Address all correspondence to: Journal of the IJHS 6 Avenue Rene Gasnier 19100 Angers France

ISSN 1548-145X John Wright, Guest Editor Michael Wright, Consultant Editor

1 Notes from the Editors 2 Interview with Fred Crane, July 17, 2008 Deirdre Morgan & Michael Wright

7 The Trump on William of Wykeham’s Crozier Jeremy Montague

11 Poem by James Woodhouse. Bob Adams

14 Jew’s harp: the classifier’s nightmare – or how I became embroiled in all this John Wright

17 Jew’s harp patents, an enumeration Harm Linsen

24 The Jew’s Harp in the Law, 1590–1825 Michael Wright

36 Protesting From The Margins: Jews Harps and Human Rights in Southern Africa Angela Impey

41 Balanese Gengong: Culture, Theory and Technique Deirdre Morgan

Cover: Detail from a series of seven photographs

discovered by Harm Linsen and taken by Trappist

Monks of the Mariann Hill mission in Basutoland in

South Africa, taken sometime between 1894-1897

(inventory number A15-18), reproduced with the

courtesy of the National Ethnografic Museum in

Leiden (Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden). An article

on the complete series is being prepared by Harm

Linsen for the next issue of the Journal.

Note by Michael Wright

The Jew’s Harp Guild of America first started publishing a journal in 1982, under the title:Vierundzwanzigsteljahrsschrift der Internationalenm Maultrommelvirtuosengenossenschaft (or VIM for short). This was the first publication to provide an opportunity for the serious study of the Jew’s harp. Eleven issues were published up until 2003. Following the establishment of the International Jew’s Harp Society in 2004 it became the Journal of the International Jew’s Harp Society . It has had the same editor, Frederick Crane, until the present publication. Four issues of the Journal of the International Jew’s Harp Society have been published to date. MW: When did you first become aware of the trump? That’s very easy to answer. For reasons that I don’t know anymore in the summer of 1955, some 53 years ago, I decided to write a paper on the trump, Jew’s harp. MW: Why the trump? I just knew that was the thing to do. MW: So you’d seen them around? Not very much really. I knew that they turned up in various places in art, in history, in country music, in film scores,

A word from the guest EDITOR So after being deprived of the journal for so long, we are publishing here the latest edition, in time (we still hope) for the Seventh International Jew’s Harp Festival at the end of June 2011. In view of the amount of serious work has been done on all sides over this period we decided to include extracts from representative papers and articles, As there was so much material, some of them will have to be in two or more instalments. This is the first time I have undertaken the role of Knight of the Blue Pencil, except that the latter usually had a whole staff of underlings to interpret his scrawls whereas these days it is a largely solitary operation mostly entailing juggling between Mac and PC platforms and scarcely compatible word processors. All I can say is I hope to have done justice to the really excellent and varied articles I have had the pleasure of reading whilst trying to put this journal together. John Wright, June 2011 and so I just decided to do this, and the way I remember it is that I shut myself up in the library day and night for the entire two month summer session, made notes on everything I could find about the Jew’s harp and turned that into a paper… When it comes to later times I realised it was just a tiny fraction of the important material, but that’s what I did. MW: Were you doing a Musicology course? That was my major at the University of Iowa.

Interview with Fred Crane, July 17, 2008 Deirdre Morgan & Michael Wright

In June 2008 Deirdre Morgan and Michael Wright met when they were invited as guests to the Crane household and took the opportunity to interview Fred on various topics, a section of which was published in the Spring / Summer 2008 edition of the IJHS Newsletter. Here is the full transcript of that recording.

MW: So you were studying ethnomusicology? No. There was no such thing at Iowa at that time. I was interested in musical instruments in general and found something fascinating about that [trump] instrument, for some reason I don’t know, and certainly it turned out in the course of worldwide presence, broad in its potential uses as a maker of music, broad in all the traditions to different peoples and different the next 53 years that it was broad in its persons, and turned out to have been a very good topic to have chosen. MW: So did you then go out and buy one or could you play one before? I don’t think I bought one that summer, maybe I did, at least I could verify that because in my catalogue I have the dates when I bought all the instruments. I had owned one as a child, but that disappeared. MW: Could you play it as a child – did you play it? No. I don’t know why. Later on when I remembered where it had been in the attic before, it wasn’t there. DM: So when you did get another one, where did you acquire it from? That was the next time I went on leave. I went to Karlsruhe for a semester and did a bit of research – theory, that sort of thing. MW: So you were in the army? No. I was teaching. I’d graduated from the University of Iowa with a PhD in 1960 and went off to Europe to teach and spent this one semester in ’62-3, getting away from it. Took my family and at that time I bought a really rather good little instrument made in Molln from the local music house and played that a lot. Found I could play a tune pretty well, you know.

MW: Were you taught by somebody how

to play?

No, I’ve hardly ever met anybody who didn’t just work it out for themselves, who actually had instructions. MW: So did that start the interest in collecting? When I look at my collection, there’s a date on each of them and there’s a scattering of them over the next 10 - 20 years. I had enough interest that when I saw them, I went to buy them. Because of course, there was no internet at that time. It was mostly music shops. MW: There’s also the archaeological side of things. How did you become involved in that side of collecting? That was pretty much the internet age. This was 1988 – I still think we’re in the [20th] century. You could check back, but I think that I started on the internet and the year 2000 and when I saw one that had been dug up by a metal detectorist I would put a bid on it, buy it – I bought quite a bunch that way, about 40 or 50 that have come from metal detectorists. DM: So simultaneously you had a teaching and academic career at the same time you were collecting all these instruments. I was doing all kinds of other things, some of which were frowned upon. I was supposed to go out there, publish and attract students to the University of Iowa – I was teaching there – but I went through a long period of reading novels, modern trashy novels. And a period on working on the trump, collecting more information, buying and other totally time-wasting things. But I did a publication or two, a book about 1968, around that time. That was on the Basse dance – I thought I was a medievalist – and then later on decided I was an Amercanist, with an interest in American music.

Note by Michael Wright The Jew’s Harp Guild of America first started publishing a journal in 1982, under the title: Vierundzwanzigsteljahrsschrift der Internationalen Maultrommelvirtuosengenossenschaft (or VIM for short). This was the first publication to provide an opportunity for the serious study of the Jew’s harp. Eleven issues were published up until 2003. Following the establishment of the International Jew’s Harp Society in 2004 it became the Journal of the International Jew’s Harp Society . It has had the same editor, Frederick Crane, until the present publication. Four issues of the Journal of the International Jew’s Harp Society have been published to date.

A word from the guest EDITOR So after being deprived of the journal for so long, we are publishing here the latest edition, in time (we still hope) for the Seventh International Jew’s Harp Festival at the end of June 2011. In view of the amount reaearch that has been done on all sides over this period we decided to include extracts from representative papers and articles, As there was so much material, some of them will have to be in two or more instalments.

This is the first time I have undertaken the role of Knight of the Blue Pencil, except that the latter usually had a whole staff of underlings to interpret his scrawls whereas these days it is a largely solitary operation mostly entailing juggling between Mac and PC platforms and none-too- compatible word processors. All I can say is I hope to have done justice to the really excellent and varied articles I have had the pleasure of reading whilst trying to put this journal together.

John Wright, June 2011

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In June 2008 Deirdre Morgan and Michael Wright met when they were invited as guests to the Crane household and took the opportunity to interview Fred on various topics, a section of which was published in the Spring / Summer 2008 edition of the IJHS Newsletter. Here is the full transcript of that recording.

MW: When did you first become aware of the trump? That’s very easy to answer. For reasons that I don’t know anymore in the summer of 1955, some 53 years ago, I decided to write a paper on the trump, Jew’s harp.

MW: Why the trump? I just knew that was the thing to do.

MW: So you’d seen them around? Not very much really. I knew that they turned up in various places in art, in history, in country music, in film scores, and so I just decided to do this, and the way I remember it is that I shut myself up in the library day and night for the entire two month summer session, made notes on everything I could find about the Jew’s harp and turned that into a paper… When it comes to later times I realised it was just a tiny fraction of the important material, but that’s what I did.

MW: Were you doing a Musicology course? That was my major at the University of Iowa.

MW: So you were studying ethnomusicology? No. There was no such thing at Iowa at that time. I was interested in musical instruments in general and found something fascinating about that [trump] instrument, for some reason I don’t know, and certainly it turned out in the course of the next 53 years that it was broad in

its worldwide presence, broad in its potential uses as a maker of music, broad in all the traditions to different peoples and different persons, and turned out to have been a very good topic to have chosen.

MW: So did you then go out and buy one or could you play one before? I don’t think I bought one that summer, maybe I did, at least I could verify that because in my catalogue I have the dates when I bought all the instruments. I had owned one as a child, but that disappeared.

MW: Could you play it as a child – did you play it? No. I don’t know why. Later on when I remembered where it had been in the attic before, it wasn’t there.

DM: So when you did get another one, where did you acquire it from? That was the next time I went on leave. I went to Karlsruhe for a semester and did a bit of research – theory, that sort of thing.

MW: So you were in the army? No. I was teaching. I’d graduated from the University of Iowa with a PhD in 1960 and went off to Europe to teach and spent this one semester in ’62-3, getting away from it. Took my family and at that time I bought a really rather good little instrument made in Molln from the local music house and played that a lot. Found I could play a tune pretty well, you know.

MW: Were you taught by somebody how to play? No, I’ve hardly ever met anybody who didn’t just work it out for themselves, who actually had instructions.

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Interview with Fred Crane, July 17, 2008 Deirdre Morgan & Michael Wright

MW: So did that start the interest in collecting? When I look at my collection, there’s a date on each of them and there’s a scattering of them over the next 10 - 20 years. I had enough interest that when I saw them, I went to buy them. Because of course, there was no internet at that time. It was mostly music shops.

MW: There’s also the archaeological side of things. How did you become involved in that side of collecting? That was pretty much the internet age. This was 1988 – I still think we’re in the [20th] century. You could check back, but I think that I started on the internet and the year 2000 and when I saw one that had been dug up by a metal detectorist I would put a bid on it, buy it – I bought quite a bunch that way, about 40 or 50 that have come from metal detectorists.

DM: So simultaneously you had a teaching and academic career at the same time you were collecting all these instruments. I was doing all kinds of other things, some of which were frowned upon. I was supposed to go out there, publish and attract students to the University of Iowa – I was teaching there – but I went through a long period of reading novels, modern trashy novels. And a period on working on the trump, collecting more information, buying and other totally time- wasting things. But I did a publication or two, a book about 1968, around that time. That was on the Basse dance – I thought I was a medievalist – and then later on decided I was an Amercanist, with an interest in American music.

DM: What was your academic background? Background in musicology? I majored in German at college – it was really a general education – and I learned the language fairly well, we went to Karlsruhe, as I said, and got a little more acquainted with the language, but never went farther in the serious study of it. I enjoyed languages in general. In high school

and college I took, it must have been 7 years Latin, 5 years German, semester in French, Russian. I think that’s all of the formal study of languages I had. If I was starting over again I would learn Japanese, probably Chinese. They say it takes a Japanese person 3 – 4 years to learn how to write the language, it’s the most complicated form of written language.

