HARMONICA
Copyright © 2006 Shlomo Pestcoe. All rights reserved.
The harmonica is a European free-reed mouth organ which can trace its roots back to the earliest known free-reed instruments, the mouth organs of ancient Asia. A free-reed instrument is any type of wind instrument on which each note is produced by air being forced through a narrow channel, either by blowing in or sucking out, to strike a thin strip of bamboo or metal tuned to a specific note. The strip, called a reed, then vibrates freely within its slot, in a greater frame of reeds, to produce the given note, hence the name free-reed. Members of the free-reed instrument family include the accordion, concertina, melodeon (pump reed organ), and melodica, to give but a few examples.
The Khaen of Laos & Thailand
The khaen (pronounced "can;” also: kaen, khène, khen) is the free-reed mouth organ of Laos and northeastern Thailand. Though there has been no written documentation of the khaen tradition until the last century and outside awareness of the instrument only dates backs to the late 18th century, scholars believe that it is a very ancient instrument. Many contend that the free-reed mouth organ may even have originated in this region, with ancestors of the khaen which have been lost to history long ago. The Hmong—an ancient animist people found in China as well as Laos and Thailand-- have a similar mouth organ called the gaeng. In Chinese, the Hmong are also referred to as the Miao, which coincidentally enough is the same term used to describe the reed-bearing sounding pipes on the Chinese sheng mouth organ. So it’s possible that the Hmong might have been the agents for transmitting the free-reed concept to China… or vice-a-verse-a....
The instrument is made of two rows of pipes (sounding tubes) made from a specific type of bamboo, called mia hia. The pipes are cut into varying length and then mounted in a carved wooden soundbox referred to as a dao (“gourd”), which also serves as the instrument’s mouthpiece. Inside each bamboo pipe is an individual metal reed tuned to a specific note, which is sounded when air is blown or drawn across them. The metal reeds are traditionally made from old coins rolled out into thin sheets. The bamboo pipes serve as conduits to channel the flow of air to the reeds. To control the air flow there’s a finger hole on each pipe so that the reed in the given pipe may only be sounded when the finger hole is closed; if the finger hole is open, the air flow to the reed is hindered and there’s not enough pressure to make the reed vibrate.
Khaen come in four basic types which are distinguished by the amount of tubes (notes); the 6-pipe khaen hok, the 14-pipe khaen jet, the 16-pipe khaen baet, and the 18-pipe khaen gao. The instrument is held upright with the mouthpiece, formed on the narrow depth side of the dao soundbox, facing the player. The khaen is grasped on either side of the dao with the palms of the player’s hands so that the fingers extend upwards to cover the finger holes in the pipes.
The earliest documentation of the free-reed concept was in China,
probably sometime in the 14th century before the Common Era (BCE). It was during this period that we
find, on bone inscriptions written by ancient oracles, the first documented references to two
different types of free-reed mouth organs, he and yu. Both these instruments
had gourd bodies into which bamboo tubes were inserted. Each bamboo tube housed an individual bamboo
reed tuned to a specific note and served as the air channel to its given reed. The he was a
small mouth organ, usually with 13 reeds, while the yu was much larger, with anywhere from 23
to 36 reeds and pipes. The he and
yu were the forbearers of the sheng, the principal mouth organ in China's rich musical
heritage. It was through the sheng that the free-reed concept was spread-- first, throughout Asia,
and then, centuries later, to Europe.
In the 7th century BCE, the term sheng first
appears in
the Shijing (‘Classic of Odes’). The earlier he and
yu-- as well as another prototypical gourd
mouth organ, the medium-sized chao-- were described as being various types of sheng in later
classic Chinese texts.
Alan R. Thrasher in his article on the sheng for
Grove Music Online writes:
"Recent archaeological finds have shed additional light on these early instruments. The tomb of the
Marquis Yi of Zeng (Hubei province), dating to about 433 bce,
contains five small mouth organs with gourd wind-chests, varying numbers of pipes (12, 14 and 18) in
two parallel ranks and bamboo reeds. The Han tombs 1 and 3 of Mawangdui (Hunan province), dating to
the 2nd century bce, contain two large yu with
wind-chests of wood and 22 long bamboo pipes in two parallel ranks, one instrument with reeds of
metal similar to those in use today. It seems, therefore, there was considerable regional diversity
in construction of these ancient mouth organ types."
