Author: Cary Karp

I retired a while ago from a career in the museum sector that lasted forty-five years. During its course I acquired a fair amount of experience in the conservation and documentation of utilitarian objects. This began with musical instruments, which is my primary area of both practical and academic training, but then expanded. When my time became fully my own, I began acquiring hands-on skill with various craft techniques based on looping. Significant effort also went into ferreting out contextual information about their origin and use, as had long been the case with musical instruments. I'm currently investigating historical details in both fields that strike me as unclear. The purpose of this blog is to share information I’ve come across along the way, and to raise questions that may be worth further investigation.
Articulation on diverse pipes
Musical Instruments

Articulation on diverse pipes

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The preceding two posts examine instruction manuals for woodwind instruments and compilations of popular dance tunes published in the 17th and 18th centuries, looking for evidence of continuity between the way such music was ornamented in earlier periods and present-day practice. The collections include tunes that originated in Ireland and remain part of the traditional repertoire there, providing a useful basis for tracing the development of the battery of ornaments associated with that genre. The investigation continues in the present post but considers an expressive technique not covered by the title of the previous installments (Turns and Rolls — Part 1 and Part 2).

In a demonstration of Sligo-style flute playing here, Seamus Tansey says of ornamentation that “it all came from the pipes.” Players of other instruments have made similar statements. Such claims are as likely to trigger debate as avert it but uilleann pipes do have a particularly rich repertoire of ornaments, including pretty much all those used on other traditional Irish instruments.

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Turns and rolls — Part 2
Musical Instruments

Turns and rolls — Part 2

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The first part of this series presented a few 17th-century instruction books for the flageolet and recorder. It illustrated continuity in ornamentation practice as the first of them ceded its position in urban amateur music making to the second. The present post moves that discussion into the 18th century and brings reed instruments into it. An instruction book for the Baroque oboe — “hautboy” — comparable to those for the flageolet and recorder was published in London in 1695, titled The Sprightly Companion.

The tunes can be played comfortably on all the explicitly named instruments. (Unqualified reference to a “flute” at that date meant a Baroque recorder; in this case one in C.) Ornamentation is clarified with tablature as in the books examined last time. The Ɔ sign that indicates both a “beat” and a “shake” in them, is used in this one exclusively for a shake executed downward from the note to which it is applied. Here is the first line of the explanatory table with a concluding remark in this post’s banner image.

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Turns and rolls — Part 1
Musical Instruments

Turns and rolls — Part 1

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This post examines historical descriptions of a musical ornament that appears in several genres. In Western classical music it is referred to by the Italian name gruppetto (small group) or a native designation in the language of discourse, such as the English “turn.” Its manifestation in Irish traditional music is called a “roll.” Tutorial presentations in that context frequently mention its resemblance to the classical ornament but caution against confusing the two. Each has its own range of variants and differ in the rhythmic attributes of their performance, but share a basic five-note configuration — note; note above; note; note below; note.

An ornament called a gruppo appears in a treatise on improvised embellishment and ornamentation in vocal performance by Giulio Caccini titled Le Nuove Musiche (The New Music), published in 1601. The five-note figure now called a gruppetto is a diminutive of it in both grammatical and structural senses, formed by the final 32nd notes of a long trill. The execution of the eponymous trillo is similarly apparent. It is the single-note ornament now referred to as a tremolo. As written, both labeled ornaments accelerate over the first several notes.

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Matters of course
Musical Instruments

Matters of course

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This blog’s icon is a trademark of the Swedish musical instrument maker John Bertels (1861–1928), who placed it on the autoharps he began producing no later than 1891. His catalog included five models of the “Swedish Original Grand Zither” (Svenska Original Flygelcittra).

The Swedish Original Grand Zither should not be confused with German and American bar- or chord zithers, autoharps, “Preciosa”, “Erato”, “Lipsia”, and others, which are twice as expensive and by far not as easy to learn, practical, and well made.

The first three models closely resembled the named competition but the top two were Bertels’s own design. The exceptionally large Model 5 is the central element of the graphic device.