DM: How was your work or interest in the trump received by your colleagues? Rather often it was accepted pretty well. For example, after the first international congress for the Jew’s harp, 4 people came from Siberia in order to make a documentary on the Jew’s harp. One I’ve known very well, a leading person on the Jew’s harp, Ivan Alexeev, and there was another friend of his, colleague of his from Yakutia and two people from Novosibirsk, and the guy who did the filming and we travelled around some and we took them to a maker down in Illinois, Wisconsin, Robby Clement, and the two of them made a trip down, first landing in New York down to Florida, stopping at several places on the way down to meet with Jew’s harp people.

MW: How did you find other people who were interested? There really was not much of getting people together before the congresses began. We did have the first one in Iowa City, ’83 or ’84, and that was called an international congress, there were not many people there – a total of 25 attendees – but 4 or 5 of them were from foreign countries, so it was international. Most were not people who became famous later on and there were other international, national meetings, starting in about the early ’90’s and the same people would go to the different meetings. I went to all the international meetings, all 6 of them, but I won’t be making it to any more. MW: You started VIM [trump journal] in 1982. Why the name? It’s a satire on German titles. Instead of quarterly, I made it ‘Vierundzwangstel- jahrsschrift”, or 24 times a year, “semi- monthly” (which it never was); the “Semi-

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monthly Journal of the International Jew’s Harp Virtuosos Society”. It was poking a bit of fun at titles, really. I never thought of the instrument in any sort of disrespect.

MW: How did you get contributions to VIM? They tended to get into contact with me. I had a good sized mailing list by the time the first issue came out.

MW: How did they get to know you? Were you published in some other way? I sent out free copies of the first issue, which was pretty cheap to produce, to a lot of people and a lot of those subscribed. There were people at the congress, word of mouth. But of course the next congress was in Yakutsk, Siberia. Lots of them were from the Russian Federation, the USSR as it was at that time. So I sent out copies and ended up with around 70 to 90 subscribers and people I gave it away to, like members of my family and so forth.

DM: So leading up to VIM No. 1, at what point did you decide you had the critical mass of material and an audience? Never thought about that really. You know, people came out of the woodwork, though most of those tended to give up their enthusiasms and I lost track of them. They stopped subscribing and so forth. Incidentally, it’s kind of interesting that my career with the instrument is ending up the same way it began. I was settled there in Iowa City and I had two or three people make pilgrimages to visit me, talk with me. One of them was mainly a dulcimer player, ended up making a lot of money, I think in Nashville. He was interested and wrote an article for me. Anyway, they sought me out and came to Iowa City and spent a day or two with me. I’m ending up the same way.

DM: Have you received a lot of visitors over the years? No. When we had the congress in Iowa City we had several visitors in the house, including a young fellow from Paris named John Wright.

MW: One of the things I thought was interesting when speaking to Spiridon was that the Yakuts thought they were the only ones who played the Jew’s harp until they came out to the international congresses. It’s true of all the individuals. They [trumps] are scattered all over the place, not totally a secret, but if you went to movies, Western movies particularly, animated cartoons, sooner or later you got slightly familiar with the sound of the instrument.

MW: Two things you’ve said in the past are significant from my point of view. One is that once you tell people you are interested in the instrument, they come back to you with things they’ve found. Yeah, that’s right.

MW: The other thing that is pretty mind- boggling is the international aspect of it. Is that an internet phenomenon? I did a lot of corresponding at the beginning of the ’80, but even before that I did a lot of corresponding.

MW: Was it VIM 3 where you bring in Spiridon? After the second international congress in Yakutsk. So from about that time I started to do quite a lot of work on it. I still thought I was a medievalist, published another book. Extant medieval instruments of all kinds, including about 80 Jew’s harps. Of course Gjermund Kolltveit later on got busy and did all the European ones he could find, and there were ten times that many.

MW: Did you just contact the museums? No, I never did much of that. I was a paper kind of guy. There are archaeological bibliographies, recent works on archaeology, who would list them by the place, what they dug up. Then you could go to the published reports, and I added quite a bit of information from things there.

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MW: Did the University have a good specialist library? It was very good. They stopped later on when things got expensive, like the Russian ones which were very detailed and full of a certain amount of Jew’s harps as well as other things.

MW: The earliest use of the word ‘juice harp’ comes from the Porcupine and is not available in the UK. I got it on microfilm. I got a lot of microfilm at that time. And of course Xerox’s – you’ve seen the box there – articles on various publications, of which I must have quite a few hundred pages.

MW: Was it coincidental that Iowa had this material or is it in all areas, or specific to the university? I don’t know if they had any such policy, but they had quite a good collection of books on archaeological subjects, and it was a very good library, actually. It still is. But at some point they stopped subscribing to these things. I made lots of Xerox’s at that time and ordered material through the inter-library loan from other American libraries that Iowa City didn’t have. I developed some correspondents that I corresponded with continually for 30 years or more. Particularly useful is Uta Henning of Germany, who had worked also on musical instruments as they appear in works of art, and she offered me a lot of material I used on the book on that subject eventually.

MW: So how many instruments do you think you’ve actually got? Until I finish cataloguing the American ones I’m not going to know exactly. Between 400- 500 somewhere, but this doesn’t put me nearly the largest collector. There’s a guy in Italy who has over 2000 of them.

MW: Your intention is for this to go to…? They will all go to the new trump museum, khomus museum in Yakutsk. They say they will have a complete room in that museum for my collection – I don’t think it’s worth that,

but I’ve tried to get variety of good things, though there are an awful lot of duplications too.

MW: My particular interest is in the trump in the UK. You say you’ve mainly got those off the internet? Yes. Practically all the British ones that I have were exported to America – all over the United States – and when those turned up on eBay – and they came from all parts of the country, universally America. I also bought some from Molln, but not nearly in the same quantity as the English ones. And English ones were pretty much always distinguishable because the frames were cast instead of made out of diamond cross-section wire bent into shape, or any other way of making them, they were actually cast. I think the English ones were cast going back to early times. We know they were from the 19th century.

MW: I’ve not been able to trace them back earlier than 1806, but there are hints that they were made earlier. Finding the evidence is really difficult. In Molln and the Birmingham area people were identified as Jew’s harp makers when they were married, things like that.

MW: Smith’s were apparently some of the best harps made. English Smith’s were very good instruments and of course, one of them migrated to America, J. R. Smith, and made what is universally considered the best American trumps for quite a long time and eventually two sons made them.

MW: These I think are quite difficult to get hold of. These days they are. I’ve got a lot of them. J. R. Smith for a long time made cast instruments too. Then in the 1930s when Molln and everybody got into making instruments from square cross-section, diamond cross-section wire bent into shape, then they started doing that too.

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DM: So are you giving your entire collection to the museum? I’ll keep a little set to play on. One tuned set. You have to have one for every key – 12 different keys.

MW: Are they the same types or are you going to go for a cross-section? They are all made by what in general I would have to say are my favourite maker, Schlutter of Germany. They are all excellent instruments of strong, brilliant tone, play overtones up to high ones and so forth, they are all very well made and I like playing on them, can play any tunes and play other kinds of things too.

MW: I use Schlutters for workshops. They are not expensive, but the quality’s good. It’s a unique design. They started making them about 1970 and stuck to that same design. They cover over 3 octaves.

DM: What are your thoughts on the appeal of the instrument or its charm? I think it’s obvious, but it isn’t to everybody, probably. The striking thing to me is always that with regard to ensembles, it always stands out immediately. It has a sort of biting sound. It’s like pepper as a spice that inserts itself. It can be in the background but still you can see it. Even if its recorded at an extremely low level, you can recognise the unique quality of the sound and it has always been very good in the movies for sound effects, because again its striking and you can get all kinds of effects, a little bit comical – very often ‘boing!’ is the most famous sound, then low harmonics glide up to high harmonics then the opposite direction. And then you can do many, many things with them, vibratos, and there are quite a number of special effects you can get, tongue tip, trilling sound. I never work on this very much. I mostly just play tunes, the old British, American folk dances (sings ‘the girl I left behind me’), those work very well for me.

DM: What about what the internet has done for the Jew’s harp community worldwide?

It’s amazing. A huge amount of material. When the internet started I used to list just a few Jew’s harp sites in my journal but there got to be so many interesting ones that I stopped doing that and I’m not sure if those sites are ephemeral or not.

MW: Do you have a vision as to how you see things move on? Where do you think it should go? Since you ask for my wishes, my preference is that I would like to achieve immortality, to go on doing this myself for ever. Inevitably I’m so much more interested in my own work than anybody else’s, present company excepted. That’s what I enjoy most, especially if I can slip a bit of humour into it…one of my favourite reviews is the Trump in the Movies, that’s one of my best little bits. So that’s my sort of serious answer to the question, otherwise I’d like to see the getting together of all kinds of people from many different places. The first meetings were 7 years in between, which is too long. Today they still haven’t quite settled down, I think 3 years is about right. But it hasn’t always worked out that way.

MW: The big problem is the dismissive nature of the way people look at the instrument for starters. You start from a low base and building up from there is quite tough . At the University of Iowa, when we first met there, they were quite kind to us. The Director introduced the first assembly and they gave us all the rooms we needed, and we gave 3 evenings of concerts. If you can find something like that where you don’t have to pay for it…

DM: You had some pretty decent media coverage. Newspapers, including a few nationals. The newspapers have always taken an interest in the congresses. I think people probably forget frequently – I do myself.

DM: What about the rest of the members of

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your family? Have any of them ever expressed an interest? Not really. When we met in Iowa City, Susan [Fred’s daughter] was about 10 years old and one of the attendees gave her a Jew’s harp and taught how to play it, but she dropped it. I do a certain amount of prophetalising. They invited me to come to a school where I met with 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders, I think they were, demonstrating the instrument. Each one of them could play their own instrument, but I

The Trump on William of Wykeham’s Crozier Jeremy Montague

Fig. 1 One side of William of Wykeham’s crozier, showing the trump at top right. Photo: Studio Edmark Oxford, used by permission of the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford.

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don’t think that any major international figures have come from that. Not yet, that I know about. MW & DM: Thank you very much. You are very welcome.

Many years ago, when I was first appointed as Curator of the Bate Collection here in the University of Oxford, I had a letter from Fred Crane saying that he had heard that William of Wykeham’s crozier had an illustration of a trump on it, and could I please find out whether this was true, and if so could I get him a picture of it. It took me a long time sort this out, because nobody seemed to have detailed pictures that might show it, and eventually Fred’s request led to the whole crozier being photographed with close-up details of all its iconography. I was then, with the help and encouragement of Dr. Michael Burden, Keeper of Silver at New College, and with the permission of the Warden and Fellows, able to describe the crozier and its history and to illustrate all its portrayals of instruments in colour, excellently photographed by Studio Edmark Oxford, in the pages of Early Music, vol. 30, no.4, for November 2002, pp. 540–62.