The Chinese sheng and yu were introduced into Japan, along many other
musical instruments, in the early 700s CE. The various musical instruments and musical styles
imported from China during this period formed the basis of gagaku (literally, “elegant
music”), the music of the Japanese Imperial Court. In this context, the sheng was adapted to become
the Japanese shō.
The sheng was supposedly
brought to Europe from China by
Marco Polo
(1254-1324) in 1295 along with pasta and
gun powder. However, Europeans didn’t really take an interest in the instrument until the 18th
century. In the 1740s, an Irishman, John Wilde— whose major claim to fame was as the inventor of the
nail violin, the precursor to the musical saw, an instrument made of iron nails hammered into a wood
block which was played with a violin bow—wowed the Russian Imperial Court in St. Petersburg with his
demonstrations of the sheng. Thirty years later, a French Jesuit missionary, Father Amiot, brought a
sheng back from China which caused a sensation in French musical circles. By the 1780s, European
inventors were experimenting with the free-reed concept picked up from the sheng which would
eventually lead to creation of European free-reed instruments like the harmonica,
accordion,
concertina, pump reed organ, etc. in the following century.
The invention of the first European
free-reed mouth organ is traditionally credited
to Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann (1805 – 1864). In 1821, this 16 year old son of German
instrument builder Johann Buschmann took out the first patents on a free-reed mouth organ—basically,
a group of pitch pipes housed in a single frame-- which he dubbed the aura. (Six years earlier, the
elder Buschmann had invented the terpodion, a small free-reed organ that presaged the popular
harmonium pump reed organ 24 years later.) The strategy
worked and, in no time, Hohner harmonicas were being played literally in every land. With the dawn
of the 20th century, Hohner was the largest producer of harmonicas in the world.
-- Shlomo Pestcoe
Illustration Credits:
Young gent playing a harmonica and guitar. The harmonica is a Richter style instrument, held in
place by an adjustable harmonica holder mounted on the guitar. Syracuse, NY, circa 1870s.
(Collection of
Peter Stuart
Kohman, used with permission. Edited by Shlomo Pestcoe)
The Free-Reed Mouth Organ in Ancient China
The Free-Reed Concept Arrives in Europe
The Harmonica: The European Free-Reed Mouth Organ
The harmonica as we know it today can really trace it roots to the mouth organ created by a Bohemian
maker by the name of Richter around 1825. Richter’s mouth organ was made up of two sets of 10 metal
reeds. The reed sets were mounted in wooden comb frame with 10 air channels. Each channel had a reed
from top set facing in one direction and a reed from the bottom in the opposite direction. This gave
each channel the capability of producing two different notes: one when air was blown into the
channel and a different one when it was sucked out.
Richter’s mouth organ would eventually be dubbed the mundharmonika (“mouth harmonica”). The term
harmonica was actually coined by
Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) in 1761 to refer to his invention, the glass
harmonica (also: armonica, glassichord), a musical instrument comprised of a group of crystal glass bowls of varying sizes,
mounted on a rod, which was played revolving the rod with a foot treadle and applying moistened
fingertips to the bowls to produce different notes.
In 1829, Richter’s mundharmonikas began to be mass-produced in Vienna. Within a few years, harmonica
workshops and factories sprang up throughout Austria, Switzerland, and Saxony. Many of the new
harmonica manufacturers were clockmakers who been thrown out of work when the clockmaking industry
went bust in the 1830s.
The company was founded in1857 by a 24 year old clockmaker,
Mathias Hohner (1833 - 1902), in
Trossingen, Germany, to manufacture harmonicas. He was inspired by two other Trossingen clockmakers,
Christian Messner and his cousin Christian Weiss, who had begun to make mouth organs in this
southern German village some thirty years earlier. In 1862, Hohner, in a bold marketing strategy,
became the first harmonica maker to export to the North America. As a result, Hohner harmonicas sold
like hotcakes and America became the company’s principal market. Five years later, Hohner churned
out 22,000 mouth organs for the year 1867 alone.
When a major depression struck America in 1893,
Hohner lost its principal market. Ever the marketing
genius, Hohner hit on the idea of creating different theme models that were geared to specific
markets around the globe, with packaging in the language of the given target audience. The best
known of these theme models is, of course, the ever popular Marine Band, Hohner's
best-selling
diatonic harmonica. It was first introduced in 1896 to honor the
United States Marine Band, which had garnered international acclaim under the leadership of
“The March King,” John Philip
Sousa (1854-1932), who led the band from 1880 to 1892.
