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.

Looped Fabric

New article on the history of the slip stitch

2 February 202314 May 2025 Cary Karp3 Comments

I am pleased to announce the publication of the article “Three objects catalogued as vantsöm in the collections of the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland,” in the Archaeological Textiles Review No. 64 (2022).

It was coauthored with my friend Anne Marie Decker after a joint visit to the museum to examine the described material. Anne has made a corresponding announcement of the publication on her own blog, Nalbound. The complete ATR volume in which the article appears is freely available for downloading here, and this blog’s document repository includes an offprint. Here is the abstract:

The looped structure termed a slip stitch in the craft glossary of crochet can be produced both with a hook and an eyed needle. These implements are not equally amenable to working that structure into complex constructs such as the toe and heel of a sock. This article describes the examination of three objects that have been misidentified as nalbinding. Two of them are certain to have been crocheted and the third is highly likely also to represent that technique. The provenance of the objects is recorded as “Coptic Egyptian” on anecdotal evidence and without ascription of specific dates. If scientific dating were to establish that any of them approaches even the youngest age this might imply, the accepted date for the advent of crochet would require major revision.

Musical Instruments

Fifes and pastoral pipes in 1862

31 January 202319 November 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

An earlier post examined evidence of the fife and flageolet interchangeably occupying the same niche in the accompaniment of dance in late-16th-century France. The fife was otherwise more clearly associated with military music, leading to a question about whether it had a more prominent role in civilian contexts than is generally recognized. Evidence of that being the case toward the end of the 18th century is provided by published compilations of Irish and Scottish dance tunes that explicitly list the fife as one of the instruments to which they are suited.

An etching from the mid-19th century presented below illustrates it in a manner that bolsters the notion of the fife having filled the musical role now commonly played by the tin whistle. (The flute is named as a separate instrument in the referenced compilations.)

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Musical Instruments

The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music

8 November 20228 September 2026 Cary Karp6 Comments

My interests in the autoharp and Irish traditional music (ITM) should be apparent from the topics of the most recent dozen or so posts on this blog. I’ve approached them separately as a musicologist specializing in the history of musical instruments. This post marks a shift toward their intersection in performance from the perspective of a musician whose journey started on the autoharp in 1952 and found its way into Scottish music a decade later via the Highland bagpipes. I’ve since become comfortably conversant with the Irish idiom on the tin whistle and would like to be able to say the same about the autoharp.

Irish dance tunes and airs figure prominently in its repertoire but the instrument is not among those normally associated with ITM in its home country. The first visible appearance of the autoharp in a traditional Irish context that I’ve identified so far was at the regional Festival of Traditional Irish Music (Fleadh Cheoil) in County Clare, 30 July – 1 August 1966, held in the towns of Kilrush and Quilty. A documentary film of this event shows several musicians with autoharps gathering for it. One of them participates in a performance of the air, The Mountains Of Pomeroy, first heard in the background in the following snippet and then brought into view.

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Musical Instruments

De Good Autoharp

13 September 202214 May 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

I’ve taken the summer off from blogging, tending instead to academic commitments and catching up on overdue reading and research. One of the areas I’ve been drawn into is the use of numeric, mnemonic, and letter-based alternatives to staff notation in the teaching of music. This has been a contentious topic in writing on the theory of Western music ever since the emergence of staff notation many centuries ago. The initial primary concern was how best to help unskilled singers gauge the size of intervals in vocal performance. In the late-18th century interest was additionally turned toward the desirability of music being printable using systems that “bring all its characters within the compass of a common fount of printing-types.”

The design of musical instruments expressly intended to bolster the pedagogical process became a focus of innovative activity that can be traced back at least to 1830. This was targeted both to use in schools and supporting members of church congregations in psalmody. Charles Zimmermann developed his autoharp with tutorial intent, incorporating a system for numbering the strings and the corresponding steps of a scale that could be indicated in simplified printed music. He also devised lesser known schemes for the similar notation of music for the button accordion and labeling the piano keyboard.

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Musical Instruments

New article on the history of the autoharp

17 June 202214 May 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

NOTE: The initial version of this post appeared before a publication date had been set. It has been revised to reflect the actual release.