The main reason for Fred’s interest was, I presume, the date, for William of Wykeham became Bishop of Winchester in 1366 and while we have no specific date for the creation of his crozier, the crooked staff that all bishops carry, it must have been made in that or the following year – it took most of a year to get the Pope’s approval before he could be consecrated and formally installed in October 1367, and for that occasion he must have had this crozier.

William was born in 1324 in Wickham (the modern spelling) in Hampshire, only 16 miles south-east of Winchester. His parents were of low status, though said to have been of good reputation and character. He must have shown early intelligence, for he was taken up by a patron and well educated in a school in Winchester. Clearly he was already expert at catching the eye of those who could help his career, for he became the secretary of the Constable of Winchester Castle. Another patron was the then Bishop of Winchester, who introduced him to King Edward III. At the age

of 32 he was made Surveyor of Works at Windsor Castle, which he rebuilt into much the state that we see it today. The King gave him many other offices, both secular and in the church even before he took full Holy Orders, until by the age of 40 he was more or less running the country. In 1367, a month before his consecration as Bishop, he was appointed Chancellor of England, a post in those days with rather more power than that of a modern Prime Minister. He was dismissed from that post in 1371 because of a revolt against clerical government of the country, but he regained much of his positions and power when Edward died in 1377 and Richard II became king, though he did not again become the Chancellor until 1389 when Richard came of age and took full power.

Between those last two dates he had leisure enough and power enough to found his two colleges, the one, now a well-known public school, in Winchester, and the other, to give the students from Winchester a university education, the New College in Oxford, the latter in 1379. On his death in 1404 he bequeathed his crozier, and also his mitre, sandals, and dalmatics to New College, and there they remain to this day. It has been described by Charles Jackson, the leading historian of English gold and silver, as ‘incomparably the finest example of English goldsmith’s work of the Gothic style that has come down to us from the Middle Ages’. Figure 1 here shows only the top of the crozier, the castle and the crook. Below this there is more decoration, with canopied niches containing figures in full relief of Christ and the Virgin and saints, and then the cylindrical shaft of the crozier 35 mm (1d inches) in diameter, which is of enamelled silver with lilies carved in low relief. The whole crozier stands six feet nine inches (2060 mm) high and the shaft is divided into three sections that can be unscrewed to make it more easily portable between the formal occasions when it was used. At the very bottom of the shaft is an iron

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spike which, said Jackson, quoting an unnamed authority, was for ‘the admonition of rebels’.

At the bottom of fig. 1, above the supporting angels, the crozier becomes octagonal, with two sides, that facing us and the opposite side, wider than the others. Here we have another series of niches, canopied like choir stalls in a cathedral, with canopied windows above them. At the front and back of the crozier, here invisible, are again Christ and the Virgin. In the centre of the wide sides stand St Paul with his sword, facing us, and on the other side St Peter with his keys. Between them stand other saints. Each niche and window is enamelled to resemble stained glass or the blue sky. Above this superb piece of craftsmanship is a six-sided house with a small dormer window in the roof on each side and in each wider face a doorway. The narrower sides each has a niche, three of them empty, but it here that the musical interest begins, for each once held a silver-gilt musician angel. Today only one survives, playing a gittern (figure 4 in my Early Music article).

From the roof of the house springs the crook itself. This again is six-sided, but two sides, that facing us and on the other side, are much wider than the other four, and as may be seen each carries a series of silver plaques or panels, each engraved with a musician angel, and originally each enamelled in brilliant colours, though today much of this is missing. To give you an idea of what these angels are playing, on the other side we have, from the base of the crook, a pair of cymbals, a triangle, a bagpipe, a portative organ (very schematic, the least detailed of all), what may be a recorder which was just coming into use at this time, a psaltery, a long trumpet, a short trumpet, a citole, and a shawm. On the side that we can see they are, again from the base, a six-winged seraph ( the only non- instrumentalist, one of those who sing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus to each other in Isaiah), and then again instrumentalists playing a kettledrum, a tabor, a transverse flute (the

earliest illustration of that instrument in Britain), the trump or jews harp, a fiddle, a harp, another pair of cymbals differently shaped, another shawm, and another long trumpet.

So at last we have reached the

purpose of this article, the trump (figure 2), as Fred has tried to encourage us all to call it. Fred pointed out that in some places, especially in America, the use of ‘Jew’s’ can cause offence, and we know from Michael Wright’s researches that that term dates back to earliest times in English, whereas there is no historical justification for replacing it with ‘jaws’. We also know from those researches that ‘trump’ was also used in the earliest references, and since in its lower register it can play much what a natural trumpet can play, it seems a logical name to use.

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The silver plaques average 38 mm (about 11⁄2 inches) in height, each differing slightly from its neighbour – I’m afraid that I didn’t measure this one exactly – and are all 19 mm (about e of an inch) wide, and each stands in a frame that is itself within a silver-gilt border. Each angel’s feet are hidden by the clouds of heaven, except for those of the flautist who seems to stand on a field of flowers, and the shapes of the clouds varies from one to another as do the pattern and, where the enamel survives, the colour of their robes. Their faces and hair styles also differ – this is by no means pattern-copy work. The amount of detail of line and of enamel in that very small space is extraordinary. Most of the enamel on this plaque is missing, but some of the brown of the hair survives as well as the blue of the eyes. The face and halo, as well as the hands, are gilt. The trump itself is perhaps overlarge, but that can be excused if it is to be seen at all in an image of this size. It is a typical medieval shape (I have two like it that were found in the mud of the foreshore of the River Thames), with the bow held in the left hand and the player plucking with the forefinger away from the face. The player’s lips are clearly slightly open.

While I suspect that there may be more iconography to be found, I only know of

Fig . 3 Sto ne corb el sup por ting the roo f wal l plat e in the chan cel of St Sep ulch re Chu rch, Nor tham pton , sho win g a gro tesq ue play ing a trum p. Pho to: C. R. Nic ewo nger , use d by perm issi on of Har riet Nic ewo nger .

one other medieval English illustration, and that is a century later. In my wife’s and my Minstrels and Angels (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1998, but now sold via Scarecrow Press) fig. 3 shows a fifteenth-century carving of a trump from St Sepulchre Church in Northampton. This a detailed close up of just the player’s head showing the trump very definitely between the player’s teeth

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Poem by James Woodhouse. Bob Adams

HIGH, on those Hills, whose scarce-recorded Name,

Has weakly whisper'd from the trump of Fame;

Just to announce, distinct, the simple sound,

O'er other swarming heights, and hamlets, round—

Unless like Name of Bristol's ancient Bard,

Among the tuneful tribes may meet regard,

Which hapless Chatterton's prolific lays

Wreath'd round his brows with never-fading bays;

Or poor Crispinus', oaten pipe, alone,

Might serve to raise the sound one semitone.

There 'mid the Cots that look o'er southern lands,

Near the blest spot where Heav'n's fair temple stands,

Once dwelt an humble, but an honest, Pair,

Of manners, rustic, but of morals rare!

The Husband handsome—active—tall and strong—

Face, form, and mien above the boorish throng!

The Wife, erect and tall; a comely Dame!

No scoff for scorners, nor fond village flame.

1 1

Not shap'd, or featur'd, to repress desire,

Or set a maddening modern Troy on fire.

His Mind magnanimous—Her's meek and mild—

No pride misled; no affectation spoil'd—

No hogs, or apes, in diet, or in dress—

Their learning little—their possessions less.

Knowledge enough the rules, and rights, to scan,

Respecting Father God, and fellow Man;

While, subjugating Pride, and Lust, and Sloth,

Their Piety, and Love, still practis'd both:

Freehold enough to bear above the crowd;

Yet not enough to make their Spirits proud,

But, Virtue to support, and Vice oppose,

When in their native County contests rose,

He gave to Merit, still, his ready voice,

Each patriot Candidate his constant choice—

He bawl'd no Party; pledg'd no Statesman's toast;

But steer'd his conduct clear of blame, or boast;

Nor penalty, nor promise, could controul

The steady purpose of his upright Soul.

Ambition had, in neither, higher aim

Than honest Yeoman, and plain, simple, Dame—

Content and toil, economy and care;

And probity, and truth; and speeches fair;

With what their Conscience, and the Scriptures, taught,

Was all the influence—all the Fame, they sought.

No Ancestry conferr'd or shame, or shine,

Tho' several Centuries mark'd their lowly Line—

No pomp, no title, stirr'd up empty pride—

To neither Potentate, or Lord allied—

In Herald's office no vain search was made;

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With Competence content, thro' toil and trade—

The fertile field, for them, had brighter charms,

Than blazon'd shields replete with quarter'd Arms;

With velvet mantlings round, or laurel wreath,

And flattering motto, telling lies, beneath;

Yet could they claim descent from noblest blood,

Of Peer!—Prince!—Potentate!—before the Flood!

Such were the Parents whence our Bardling sprung,

Their Names unnotic'd, and their Site unsung;

James Woodhouse shoemaker poet from Rowley Village

written circa 1790

James WOODHOUSE was born and raised in ROWLEY village, leaving school at the age of eight years, he went on to become a famous poet under the patronage of amongst others Shenstone, designer of the Leasowes in Halesowen. The above is the beginning of a very long autobiographical poem, as far as I can see this portion of it describes his birthplace, his parents and his lowly origins. Crispinus is Woodhouse himself.

Line 11 and 12 refer to his parent’s home high on Rowley Hill near to the church. Lines 1 and 2 refer to Rowley Village a place barely known apart from being known for Jews Harps.

James was born in 1735 so his parents obviously lived in Rowley before this and could, according to the excerpt above, trace their line back several generations. It may be my imagination but could the above show a link between Rowley and jews harps in the early 17th century. I also enclose a picture of the original Rowley Church high on the hill at the time of the above, with the village in the back ground, the dwelling woodhouse mentions must be in this vicinity and Hawes Lane where many jews harp makers lived in the 19 century is in the unseen foreground in front of the church, all very tenuous I know and maybe wishful thinking, but tell me what you think.

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To begin at the beginning, I first began playing the Jew's harp seriously around 1965; at that time I can safely say I that, at least in Britain, I was lucky in having the field pretty well to myself. The most stimulating thing that happened to me in that year was a visit to the sound library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society at Cecil Sharp House where I came across an old BBC 78 recording of a Scottish trump player, Angus Lawrie, a one- time piper who played essentially bagpipe music on the Jew's harp with many of the grace-notes faithfully rendered. Later that same year I found his address and went to visit him at Oban and during an afternoon he did show me a few tricks. But the session only lasted a couple of hours or so and I had no recording equipment, so I still have to admit to this day that, judging by extant recordings, there are many aspects of his technique that to this day I have not completely grasped.

