Cary Karp
The Galpin Society Journal, Volume 76, 2023,
pp. 178–197 & 218–219.
This article presents details about the development of the autoharp taken from patents and trade publications. The extent of such material that appeared in European venues is greater than has generally been recognized and enhances the understanding of the instrument’s emergence. This material on the present page provides a general supplement to the article.
- The volume where it appears has been distributed to the members of the Galpin Society and will become generally accessible in digital form at a later date via JSTOR.
- With the kind permission of the journal’s Editor, Dr. Lance Whitehead, the document repository on this blog includes an offprint of the article.
- There are also addenda with corrections and supplementary material. They are collated on a single page that is appended to the offprint but absent from the published article.
The scope of the article is restricted to the type of autoharp that requires a bar to be depressed in order to apply damping pads to the strings, normally presenting the player with an array of buttons. An alternate form keeps dampers in contact with all strings until the mechanism is activated via a piano-type keyboard. These can be differentiated as ‘button-bar’ and ‘keyboard’ autoharps (or zithers) but rigorous typological correlates remain to be defined.
The article also has a narrow geographic focus, within which the keyboard form is of only marginal significance. However, it is well established in Eastern Europe. In hindsight, it deserved inclusion in the article if for no other reason than the plausibility of its own local antecedent having influenced the initial development of the button-bar instrument.
This topic is addressed in several posts on this blog, summarized (with internal links to the others) here:
Additional texts address varying aspects of the autoharp and the contexts of its use are found in:
- Posts tagged relevant to the autoharp.