The keyboard autoharp and gusli

18 July 202319 February 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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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Musical Instruments

Zithers gain leverage

27 June 202314 May 2025 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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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Musical Instruments

The Baltic psaltery and the autoharp

21 March 202314 May 2025 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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Musical Instruments

The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music

8 November 202229 July 2026 Cary Karp2 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 National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Kilrush, County Clare, in 1967. 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

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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Musical Instruments

Zither accordions

23 February 20224 March 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

For decades, my day job gave regular need for bridging the gaps between the academically derived terminologies used for the labeling and classification of musical instruments in museum collections, the craft-oriented vocabularies of musical instrument makers, and the freer glossary used by musicians. I was deeply embroiled in what remains lively controversy about classification systems and am finding it increasingly difficult to steer clear of that topic on this blog.

At the moment, though, it seems to be something of a “Patent of the Month Club.” The nomenclature applied to the description of musical instruments in the reported documents varies widely and wildly, and is often severely at odds with that accepted in explicitly music-oriented contexts. Dealing with this is keeping the terminologist in me happily occupied. The present installment also provides a springboard into the discussion of tuning and tuning systems, which is another topic that I’ve been saying less about than I ultimately intend to.

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Musical Instruments

Patent misrepresentation of patents

19 January 202212 August 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The history of fretless zithers is replete with inventions intended to ease the production of chords, first patented in one country and then claimed by someone else shortly thereafter, in a patent issued in another country. When the dates are close enough, it can be difficult to determine who should be credited with the actual innovation. Similarities do sometimes appear to be coincidental but plagiarism was common enough.

The assessment of such situations can be made more difficult by the widespread practice of marking an instrument with the date and number of the first patent issued for it, even if the model at hand incorporates details that do not figure in that patent. One frequently cited example is the way Charles F. Zimmermann applied the number and date of a well-known patent US257808 issued to him in the United States on 9 May 1882.

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