Lawrie used an ordinary English Trowman Jew's harp of that time with a cast iron frame and it has to be said that the quality of these instruments left much to be desired, a situation exacerbated in later years as the quality got even poorer. As I subsequently discovered, the frustrating thing was that at an earlier period British Jew's harps had been of really excellent quality, however by the 1950s trump- making in England was decidedly on the wane and there was no commercial outlet to revive it.

But what exactly had been lost and what makes a good Jew's harp? That question haunted me right from the start and in order to begin to answer it, I felt I had to look into the development of the Jew's harp both in time and space. This to me meant that it was necessary to get an overall appreciation of the

technology. A visit to several museum ethnographical collections soon revealed an astonishing variety of Jew's harp types made from a variety of materials with widely differing working principles and sometimes complex methods for setting the instrument in vibration; but all we had variants of the same instrument that shared a number of common elements. I became fully aware of this in the following years when I settled in London and took the opportunity, with the kind co- operation of the curators, to examine the collections of the British (thanks due to Bryan. Cranstone) and Horniman Museums (with the particularly valuable help from Jean Jenkins) and several visits to the extraordinary Pitt- Rivers museum at Oxford (where Bernard Fagg asked me one day to record a tape of their entire Jew's harp collection). So you can say that I got off to a good start, but the real opening came in 1966 when I first visited the rich Jew's harp collection in the Ethnomusicology department of the of the Musée de l'Homme, Paris and later the same day met the musical acoustician, Prof. Émile Leipp, who for a number of years had been particularly interested in the problems posed by the Jew’s harp and the following year invited me to a meeting of the GAM (Groupe d’Acoustique Musicale) where I gave a demonstration and a short presentation in my halting French of what I had discovered so far about Jew’s harps. I settled in Paris from 1967 and immediately undertook an extensive examination of the Musée de l'Homme's collection; this was initially a personal project, but it soon attracted the attention of the former director, André Schaeffner and the new director, Gilbert Rouget who asked me to prepare a catalogue of the entire Jew’s harp collection. So in 1968 on I began work on this,

Jew’s harp : the classifier’s nightmare. - or ho w I be ca m e en br oi le d in al l th is

John Wright

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subsequently in collaboration with the new curator of the musical instrument collection, Geneviève Dournon-Taurelle.

From the start, the organisation of the catalogue presented a serious problem of organological classification of the objects. The obvious place to look for guidance was of course the Sachs/Hornbostel general classification, especially as Kurt Sachs had very early on been particularly interested in the Jew's harp which had obstinately refused to exactly bend to his classifier's will; the result was the publication in 1917 of "Der Maultrommel: ein typologische Vorstudie". This seems to have been be his first attempt to extend the universal classification to cover a specific instrument type; nevertheless I could see that this immediately exposed a number of major snags in the whole system.

A particular difficulty came from the simultaneous effort to establish both a hierarchy of criteria and a history of the evolution of a group of objects which led to an extremely rigid classification and to conflicts between the hierarchical criteria, which made it well-nigh impossible to enter some essential features and thence to describe them fully.

Another thorny problem came from Sachs' principal binary division into two categories: idioglottic Jew's harps (those in which the lamella was taken from the same workpiece as the frame) and heteroglottic instruments (those consisting of a separate workpieces - lamella and frame, afterwards assembled). These two categories do in effect cover the vast majority of Jew's harps; unfortunately there does exist a category of instruments fabricated by Taiwan aborigines, also those in the neighbouring of Hainan Island that whilst consisting of two elements (and therefore strictly speaking heteroglottic), in all other features, bring them inevitably into the idioglottic camp. This was the most glaring problem but on the whole I found that the Sachs/hornbostel system, although a useful aid for non-specialist

museum curators becomes very much a straitjacket for a specialist desiring to undertake a detailed comparative study.

What substitute could there be for this a system? - Perhaps the answer was to eschew all comprehensive systematic classifications and to say that each object was in a sense its own classification. That sounds a bit abstract so let us say that it entailed retelling the same story from several different points of view; moreover experience had shown that the thorniest problem was that of terminology. One observed many an important feature to which one could not put a name. Sachs' solution was to use metaphorical images: "castellated" lamella; "bottle-shaped", etc., but these gave no indication of the raison d'être for the form and I felt that the nomenclature used for a given feature should have some bearing on its purpose - its function. To achieve this I eventually decided that the best approach was to divide the catalogue into two distinct sections: one being a functional analysis divided into three chapters - acoustics, mechanics, morphology… it was hoped this would help to elaborate the necessary terminology for the second part in which the instruments were presented according to their geographical provenance. Obviously the actual organisation of this second part was bound to be somewhat arbitrary - but at least the instruments could be presented in their ethnographical context.

That evacuated most of the problems but one remained outstanding: looking over the entire collection, it was still obvious that whichever way we looked at it, we were in the presence of two distinct categories of Jew's harp, so what distinguished them?

Once again following the functional approach, it eventually occurred to me that it had to do with the way the instrument was mainly intended to be held and the lamella made to oscillate. In one case the tip of the lamella was directly plucked at the tip,

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whereas in the other case, the action was applied to the opposite end of the instrument near to, or beyond the root of the lamella; this meant that the first instance, the instrument has to be grasped by the supporting hand with the lamella pointing away from the latter ( outward- pointing Jew’s harps, Fig. 1) so that the other hand can directly excite the tip of the lamella bent upwards for easy access.

In the other instance ( inward pointing Jew’s harps, Fig 2) , the supporting hand holds the end of the frame extending beyond the tip of a lamella, which last is in the same plane as the frame; the lamella is exited by the action by the opposite hand upon its root end or upon the part of the frame extending beyond that. Sometimes the action is direct (percussion or plucking), sometimes indirect by means of a pulled string. In the case of the instrument illustrated in Fig. 2, the string is wrapped around the thumb of the actuating hand which strikes the lamella very close to its nodal point; the string pulls the instrument towards the thumb which enters into collision with the lamella, increasing the force of the shock

(another action perhaps would augment the effect if the hand gripping the instrument pushes the instrument towards the other hand - this would need to be verified by field observation.

This simple bipartite typological division, along with other functional descriptions eliminated all the problems I had encountered with conflicting criteria posed by Sachs/ Hornbostel and made full description of the organological material very easy.

It also entailed the complete rearranging of the catalogue and a delay of about a year. — It also meant convincing the colleagues! I would have preferred the inclusion of both outward and inward-pointing types into any individual description of the products of a culture where the two types were present but was unsuccessful in defending this approach in its entirety. So the catalogue "Les Guimbardes du Musée de l'Homme" ended up by being something of a compromise — as does any collaboration.

Fig. 1: Outward-pointing Fig.2: Inward-pointing

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Jew’s harp patents, an enumeration

Harm Linzen

You have jew’s harps and jew’s harps and we jew’s harp enthusiasts and trumpists have seen the most of them; - seen them, known them, played them, heard them. However, when you enter the realm of patents you’ll be surprised to find jew’s harps you’ve never seen, let alone heard before. Let’s start with the following list of patents starting from 1885 on, more or less until present day. The list is in order of date.

Year land number Inventor 1822! Piedmont An industry protecting patent by the Piedmontese King 1885 US 320440 John Mc Mahel 1905 US 788419 Charles E. Mincks 1912 US 1044025 John Riley Combs 1918 US 1266556 Edward O. Cook 1922 US 1434736 George Brown Dusinberre 1927 US 1651448 George Brown Dusinberre 1932 US 1857400 Harry W. Pidgeon 1933 US 1933721 Maximo Escalante 1934 US 1974370 De Keller Stamey 1935#!GB 11185/35 Millicent King-Troman? Application/fake? 1977 US 4000677 Teddy W. Rabb 1978 AT 341312 Karl Schwarz 1979 US 4161902 Harry E. Siverson 1984 DE 3241545 Ernst Zacharias 1986 SU 1234876 Robert Abdrakhmanovich Zagretdinov 1988 HU 190287 Zoltán Szilagyi 1989! SU 1729018 Burtsev? (Not found yet, maybe not a jew’s harp) 1990 SU 1571396 Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev 1990 SU 1571649 Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev 1990 SU 1683062 Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev 1991 CS 273105 Beata Kotocova 1992 SU 1730677 Nikolai P. Burtsev 1992 SU 1778777 Nikolai I. Potapov and Nikolai N. Burtsev 1993 SU 1791842 Nikolai I. Potapov and Nikolai N. Burtsev 1996 RU 2063067 Robert Abdrakhmanovich Zagretdinov 1997 RU 2086006 Robert Abdrakhmanovich Zagretdinov 1999 RU 2140102 Robert Abdrakhmanovich Zagretdinov Next few sentences: Year unknown. Last one not even sure if it’s a jew’s harp. Of these I haven’t got the patent papers. ????! IT 48852/A Andrea Bugari and son ????! IT 35635/B Andrea Bugari and son ????! SU 234849 Burtsev?

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These are all jew’s harps. Some of them were filed and applied for up to 5 years before! The years in this list refer to the year that the patent was actually approved unless noted with a (#.) Years marked with (!) are patents I haven’t got yet.

With all these patents we could easily fill one or two journals but then there wouldn’t be any

room left for other lesser features 1 so I’ve made a small survey.

1 No I’m not serious and I don’t mean it… seriously I don’t!

John Mc Mahel, US patent 320440, 1885. This is a jew’s harp within a box. The box serves to protect the teeth. By opening or closing the slots in the box the intensity of tone is changed according to its inventor.

Charles E. Mincks, US patent 788419, 1905. This jew’s harp design has two extensions alongside the cheek of the player, that function as resonators. This way the inventor claims it is easier to play and has an increased tonal compass and volume. Furthermore the need to press the instrument against the teeth is obviated. The final appearance of the instrument is different than the mosaics in the patent. As is to be seen in the second journal, page(?)

John Riley Combs, US patent 1044025, 1912. Again an attempt to increase the instrument’s volume, this time by providing a soundbox on the jew’s harp itself. I wonder if this design is inspirated by Sakha jew’s harps with closed bows which look very similar. The effect is, I gather, minimal because the soundbox is not there where the sound is generated but, as mentioned, over the jew’s harps bow. However this is all theory, you’re welcome to prove me wrong.

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Edward O. Cook, US patent 1266556, 1918. Cooks aim is to prevent the jew’s harp arms being bitten together by increasing its rigidity. For this purpose he joins the tips of the arms and places a small extra bow halfway along the embouchure.

George Brown Dusinberre, US patent 1434736, 1922. This is an attempt to change the jew’s harp format in such a way that it can be produced industrially. It’s a jew’s harp stamped out of sheet metal and has an extra arch to provide for rigidity and a finger rest for the fingers that maintain the instrument. More on this instrument in my article about Dusinberre’s jew’s harp patents.

George Brown Dusinberre, US patent 1651448, 1927. Dusinberres second attempt and this time reasonably succesful, although in a slightly different appearance, known as the DUSIE-harp. The lid in the patent letters is not implemented in the final product. More on this instrument in my article on Dusinberre’s patents.