I am pleased to announce that my article “Northern European Contributions to the Development of the Autoharp” has been published in the The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 76 (2023). As noted in an earlier post, that is where my first research article appeared fully fifty years ago and I contributed to the journal regularly for a long while thereafter. Readers of this blog who are interested in the history of musical instruments but are unfamiliar with that publication will find it worthwhile to visit the website of The Galpin Society.

Here is the abstract of the article:

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Musical Instruments

Tin whistle, penny whistle

7 June 202228 November 2025 Cary Karp1 Comment

A cylindrical metal whistle with six finger holes was found together with pottery dating from the 14th and 15th centuries underneath the floor of a medieval house excavated in North Berwick, Scotland, in 1907. It is referred to as the “Tusculum whistle” and is now part of the collections of the National Museum of Scotland. Here is a photograph of it from the museum’s online catalog.

And here is one of its current display.

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Musical Instruments

Fifes and flageolets

24 May 20227 August 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The preceding post discusses a tune found in the third volume of “Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish, and foreign airs; Adapted for the Fife, Violin, or German Flute.” This is a six-volume series produced during the final two decades of the 18th century. The title page of the first volume illustrates a fife in a military context and the following volumes are dedicated to the British and Irish armed forces.

The collection does not include a noteworthy amount of military music and there is no obvious musical intention behind the dedication. This raises a question about whether the fife was highlighted at the start of the list of instruments simply as part of the homage, or if it had a more prominent role in civilian contexts than is generally recognized. A hand drawing on the back of the illustrated page sheds light on this and will be examined more closely below.

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Looped Fabric · Musical Instruments

The Cardin’ o’t

19 April 202214 April 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The following song appears in the The Works of Roberts Burns, by Allan Cunningham, published in 1834, vol. 2, p. 430.

        THE CARDIN’ O’T.
 Tune—“Salt-fish and dumplings.”
                       I
I coft a stane o’ haslock woo’,
   To mak a wat to Johnny o’t;
For Johnny is my only jo,
   I lo'e him best of ony yet.
      The cardin’ o’t, the spinnin’ o’t,
         The warpin’ o’t, the winnin’ o’t;
      When ilka ell cost me a groat,
         The tailor staw the lynin o’t.
                       II
For though his locks be lyart grey,
   And tho’ his brow be beld aboon;
Yet I ha’e seen him on a day,
   The pride of a’ the parishen.
      The cardin’ o’t, the spinnin’ o’t,
         The warpin’ o’t, the winnin’ o’t;
      When ilka ell cost me a groat,
         The tailor staw the lynin’ o’t.

The title expands prosaically to The Carding of it and ‘wat’ appears as ‘coat’ in other sources. The remaining Scots vocabulary is:

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Musical Instruments

Passing the bar exam

1 April 202214 May 2025 Cary Karp2 Comments

This post takes another look at the often blurry lines separating what are regarded as categorically distinct types of chord zithers. The focus this time is on variant forms of the autoharp that branched off before it had fully acquired its current identity. The baseline is an unmechanized fretless zither, tuned to a continuous scale that can be anything from single-key diatonic to fully chromatic.

It becomes an autoharp by the attachment of a battery of movable bars with damping pads — but there’s more to it. Adding that the pads on a given bar have to be arranged to mute the strings that don’t belong to a specified chord still doesn’t cover everything. The lock bars now commonplace on two- and three-key diatonic autoharps mute strings that don’t belong to a specified scale, rather than chord. Systems that produce chords by pressing two bars simultaneously entail further variation, so it is also necessary to distinguish between one type of bar and another.

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Musical Instruments

The value of $50

16 March 202219 November 2025 Cary Karp2 Comments

One of the most widely known details about the history of the autoharp is that its name first appeared in an application for a US patent filed by Charles Zimmerman on 10 December 1881, and issued on 9 May 1882. Seeing an autoharp mentioned in an advertisement in the 21 September 1884 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is therefore unsurprising.

E. W. Muller instructs on piano, guitar, mendiline, zither, auto-harp, singing, etc.: a lodging-room in exchange for instructions.

This also provides a concrete date by which the autoharp had come into circulation, pushing the generally accepted estimate back from 1885. There is a useful clue about the model that Muller owned in the section headed “Criminal Notes” in the 16 February 1885 edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. This also corroborates the prior familiarity of the instrument’s name.

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