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Slurred miscellany
Musical Instruments

Slurred miscellany

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Recent posts have examined the structural and musical attributes of a variety of zithers. They include a few that were derived from the concert zither but little has been said about the parent instrument. It originated through a fusion of Alpine designs and is still used in traditional contexts.

The melody is played with the thumb alone, which nearly always plucks the strings from the same direction. The speed this can attain is seen in a classical work arranged for the same basic ensemble. The use of the left hand to “hammer on” notes seen at the outset of the performance will be discussed further below.

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The keyboard autoharp and gusli
Musical Instruments

The keyboard autoharp and gusli

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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.

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Zithers gain leverage
Musical Instruments

Zithers gain leverage

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Toward the end of the 19th century mechanical devices began to proliferate on zithers. Most of them were short lived, if marketed at all, but a few came into persistent use. One of their purposes was to enable a sequence of strings tuned diatonically in a given key to be shifted into others. Although this can obviously be effected simply by retuning the strings, for example, altering a G major scale to D major by raising all C strings to C♯, rapid changes require a more nimble auxiliary device.

Corresponding mechanisms were applied to chordal string arrangements, altering a block of strings from one type of chord to another. This was illustrated in the preceding post with a Swedish harp zither patented in 1886 by Adolf Larsson, equipped with a mechanism for shifting each supported major chord to the parallel minor or a seventh. This post’s banner image comes from a German patent (no. 266371) for an improvement on that device, issued to Larsson in 1913. A more recent two-position design is demonstrated here.

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Chord Zither Competition
Musical Instruments

Chord Zither Competition

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The term “chord zither” is a literal English translation of the German Akkordzither. Both are used in their respective languages as a general designation for zithers designed to permit the easy production of chords. Instruments doing this with a mechanical device or distinctive arrangement of the strings are often categorized thereby and named individually, typically as labeled in a patent.

The “autoharp” is a well-known example. It is also referred to as such in German-language discourse but was initially simply an Akkordzither. Such ambiguity led to the coinage of the generic term griffbrettslose zithern — literally “zithers without fingerboards” — of which the autoharp is one of many types. In German, a griffbrett can either be fretted, as on a guitar, or fretless as on a violin. In English, the former is a “fretboard.” After extensive discussion (detailed here) the generic heading in English settled on “fretless zithers” in analytical contexts.

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Scottish crochet in 1567
Looped Fabric

Scottish crochet in 1567

Cary Karp15 Comments

The word “crochet” designates both a tool with a hooked tip and a family of looped structures made with that tool. It additionally names the craft of producing fabric consisting of those structures, the fabric itself, and the objects into which it is worked. Each sense of the term has its own history and its appearance in an older text does not in itself indicate either a technique or a craft, even if the topic clearly relates to fabric production. Care is therefore needed to avoid conflating usage at one time and place with that of another.

The modern form of the craft can be traced back to the early 1800s and is commonly referred to simply as crochet. It didn’t initially span the full range of structural detail and techniques that were to develop (with a few also dropped along the way) but the aggregate has borne the name in English-language publication since the late 1830s. Nonetheless, its most basic structures — chains and the slip stitch — are verifiably older. Their position on the timeline of hook-based loopcraft has been indicated in various ways.

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The Baltic psaltery and the autoharp
Musical Instruments

The Baltic psaltery and the autoharp

Cary Karp2 Comments

A previous post announced the publication of my article in the The Galpin Society Journal (vol. 76, 2023), titled “Northern European Contributions to the Development of the Autoharp” (offprint available here). I’ve since begun taking a close look at Eastern European participation in the same process. Distinct forms of autoharps found there are described in a subsequent post (linked to at the end of this text) and the present one sets the stage for it.

The starting point for the journal article is the wave of activity that began in German-speaking Europe in the 1870s with the intention of rendering the concert zither more amenable to use by players with little or no musical experience. It does not discuss earlier types of zithers or playing techniques that might have inspired those innovations. However, the principle of producing a chord on a zither by using the fingers of one hand to damp strings that do not belong to that chord, while strumming the open strings with the other, predates any effort toward its mechanization by far.

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