Harry W. Pidgeon, US patent 1857400, 1932. Again a design to increase the volume of the jew’s harp. Pidgeon attached a bell to a trump. Works to some extent and focusses the sound. Because some higher frequencies are filtered the tone appears to be warmer (the same effect you hear in old tube radio’s). On Ebay they try to date these in the twenties but the method of making a bell like this is a patent from 1929 secondly the instrument was introduced in 1930 so jewsaphones from the twenties don’t exist. More on this instrument and dating it in journal no. 4 p. 49-59.

Maximo Escalante, US patent 1933721, 1933. An alternative format for a jew’s harp. My view is that Escalante ‘borrowed’ his idea from Southeast Asia; just compare it to the bamboo jew’s harp of the Dayak population on Kalimantan (former Borneo), Indonesia.

De Keller Stamey, US patent 1974370, 1934. A double jew’s harp. In order to change key rapidly while playing the jew’s harp, De Keller Stamey conceives a double jew’s harp with a central mouth position. This way you could play two jew’s harps simultaneously. However the mouth position is not there where the sound is generated so I think that the volume is weak. But again, you’re always welcome to prove me wrong.

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M o n ta g u C o ll e c ti o n O x fo r d Millicent King-Troman(?) , possible GB-patent, application number 11185/31 or 11185/35. The first application number however, refers to a way to change film by the use of cartridges. So probably the application is filed in 1935. Although I haven’t been able to find the patent papers we do have the final product to review. Unlike the jewsaphone this jew’s harp is soldered directly to the horn. The horn itself is composed of two or three tinplate sheets soldered together and not out of one piece. Some phonoharps are lacquered to appear bronze. They were manufactured by Millicent Troman of Birmingham UK. The effect will be, I guess, similar as with other megaphonic trumps, a little louder and focussed. There is a possiblity that this patent was rejected because of the similar patent of the jewsaphone which is earlier. It is also suggested that we’re dealing with a fake here although most pretenders didn’t go to the length of producing a fake number. Photograph courtesy of Mr. Jeremy Montagu, for which and for his ponderings on the patent being a fake or not, many thanks; this Phono-harp is part of the Montagu Collection in Oxford. The search for this very patent resulted in the list you’re reading now.

Teddy Rabb, US patent 4000677, 1977 Again a method where you can play without the use of the teeth. Every jew’s harp has a tubular mouthpiece. By fixing several tubes together one can easily change key during play. The tube is placed over the mouth when played,

Karl Schwartz AT patent 341312, 1978 (AT = AusTria). In this patent Schwartz describes a merge between two jew’s harps. The sheet metal instrument has two separate playable tongues in order to change key quickly. The tongues are fixed in place using riveted plates; we see this method later with other patents. In theory this makes the tongue replaceable. You still see it for sale.

Harry E. Siverson, US patent 4161902, 1979. Another attempt to increase the rigidity of the instrument and the tonal qualities by joining the arms of the jew’s harp. The tongue is not fixed with a riveted plate but with a screwed plate which makes the tongue really replaceable.

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Ernst Zacharias, DE patent 3241545, 1984. (DE Deutsch = German) With this invention Zacharias tries to find a solution for the fixed pitch of a jew’s harp. His solution: to shorten or lengthen the tongue during play by means of a wheeled stop that can be moved over the length of the tongue during play.

Robert Abdrakhmanovi ch Zagretdinov, SU patent 1234876, 1986 (SU = Soviet Union). Sometimes the time is ripe for a certain idea or thought. This jew’s harp with variable pitch appears around the same time as Zacharias’ jew’s harp with variable pitch. The execution however is totally different. The stop is a part of the frame and will always go back to its starting point because of springs that push it back in that position.You still can buy these.

Zoltán Szilagyi, HU patent 190287, 1988 (HU = Hungary). This patent was a problem getting translated as most people found it too technical. Not even the Hungarian embassy in the Netherlands was able to help me although I sent them only an abstract. So what I write here is an observation of the patent on those things I think I recognize. What is described looks like a way of making a trump according to preset measurements, angles and alloys. Varying these elements gives one different characteristics and quality. I can imagine that a certain amount of preset combinations result in the same amount different models. Knowing these presets makes it possible to standardise certain stages of manufacture and ease production. Again this is all just a guess on what I think I’m recognizing in this patent. But maybe Zoltán can enlighten us on what it’s about and I mean the main line of the story not the technical details.

Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1571396, 1990. Again a double tongued jew’s harp, this time from Yakutsk. Not meant to play the tongues separately but the two tongues are there to be able to create more variations in overtones. For this the two tongues are not exactly the same size.

Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1571396, 1990. Again a double tongued jew’s harp, this time from Yakutsk. Not meant to play the tongues separately but the two tongues are there to be able to create more variations in overtones. For this the two tongues are not exactly the same size.

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Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1571649, 1990. A jew’s harp. Apparently there is nothing special to this jew’s harp except maybe for the way the tongue is fixed to the frame. We couldn’t make out much more out of the patent paper.

Nikolai P. Burtsev and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1683062, 1991. A jew’s harp similar to that in the last patent, except for the grooves on the exterior of the arms of the frame. With these grooves the position of the teeth is fixed on the jew’s harp’s arms.

Beata Kotocova, CS patent 273105, 1991 (CS = Czechia). This is a method of adjusting and tuning the pitch of the jew’s harp by placing different weights on the tip of the tongue. As far as I know Beata Kotocova is the only woman that patented a jew’s harp application.

Nikolai P. Burtsev, SU patent 1730677, 1992. On first sight another ordinary jew’s harp. This one however has special padding in the arms of the frame in order to protect the teeth of the player.

Nikolai I. Potapov and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1778777, 1992. The aim in this invention was to provide for a way to be able to create more variations in overtones. For this there is a groove on the inside of both arms making the tongue pass not one but two edges. An instrument like this is made and sold by Szilagyi under the name ‘choir’.

Nikolai I. Potapov and Nikolai N. Burtsev, SU patent 1791842, 1993. This jew’s harp is equipped with two kind of shells on the arms of the jew’s harp. These shells make this jew’s harp playable by people that are toothless (or at least with their front teeth missing) as they are especially formed in the shape of the gum. This device also makes it possible for people with one hand missing to play the jew’s harp as it prevents the arms being bitten together.

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Robert Abdrakhmanovi ch Zagretdinov, RU patent 2063067, 1996 (RU = Russian Federation). This is a jew’s harp with two bells that can be rang during play. Both bells are in a different pitch and operate independent from each other. Which means that they can be played separately.

Robert Abdrakhmanovi ch Zagretdinov, RU patent 2086006, 1997. This invention baptised ‘Grusha’ (pear) consists of a jew’s harp within a resonating body of wood. This way the player is able to influence pitch by closing or opening the hole in the soundbox.

Robert Abdrakhmanovi ch Zagretdinov, RU patent, 2140102, 1999. An electric generated jew’s harp. An electromagnet sets the tongue of the jew’s harp in motion.

Andrea Bugari and son. IT patent 48852/A or 35635/B, year unknown (IT = Italy). A sheet metal jew’s harp. The frame is made from aluminium, the tongue is fixed with a riveted plate as we’ve seen before in other patents. A design made for mass production.

Conclusion : I found 31 patents of which some 6 patents are not confirmed yet (I only have a number or reference of these 6) of which only two have a physical representative (the Phonoharp by Troman and the scacciapensieri

by Bugari). Not in the list is a patent that claims to be a jew’s harp but misses certain characteristics such as the embouchure and a tongue and therefore isn’t a jew’s harp (US 2529584). Despite the amount of patents I have found, I still have the feeling that I

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missed a few. (For instance Heinrich Scheibler’s Aura: was that patented? and what about the indications of patents in the Burtsev documents I haven’t found yet). If you know of jew’s harp patents that are not mentioned in this text, please let me know. I am also very interested in pictures of these jew’s harps as they prove manufacture. In all there are about three elements to indicate which the inventors are trying to improve: -Protection of the teeth or play without the use of teeth. -Amplification and improvement of the sound. -Establishing variations in either overtone, pitch or key. A fourth element to indicate is the sheet metal jew’s harp which are easily manufactured industrially (Dusinberre, Schwartz, Bugari). A fifth and unique element is the Potapov/ Burtsev invention to serve handicapped people. I think there’s still some jew’s harp history to discover in patents. A way to do this is to remake the jew’s harps and test the patent papers on their merits. Another is to find if the patents are implemented as I have done with my Dusinberre article in which I have

highlighted other approaches as well in the sidekicks. Finally I would like to invite jew’s harp patent holders (Zoltán Szilagyi, Robert Zagretdinov, the Burtsevs, Ernst Zacharias, Beata Kotocova,…) to tell something about their patents, what were their motivations, what line of thought did they follow and what obstacles did they have to overcome, what became of them? It might result in some nice articles for the journal, or, when short, for a ‘regional’ issue of the newsletter. To conclude with an apology to AP&M Co. is in place, in the last journal I wrote that the Tromans probably were the first to make a megaphonic trump but it seems more and more likely that it was AP&M Co. who was the first.

In testimony whereof, I hereunto set my hand 2

. Harm J. Linsen

Thanks to: Irina Zipounova (Russian language) Alena _apkova (Chech language)

2 With this sentence, many patents conclude.

The Jew’s Harp in the Law, 1590–1825 Michael Wright

An edited article first published in the FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL VOLUME 9 NUMBER 3 PP. 349–371 ISSN 0531–9684

Reproduced here by kind permission of the English Folk Dance and Song Society Copyright © English Folk Dance and Song Society

This will be a two-part article. Pa rt 1: 15 90 -1 67 77

Prior to the nineteenth century, written references to the Jew’s harp in the United Kingdom are scarce and mention of named players is extremely rare. One source, however, that describes individuals and their

circumstances can be found in criminal trial records. In fact, the first three players of the instrument in the UK whom we can definitely identify were tried, convicted, and executed for one crime or another. That the accused were

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associated with the Jew’s harp was coincidental and it had nothing to do with their convictions, but it was considered sufficiently unusual to be noted at their trials. This article considers what we know about the trials and how confidant we can be that the information conta ined in cour t records a n d contemporaneous written accounts is correct. It also looks at the historical context in which each of the accused lived and the circumstances of their arrest, and how and why the Jew’s harp was mentioned at the trial. It explores what tunes might have been played, how much Jew’s harps might have cost and where they could have been purchased, and describes archaeological finds that show the kinds of instruments available. The overall evidence suggests that the Jew’s harp was a widely distributed musical instrument throughout the period, but that exceptional performance skills on it were sufficiently unusual to invite comment.

Amongst all the thousands of trial

documents recorded in England and Scotland between 1590 and 1825, twenty-four trials have the distinction of mentioning the musical instrument known as the Jew’s harp or Jew’s trump (often simply ‘trump’, especially in modern Scottish usage). Three specifically give the names of players on the instrument, the first players of the Jew’s harp in Britain whom we can identify; in four the instrument itself provides evidence in the trial; and the remainder include references to locations in London which comprise either drinking establishments or thoroughfares called the Jew’s Harp House, Jew’s Harp Tavern, or Jew’s Harp Court.

