhibitors to highlight recent innovation alongside their established products. Zimmermann’s advertisements closely beforehand and afterward (described in the preceding post) focused on the manufacture and pedagogics of the accordion and concertina. He was still developing and marketing the system of numerical notation for the accordion that he patented five years earlier (US110719) and was doubtless calling active attention to it there.
At large industrial fairs, a medal was commonly given to each exhibitor acknowledging their participation. Particular distinction was recognized with a tiered system of more elaborate awards. In contrast, a display at the Centennial Exhibition was not awarded in itself, and bronze medals were presented to selected exhibitors on the basis of specified merit. Zimmermann was among the musical instrument makers who received this distinction.
An extensive background narrative about the manufacture of musical instruments in the US is included in the cited volume of the directory of Reports and Awards. It notes:
Of the smaller musical instruments, the guitars, zitherns, accordions, concertinas, mouth-harmonicas, tambourines, and banjos, there was quite a large exhibit by various manufacturers, and of much excellence in their kind.
A sequence of 100 awards given to domestic and foreign musical instrument makers begins with #34. It is not clear if they are in any particular order but, if so, one guess might be that it reflects proximity in the exhibition hall. Zimmermann is near the top of the list and the only maker of accordions or concertinas on it. The two awardees following him are similarly alone in the commended categories.
The terms “zithern” and “zither” are not synonymous but makers explicitly of the latter were also commended. I won’t speculate about the reasons for Zimmermann initially labeling his autoharp (discussed further below) as a “Harp” rather than zither but will note the presumably coincidental heading of the list entry following his. There may be greater significance to Alfred Dolge — to whom Zimmermann ultimately sold his autoharp enterprise — appearing in the entry after that.
International participants presented a wide variety of non-Western musical instruments, They were both displayed and used in numerous live demonstrations of what from the Philadelphian perspective of the day were exotic arts and crafts. Here is a performance in a “Tunisian Café” also depicted in Leslie’s Register.
There is an intriguing possibility of similar performances having been staged at an exhibition of Russian national musical instruments in the Main Hall, headed by Nicolas Koolikoff from Moscow. Even if not, a range of such instruments would have been on display, with someone capable of commenting on their detail and use on hand. The gusli (seen below) was iconic among them and surely on prominent view.
I’ve already devoted a fair amount of blog space to it because of a strong suspicion that an observation of a gusli in use triggered a change in Zimmermann’s thinking he discussed at length in his autobiography. This was about the most appropriate vehicle for the system of numerical music notation that he increasingly regarded as his life’s mission. He described a shift in focus away from the accordion “toward a string instrument with key bars which would produce chords in all musical keys by silencing the strings not belonging to them…—the autoharp.” The surmised pivotal observation would have been of a playing technique that was, and remains, widespread on fretless zithers in the Baltic countries and neighboring parts of Russia (summarized here).
The salient detail of their shared playing technique is the use of the fingers on one hand to damp strings that do not belong to a chord that is strummed with the other. Here is a video demonstration of a traditional type of gusli that would likely have been in Koolikoff’s exhibit. Its modernized sibling may also have been there and is seen in the final video below.
The fingers of the left hand are inserted between the strings and damp them from the side, making it easy to change chords with a simple rocking motion. Zimmermann’s initial autoharp patent refers to the dampers as “fingers,” attached to bars that move laterally. Citing his later instructions:
Should one of the notes in the melody be kept silent by the bar, as happens from time to time and is indicated with the symbol ●◦, when reaching that note the chord bar must be released.
Assuming that the demonstrated technique actually did inspire the mechanized bars on an autoharp, Zimmermann may have encountered it somewhere other than at the Centennial Exhibition. However, that venue provided the only documented instance of him in a situation where a gusli was also found — and likely demonstrated. If it is posited nonetheless that he took little or no heed of it there, another of the Russian exhibitions would have had a more irresistible attraction.
This was an exhibit of a “New method of writing music” by the Lithuanian musicologist Jan Karłowicz (Janas Karlovičius). An English description of it was published in Warsaw in 1876, with the title Project of a new way of writing musical notes. This was for display, if not distribution, at the exhibit and it is difficult to imagine that Zimmermann would have missed the opportunity for discussing the underlying topic with its author.
That initiative could also have been taken by Karłowicz if he were aware of Zimmermann’s system of numerical notation for the accordion. This would no doubt have been a facet of the US display even if it wasn’t mentioned in the exhibition documentation, and can have caught the eye of anyone stopping by. It’s easy to envision someone from either side reporting to the other that “there’s something further down in the hall you need to see.”
Karłowicz also published studies about traditional Central European musical instruments. One that is often cited has the translated title “Folk instruments at the exhibition of music in Warsaw, Spring 1888” (online here beginning with scan 196). His home country was in the heartland of the Baltic psaltery and there can be little question about his familiarity with its chord-blocking technique. Any exchange he might have had with Zimmermann about it, perhaps together with Koolikoff, could readily have provided impetus to the development of the autoharp.
There is a further hint of other professional contacts made at the exhibition leading to an expansion of Zimmermann’s business model. The earliest indication of his commercial involvement with zithers in any form, is an advertisement for their sale in his Philadelphia store three years after the Centennial Exhibition (also discussed in the preceding post). It is therefore entirely plausible that the underlying trade alliances were spawned at that event, where zither makers from Austria, Bavaria, and Switzerland all had exhibitions.
An obvious alternative would have been observations and business contacts Zimmermann made in Europe, either while still residing there or on return visits. He made no reference to the Centennial Exhibition in his autobiography, which although undated, also describes later events. Its wording implies that the shift in his focus from accordions to zithers was precipitated by a trip to Europe to promote his notation system. This allows for the seminal cross-cultural meeting having been in the Main Hall in Philadelphia, despite the event not being named.
If Karłowicz, Koolikoff and Zimmermann engaged in amiable conversation there, they may have agreed to keep in touch. If their encounter was more guarded they may simply have begun following each others’ work as a matter of competitive interest. Assuming that either conjecture is correct, a question arises about how long that attention persisted.
A continuum of modifications to Zimmermann’s ensuing autoharp design can be traced through to the large “keyboard gusli” (гусли клавишные) that became a mainstay of the Russian traditional orchestra (detailed here). Koolikoff surely exhibited other instruments that it was to include but it is not clear how the keyboard gusli found its way into that context. Whatever the sequence of events may have been, it can plausibly be rooted in a meeting at the Exhibition.
The cited description of the instrument’s developmental trajectory is illustrated with several video performances. The following additional one places it behind the orchestral variant of the wing-shaped gusli.