The circumstances surrounding the individual players of Jew’s harps who were involved in the trials that we shall consider here range from the bizarre to the downright horrific. Witchcraft, theft, murder: all brought to the attention of the authorities in Scotland or England someone of whom it was thought worthy of mention, either as a passing observation or as an indication of their character, that they were able to play the Jew’s harp or that they owned one. The three players named in the trial records are Geillis Duncan of Trenant, Lothian, in Scotland, accused of witchcraft in 1590; Donald McIlmichall, a wandering vagabond from the Appin area of north-west Scotland, accused of consorting with evil spirits in 1677; and Peter Kelly, accused of murder in London in 1729. A fourth character, James Norril, an accomplice in a robbery in London in 1746, is known to have owned a Jew’s harp. In addition, three more trials make reference to the musical instrument. The Jew’s Harp House, Tavern, or Court is mentioned in seventeen further trials which took place between 1773 and 1822.

Of the first three players, the examination and trial of Geillis Duncan in Scotland, in 1590–91, is without doubt the most significant. Not only is she the first named player we have found to date, but the events with which she was linked, commonly known as the North

Figure 1 Frontispiece from Jacobus Masenius, Wolverdientes Capitel welches (1664) Courtesy of Frederick Crane

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Berwick witch trials, have provided a huge amount of material.

There are numerous articles and histories, a play, a novel, and even a poem concerning these events. Of the publications consulted, seventy-three mention the North Berwick convention where Geillis played the Jew’s harp, fifty-nine refer to Geillis herself, and fifty-three indicate that she or someone else had played a musical instrument or a tune. In contrast, Donald McIlmichall’s trial is relatively insignificant in historical terms, and there is just one source for it, although three Scottish fairy histories also make mention of it The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, now available online, provide the trial details for Peter Kelly, as well as a number of other references, such as the account by the Ordinary of Newgate Gaol, who would have met and talked with Kelly in the time between his conviction and execution, and a detailed account of the lives of condemned crimidatingfrom 1735 1 . Newspaper reports of the time provide confirmation of Kelly’s trial and execution, but a search for another possible source, namely street ballads on the affair, has not yet produced anything.

Geillis Duncan, 1591 Background King James VI of Scotland was born on 19 June 1566, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Lord Darnley. Mary’s abdication in his favour a year later, following the murder of Darnley and her scandalous remarriage to James, fourth Earl of Bothwell, placed the infant James in the care of a political faction seeking the complete reformation of the Scottish Church and the limitation of royal prerogative. By 1589, James had become conscious of his duty to produce an heir, particularly as the combined throne of Scotland and England beckoned, and negotiations with a 1 Proceedings of the Old Bailey <

www.oldbaileyonline.org > [accessed 18 April 2007]. In the notes that follow, reference numbers for the trials are cited, enabling the records to be accessed directly through the website.

number of European royal houses eventually resulted in his marriage by proxy to Anne of Denmark on 20 August of that year. Anne’s attempts to reach Scotland were thwarted by severe storms, so James decided to fetch her himself from Denmark, where he remained, again due to the bad weather conditions, until April 1590. The Danish admiral of the fleet ascribed the difficult conditions to the influence of witchcraft, and a number of witches were subsequently executed in Copenhagen for the crime of raising the storms.

Francis Stewart was three years older than the king. His father, Lord John Stewart, was the illegitimate son of King James V, while his mother, Lady Jean Hepburn, was sister of the fourth Earl of Bothwell. On her accession, Mary, Queen of Scots, with the agreement of Pope Pius IV, legitimized all of James V’s children. In 1576, James VI recognized Francis Stewart as the fifth Earl of Bothwell and as his own heir. This meant that Francis Stewart, or his off spring, would become king if James VI were to remain childless. Francis Stewart was known as a necromancer and was associated with a reputed sorcerer, Richard Graham, who in turn introduced him to Agnes Sampson, the ‘Wise Woman of Keith’, the leader of a coven of ‘witches’. This group allegedly became intent on, at the very least, undermining the authority of the king, and preferably bringing about his death, which would provide Bothwell with the opportunity to claim the throne.

In November 1590, Geillis Duncan was suspected of witchcraft by her employer and, under torture, she implicated Agnes Sampson. A story began to emerge of the coven’s attempts to conjure up storms and various other potential attacks on the king and queen, which eventually reached the ears of James, who chose, against the advice of his courtiers, to be present at the examinations. Agnes Sampson is said to have confessed to James in person at the palace of Holyroodhouse. From

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this confession, it emerged that a meeting of the coven had been called on All Hallows’ Eve, 31 October 1590, at which (sources variously estimate) there had been between thirty-nine and three hundred participants present. This gathering turned out to have been the group’s final attempt, following many over the preceding fifteen months, to remove James from the throne by witchcraft. The assembly had started with a dance led by Geillis Duncan playing the Jew’s harp or trump, and this revelation led to a command for her to play before the king.

The Accused The classic view of witches, archetypically illustrated by the only known representation of Geillis Duncan playing the Jew’s harp for James VI of Scotland, is of wizened old hags 2 . It is closer to the truth to say that Geillis Duncan was a youngster caught up in what became one of the most notorious of early modern witch-hunts.

The official line condemned Geillis Duncan as a witch, although Montague Summers believed she was also a whore, given the accusation that she ‘vsed secretly to be absent

2 Drawing by F. Armytage in Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (London : G. Routledge and Sons, 1884)

and to lye forth of her Maisters house euery other night’ 3 . All the events associated with her appear to have happened between September 1589 and December 1591, beginning, it will be noted, while James was in Denmark. There is no indication of her age, but all the clues point to a headstrong young woman or girl. Firstly, she is described, in a hurriedly produced chapbook of 1591, titled Newes from Scotland (Figures 1 and 2), as a maidservant working for David Seton, the deputy bailiff of Trenant, who had recently noted, much to his astonishment, her skill as a healer. Secondly, there is no evidence of malefices going back for decades, so far as is known, and Duncan confessed to just one act of witchcraft, the bewitching of the laird of Balnaird’s hat 4 . Her accusers do not appear to have been especially interested in uncovering other actions on her part, only in whom she could name. Thirdly, the trial transcripts indicate that she was often sidelined by her seniors in the coven and used as a runner. She also stated that she knew nothing of what the group was up to but was only obeying ‘he’who

3 Newes from Scotland (London, 1591), pp. 8–9. 4 Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland , ed. by Lawrence

Norman and Gareth Roberts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 136.

Figures 2 ( above ) and 3 ( right ) Woodcuts from Newes from Scotland (1591) Courtesy of Special Collections, Glasgow University Library, and Marion O’Neill.

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commanded her, presumably the Devil 5 . Although all of these points could be ascribed to an older woman who deferred to her social superiors, in my view she is likely to have been a young girl in her early to mid-teens. Sources The first reference to Geillis Duncan playing the Jew’s harp occurs in connection with the confession and trial of Agnes Sampson in December 1590, but the earliest published reference is in the popular account, Newes from Scotland , which was in print while Duncan was still alive. It has formed the basis of historical research into the events right up to the present day, even though there is a general recognition that the account is distorted, propagandist, and sensationalist in style. Be that as it may, it tells us: ‘ Guilles Duncane did goe before them playing this reill or daunce vpon a small Trump, called a Iewes Trump, vntil they entred into the Kerk of north Barrick 6 . ’ This is also the only source that refers to the king’s interest in her musicianship: ‘ These confessions made the king in a wonderful admiration, and he sent for said Geillis Duncane, who upon the like trump did play the said dance before the King’s Majesty: who, in respect of the strangeness of these matters, took great delight to be present at their examinations. 7 ’ Given that she had been tortured by having her fingers crushed, this was no mean feat. Historians began writing about the events of 1590–91 within a hundred years, and there is an early mention in The History of the Kirk of Scotland , written in 1678, which erroneously attributes the playing of the trump at North Berwick to the Devil. In the course of a sermon delivered by the Devil, ‘ He found fault with sindrie, that had done their part in ill. Those that had beene busie in their craft, he said were his beloved, and promised they should want nothing needed. Playing to them upon a 5 Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland , ed. by

Lawrence Norman and Gareth Roberts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 136.

6 Newes from Scotland , p. 14. 7 Newes from Scotland , p. 14.

trumpe, he said, “Cummer, goe ye before; cummer goe ye!” and so they daunced . 8 ’ This is all rather different from the account in the Newes from Scotland , and it is a unique account.

The next group of sources follow more faithfully the description given in Newes from Scotland and quote directly from it. George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered , of 1685, states: ‘ They danced along the Kirk- yeard, Geilie Duncan playing the Trump, and Iohn Fian mussiled [i.e. masked] led the Ring . 9 ’ John Graham Dalyell, in his Musical Memoirs of 1849, directly quotes from Newes from Scotland and adds: ‘ Doubtless, it was the marvellous incidents of their Satanic convention having been reported to King James VI, that the credulous monarch sent for the reported participant. 10 ’ Hugo Arnot in his Abridgement of Celebrated Criminal Trials in Scotland of 1785 also quotes the Newes from Scotland text and adds, ‘ where six men, and ninety women, witches, were present, dancing to one of their number, who played there on a Jew’s-harp ’ 1 1 .

A record of the original documents was first printed in Robert Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials , published in 1831–33. Geillis Duncan appears in the transcript of Agnes Sampson’s trial, on 27 January 1591, where Item 50 states: ‘ They danceit along the kirk-yard, Gelie Duncan playit to them on a trump, John

8 David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, Edited from the Original Manuscript Preserved in the British Museum by the Rev. Thomas Thomson , 8 vols. (Edinburgh: Woodrow Society, 1842–49), V. 118.

9 George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered , (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969),pp. 24–25.

10 John G. Dalyell, Musical Memoirs of Scotland , (Edinburgh: ! Thomas G. Stevenson, 1849), p. 182.

1 1 Hugo Arnot, A Collection and Abridgement of Celebrated Criminal Trials in Scotland, from A.D. 1536 to 1784 (Edinburgh: W. Smellie for the author, 1785), p. 349 .

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Fian,misselled,led all the rest . 12 ’ A second reference occurs in the trial of Barbara Napier’s assizers (i.e. jurymen) on 7 June 1591 for ‘Wilful Error’ in finding Napier not guilty at her original trial: ‘ And siclike the said Barbara was accused that she gave her bodily presence upon Allhallow Even last was, 1590 years, to the frequent convention held at the kirk of North Berwick, where she danced endlong the kirkyard, and Gelie Duncan played on a trump. John Fian, miselled, led the ring . 13 ’ Napier was found guilty the second time and executed, while the jury was forgiven by the king personally for their original decision.

Subsequent historians, though sometimes translating the trump as a pipe, trumpet, or other instrument, add little to the debate 14 . A recent publication, however, contains a transcript of Agnes Sampson’s confession of 4–5 December 1590, in which Sampson confessed to having ‘ passed there [i.e. North Berwick kirk] on horse back convoyed by [ ] Couper and lighted at the kirk yard. Gilli [ ] hem on the trump. John Fian led all the rest 15 .’ This gives us a reasonably accurate idea of the date at which Geillis Duncan would have performed before the king. The dance itself represented the crossing of the barrier between the natural and supernatural worlds 16 . According to Summers, during a typical dance, music was provided by ‘ Those of the witches who had any skill … and 12 Robert Pitcairn, Criminal Trials and Other

Proceedings before the High Court of Justiciary , Bannatyne Club Publications, 42, Maitland Club Publications, 19, 3 vols (Edinburgh: printed for the Maitland Club, 1831–33), II, 239.

13 Pitcairn, II, 245–46. 14 Of anecdotal value are two paperback novels : The

Witches , by Jay Williams (1958); a play, The Burning , by S. Coom (1973); and a poem , ‘Martyrology’ , by Mina Kennedy, published in The Blue Penny Quarterly (1990). None add anything of particular interest.

15 Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland , p. 147 (the square brackets indicate indecipherable writing, but there is sufficient information here to establish the use of the Jew’s harp).

16 Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, ‘Circling as an Entrance to the Otherworld’, Folklore, 96 (1985), 3–20 (p. 9).

very often they obliged the company awhile with favourite airs of a vulgar kind, but the concert ended in the most hideous discords and bestial clamour; the laws of harmony and of decency were alike rudely violated 17 ’

. There is conflicting evidence as to what tune Geillis Duncan might have played. George Black in 1938 was the first to come up with a title for the piece, in his A Calendar of Cases of Witchcraft : ‘ She [Agnes Sampson] confessed that at the great witch gathering on All-Hallow-even Geillis Duncan played the dance-tune “Gyllatripes” on the Jews’-harp. This confession so pleased King James VI that he sent for Geillis to play the tune before him, which she did “to his great pleasure and amazement” 18 . ’ Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan repeat this suggestion in their Scottish Fairy Belief and give other references to the tune: [Isobel Gowdie] told her inquisitors that a woman, Jean Martin, named ‘ Maiden ’ by the Devil, was so called because the ‘ Divill always takis the Maiden in his hand nixhim, quhan we daunce Gillatrypes ’. This piece, ‘Gillatrypes’, was the same as that played by Gellie Duncan when she led the diabolical procession into North Berwick kirk in 1589. King James, ‘ in a wonderous admiration… in respect of the strangeness of their matters’ , was so fascinated that he had her play it for him. Four years later three women from Elgin ‘ confessir thame to bein ane dance callit gillatrype singing a foull hieland sang ’ 19 . Although Black, and Henderson and Cowan, suggest that Pitcairn refers to ‘Gillatrypes’, I have not to date found such a reference. I have been unable to identify a tune called ‘Gillatrypes’; though one might speculate, on the basis of the similarity between the first two syllables of ‘Gillatrypes’ and the name ‘Geillis’ (Duncan), as to whether

17 Summers, p. 142. 18 George Black, A Calendar of Cases of Witchcraft in

Scotland 1510–1727 (New York: New York Public Library, 1938), p. 24.

19 Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History ( East Linton: Tuckwell, 2001), p. 134

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the notorious events at North Berwick gave rise to a popular tune of that name. Julian Goodare, Director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563–1736, observes that there is no way of knowing for certain whether ‘Gillatrypes’ was basically a tune for dancing, or a set of movements with a musical accompaniment, and that the Elgin source (quoted by Henderson and Cowan) suggests the latter 20 . On the other hand, Henry George Farmer, in his 1947 A History of Music in Scotland , asserted that we have no idea what Geillis Duncan played, though he did make the following suggestion 21 :

We read of the reel at the extraordinary trial of witches (1591) with which James VI was acquainted. Here it was averted ‘Geillis Duncan did go before them playing a reill’. Its character may be seen in ‘To dance about the Biullzeis dub’ in the Skete M.S. (c.1615–35) [Figure 3], and ‘The Bony Brow’ and ‘New Hilland Ladie’ in the Leydon M.S. although none is called a reel there.

As for the song that Geil lis Dun can alleg edly acco mpa nied , Kari ne Polw art, vice -con veno r of the Trad ition al Mus ic of Scot land Asso ciati on, offe rs the follo wing :

20 Personal communication, 7 November 2006. 21 Hen ry Geo rge Farm er, A Hist ory of Mus ic in Scot land

(Lon don: Hinr ichs en Edit ion, 1947 ), p. 148.

The Wit ches Ree l’ Cummer, go ye before, cummer, go ye, If ye willna go before, cummer, let me. Ring-a-ring-a-w iddershins, Linkin’, lithely widdershins. Cummer, carlin, crone and quenn, Roun’ go we. Cummer, go ye before, cummer, go ye . if ye willna go before, cummer, let me. Ring-a-ring-a-w iddershins Loupin’, lightly widdershins, Kilted coats and fleein’ hair Three times three,Cummer, go ye before, cummer, go ye . if ye willna go before, cummer, let me. Ring-a-ring-a-w iddershins, Whirlin’, skirlin’ widdershins De’il tak’ the hindmost, Wha ‘er she be

An idea of the instrument that she might have played comes from a find at Fast Castle, Berwickshire (Figure 4), designated as type ‘Kransen’ by Gjermund Kolltveit from Norway in his new classification system for Jew’s harps (Figure 5) 22 . Graeme Lawson describes the Fast Castle instrument thus: A small two-pronged penannular loop of iron from Period III-IV confirms the existence on site of that most popular of our ancient musical instruments, the jew’s harp or trump … X- radiography of Fe concretion, reveals the characteristic shape of the frame of a small jew’s harp. It is of a well attested late medieval/post-medieval form: the jaws and loop are of probably diamond cross-section, the loop medium to large and the jaws set

22 Gjermund Kolltveit has identified twenty-one types for Jew’s harp finds in Europe, of which sixteen have been found in the UK. For furth er info rma tion , see his Jew ’s Har ps in Euro pean Arch aeol ogy, BA R Inte rnat iona l Seri es, 1500 (Ox ford : Arch aeop ress , 2006 ).

Figure 4 To dance about the Biullzeis dub’, from William Dauney, Ancient Scotish Melodies (1838).

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slightly apart to accommodate the vibrating tongue or stang… The date of deposition, in the late 16th to early 17th century, lies well within the established date-range for western European examples in general and British finds in particular 23 . Coincidentally, according to Roy Pugh, Francis Bothwell was a frequent visitor to Fast Castle, although there is no suggestion that the instrument is related to the events at North Berwick 24 .

As for the cost of the instrument, the inventory of goods of a deceased chapman from Lothian, which appears in the Haddington Sheriff Court Book for 18 March 1619, includes: ‘ITem

23 Graeme Lawson, ‘5.11 Musical Relics’, in Keith L. Mitchell, K. Robin Murdock, and John R. Ward, Fast Castle Excavations 1971–86 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Archaeological Field Society, 2001), p. 114.

24 Roy J. M. Pugh, Th e Deil’s Ain (Balerno: Harlow Heritage, 2001), p. 19

thretteine trumpis pryce yairof ij ss ij d’, or 2d. per instrument . There are a number of extant images of pedlars 25 selling Jew’s harps, and while these are all from the Continent, it seems plausible that Jew’s harps were also stock-in- trade items for peddlers in Britain. One final and very important point is that Newes from Scotland describes the instrument as a ‘ Trump, called a Iewes Trump’ , which, when combined with references in the Customs Account of 1481 to ‘ Jue harpes’ and ‘ Jue trumpes’ 26 , provides a crucial link in Jew’s harp etymology. From these two documents come the three names by which the instrument was known at the time – Trump, Jew’s trump, and Jew’s harp – allowing us to state with some confidence that other literary references refer to the same instrument 27 .

Postscript Agnes Sampson was executed on 28 January 1591, and Geillis Duncan, along with another young girl, Bessie Tompson, on 4 December 1591, at Castle Hill, Edinburgh. They were ‘worried’ – or strangled – before their bodies were burnt.

Donald McIlmichall, 1677

Background Linking Geillis Duncan and Donald McIlmichall are a series of witch-hunts in Scotland. Throughout this period, witchcraft was seen as the ultimate in social deviance, representing disorder, chaos, and evil. Five peaks of intensive witch-hunting occurred between 1590 and 1662, with the North Berwick conspiracy in particular having a profound effect on James VI. His own unnerving experiences as the target of the biggest witch conspiracy ever to hit Scotland 25 Roy J. M. Pugh, Th e Deil’s Ain (Balerno: Harlow

Heritage, 2001), p. 19 26 Wright, ‘Jue Harpes Jue Trumpes’. 27 The more popular etymologies, ‘Jaws harp’ and the

American ‘juice harp’, are first mentioned in the mid-eighteenth century. For further reading, see Henderson and Cowan.

Figure 5 Fast Castle find Drawing courtesy of Marion O’Neill and the Fast Castle Excavation Report 1971–86 (Edinburgh Archaeological Field Society)

Figure 6 Jew’s harp frame, type ‘Odiham’

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resulted in the publication in 1597 of Daemonologie, a tract that was to have influence throughout the seventeenth century 28 . While focusing mainly upon witchcraft, James also looked at the broader issues of the supernatural, such as brownies and fairies. He had pity for believers but recommended no mercy be shown to anyone promoting the powers of such supernatural beings. This reflected a growing desire on the part of the authorities to clamp down on any activity that could be translated as the Devil’s work. Any confessed association with fairies or evil spirits suggested witchcraft, and Donald McIlmichall fell victim to the process.

According to Montague Summers, this attitude towards fairies was a peculiarly Scottish one: Even the realm of Faerie, whose denizens were thought of elsewhere as bright spirits friendly to mankind, lovely, gay, bounteous of goodly gifts, in Scotland becomes the court of Elfame, a fearful country ruled over by the Devil, who is actually spoken of as a fairy-man, inhabited by malignant fiends, where the revels of elves and pretty pixies dancing their graceful rounds in the silvery moonlight, are a foul Sabbat of demons, hideous carlines and their dark familiar s 29 .

The attitude towards fairies among the general populace is believed to have been one of ambivalence, of neither altogether believing nor disbelieving, a half-belief that reflected the nature of the fairies themselves: ‘ Fairies both are and are not, being encountered on the boundaries, either in space – between town and wilderness – or in time – at midday, at midnight, at the change of the year, on the eve of a feast, on Halloween or May Eve, in a 28 For further reading, see Henderson and Cowan. 29 Summers, p. 201.

festive space marked out from normal life, like Yule . 30 ’

Nevertheless, by the sixteenth century fairy beliefs had become subject to a gradual process of demonization. From the fourteenth century onwards, spirits had been classified as either angelic or demonic, and the activities of witches and witchcraft rapidly became associated with the latter category. Fairies belonged to neither class, but this was a situation that gave cause for suspicion and apprehension for officials keen to eradicate pagan beliefs that might compete with Christian orthodoxy. By the seventeenth century a logic was being applied that inferred that, since fairies, elves, brownies, water- sprites, forest and woodland folk were certainly not angelic, therefore they must be demonic.

They began to be associated with aspects of witchcraft such as invisibility and shape- shifting, and with activities such as the taking of foodstuffs, stealing or exchanging of children, riding or injuring of horses and cattle, shooting elf-bolts, meeting at May Eve, Midsummer Eve, or Halloween, travelling through the air, dancing and feasting at night, and creating circles or rings in fields. Once witches and fairies had come to be classified together, any human relationship with fairies could lead to prosecution.

30 Diane Purkiss, ‘Sounds of Silence: Fairies and Incest in Scottish Witchcraft Stories’, in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture , ed. by Stuart Clark (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 83. It is interesting to observe that this ambivalence extends to the Jew’s harp itself, which is a musical instrument and yet, to many, not a musical instrument at all – an issue that is reflected both in historical references and in attitudes towards the Jew’s harp today.

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The Accused The events that resulted in the trial of Donald McIlmichall, a vagabond of no known residence, occurred at the end of 1676 and in early 1677, during the reign of King Charles II. They took place within a radius of some twenty miles of Oban, particularly around Lorn and Appin in Argyll. The original reason for his arrest and trial at Inveraray, which began on 27 October 1677, was that on 29 September 1677 he had conspired with Donald dow McGregour to steal a cow while at the Michaelmas Fair at Kilmichael. There, it was alleged, the two had agreed to steal something ‘ worth ther paynes 31 ; and they had then taken the cow from a certain John McIlvery of Dalalich, situated on the west side of Loch Awe, on the night of 4 October 1677. Donald McIlmichall’s defence was that he and two others had bought the cow from McGregour with the intention of collecting a reward for its safe return to the original owner. A system known as ‘tascal’ or ‘taskal’ provided for recompense should anyone find cattle that had been driven off, though it was also necessary to inform on the culprits. McIlmichall pointed the finger at other known common thieves.

This charge was serious enough, but yet another was added at the continuation of the trial on 15 November. Some time in the intervening eighteen days it had come to the notice of the justice, John Campbell of Moy, that McIlmichall had been consorting with evil spirits. McIlmichall, under interrogation, confessed to a series of meetings that took place in and around Appin from November 1676 to February 1677, at some of which he played Jew’s harps. On Sunday, 20 November 1676 he had been travelling from Ardtur, about a mile north of Port Appin, south to Glackriska, on Loch Crenan opposite the island of Eriska. Somewhere (and he claimed that he had become lost) he had seen candle 31 Highland Papers , ed. by J. R. N. Macphail,

Publications of the Scottish History Society, 2nd series, vols 5, 12, 20, 3rd series, vol. 22, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1914–34), III, 37.

lights on a hill and a large number of men and women dancing. He was spotted by the participants, and there was a discussion among them as to whether they should invite him in, after which the leader, who appeared to be a large, ruddy-faced, old man, dressed as a corporal guardsman, asked McIlmichall to come back on the following Sunday. The defendant confessed that he ‘judges them not to have bein wordlie men or men ordayned of god, and that they enquyred if he wes baptized and that he said he wes’ 32 .

In spite of the leader having told McIlmichall he must keep their meetings secret, he confided in a certain Robert Buchanan, and he was punished for this by the distinctly unimpressed fairies, who gave him a beating. Nevertheless, he continued to meet with the dancers on a number of other occasions up until 2 February 1677. The meetings always took place on Sundays, sometimes on the island of Lismore or at a well-known fairy mound, the Shian of Barcaldine, on the south side of Loch Crenan, where, while the others danced, ‘ he played on trumps’ 33 . This implies that he played more than one Jew’s harp. Playing two Jew’s harps, one in each hand, is a known technique, practised by skilled players, particularly in Austria today and in Ireland in the recent past.

Sources The information regarding Donald McIlmichall comes from a single source, the Highland Papers . At the continuation of his trial he was asked:

4˚. Interrogat if he mett with them in other places Answers that he mett them in Leismore and at the Shian of Barcalden and still saw the old man that seemed to be cheif being ane large tall corporal Gardman and ruddie and he was engadgeit to conceal them and no to tell other. Bot that he told it to the forsaid

32 Highland Papers , III, 37.

33 Highland Papers , III, 38.

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Robert Buchanan once fer which he was reproved and stricken be them in the cheik and other pairts, and that he mett them still on ilk Sabaths nights and that he playd on trumps to them quhen they danced 34 . I have only come across three further references to McIlmichall. Canon J. A. MacCulloch in a paper on ‘The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Scotland’, first read before the Anthropological Section of the British Association in September 1921, wrote, ‘Donald MacMichael, told how he had entered a fairy hill, where dancing was going on … One of the fairy women engaged Donald to return eight nights after. He obeyed and was in the hill for a month, playing the “trumps” while the fairies danced. 35 ’ Henderson and Cowan state: ‘On Donald McIllmichall’s first sighting he saw them dancing by candlelight. On subsequent visits he ‘playd on trumps to

34 Highland Papers , III, 37–38. 35 Canon J. A. MacCulloch, The Mingling of Fairy and

Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Scotland’, Folklore , 32 (1921), 227–44 (p. 238).

them quhen they danced’ 36

. I. F. Grant in Highland Folk Ways quotes from the original source, but goes on to say, ‘I have heard that a trump, being of metal, had been considered a safe thing to play on entering a fairy mound . 37 ’

Two finds of Jew’s harps have been made at Achandun Castle, on the island of Lisemore. These have been identified by the (now- retired) archaeologist Denis Turner as type ‘Odiham’ (Figure 6), a type that can be traced back to the fourteenth century. The originals are (re)buried in the archive of the Museum of Scotland. Typical instruments from the Scotland of Donald McIlmichall’s time can be conjectured from a seventeenth-century instrument found in East Lothian and designated as type ‘Damme’ (Figure 7). As in the case of Geillis Duncan, chapmen would seem most likely to have been the source of the Jew’s harps.

There is no mention anywhere of the tunes that McIlmichall played, but a period piece from the seventeenth century which is associated with witchcraft is ‘Kilt thy Coat, Maggie’ (Figure 8) 38 .

Postscript In view of his confessions, the jury had no hesitation in finding Donald McIlmichall guilty of the theft of the cow and of consorting with evil spirits. He was executed on Monday, 19 November 1677.

Summary According to Julian Goodare of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft at Edinburgh

36 Henderson and Cowan, p. 62. 37 I. F. Grant, Highland Folk Ways (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 135; and see Ellen Ettlinger, review of Highland Folk Ways , Folklore , 72 (1961), 421

38 See William Dauney, Ancient Scotish Melodies from a Manuscript of the Reign of King James VI, with an Introductory Enquiry Illustrative of the History of the Music of Scotland , Bannatyne Club Publications, 59, Maitland Club Publications, 43 (Edinburgh: printed for the Maitland Club, 1838), p. 220.

Figure 7 Jew’s harp frame, type ‘Odiham’

Figure 8 Jew’s harp frame, type ‘Damme’ Drawings courtesy of Ann-Turi Ford

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University, there are so many incredible elements to the account that it looks like the invention of people under torture 39 . King James is said to have requested that Geillis Duncan perform for him, but this may have been due to the strangeness of the circumstances and the novelty of the performance rather than because of any particular talent on her part. that she was able to do perform, given the torture she had endured on her fingers in particular, is quite remarkable. The only proof that such an event took place at all comes from the Newes from Scotland chapbook, which would now be considered unreliable evidence – nevertheless, why mention the Jew’s harp at all?

The evidence for Donald McIlmichall’s ability is limited to the comment that he played Jew’s harps, with no indication of his skill. One interesting side issue relates to the link between iron, the Jew’s harp, and the fairies. In Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland by John Gregorson Campbell, minister of Tiree, is the following passage: The great protection against the Elfin race (and this is perhaps the most noticeable point in the whole Superstition) is Iron, or preferably steel (cruaidh) … The metal in any form – a sword, a knife, a pair of scissors, a needle, a nail … a fish hook – is all powerful. Playing the Jew’s harp (tromb) kept the Elfin women at a distance from the hunter, because the tongue of the instrument is of steel. So also a

39 See Sarah Roe, ‘North Berwick and the Brew of Tortured Witches, Scotsman , 27 October 2005 < http://heritage.scotsman.com/myths.cfm ?id= 2149692005&/>[accessed 8 January 2007].

shoemaker’s awl in the door-post of his bothy kept a Glastig from entering 40 .

A traditional tale from Lochaber, which has a hunter keeping a glastig (or glaistig , a supernatural creature, part-woman, part-goat) at bay by playing a Jew’s harp, has the following rhyme:

Good is the music of the trump, Saving the one note in its train. Its owner likes it in his mouth In preference to any maid 41 .

40 John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Collected Entirely from Oral Sources (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1900), pp. 46–47.

41 The Revd George B. D. Calder, Folk Tales and Fairy Lore in Gaelic and English (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), p. 75.

Figure 8 ‘Kilt thy Coat, Maggie’, from William Dauney, Ancient Scotish Melodies (1838)

(To be continued)

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Protesting From The Margins: Jews Harps and Human Rights in Southern Africa

Angela Impey Lecturer in Ethnomusicology

Department of Music, SOAS

Nowhere, it could be argued, has the force of music to communicate and persuade been played out more vigorously than in South Africa during apartheid. During its last, and most rigorous years, when most forms of oppositional oratory was prohibited by an assiduous government intelligence apparatus, the public found expression in the bare bones of a rhythm, seemingly stripped and innocuous, yet intoxicating in its mass appeal. This rhythm, known as toyi-toyi, dug deep into the energy of resistance politics, raising fists of defiance and mobilizing millions into collective action 1 .

Yet while toyi toyi may have carried the force of protest in the cities and townships across South Africa in the 80s and early 90s, there were many who were too remote from the urban centres to feel part of the action. They, like most black South Africans, had been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, had suffered the consequences of social fragmentation brought about by poverty, and had been undermined at every level by a government that vehemently refused to consent to their civil liberties.

Marginalisation, particularly for those who

A fuller version of this paper can be read in a chapter entitled 'Songs of the In-Between: Remembering in the Land that Memory Forgot' in Popular Music and Human Rights, Volume II: World Music (ed). Ian Peddie (Ashgate Press, forthcoming)

Photo: Mduduzi Mcambi

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who inhabited the interstitial spaces on state boundaries, meant that their protestations fell off the edges of the mass movement, and today their experiences, stories and songs remain unrepresented in South Africa’s anti-apartheid history.

A brief background The jews harp was played widely by Nguni women in southern Africa until the 1970s 2 . Having been introduced to the region in the early 1800s by European traders and travellers, they had joined a stable of traditional mouth instruments played by young women to accompany walking. The instrument – known locally as isitolotolo or isitweletwele – was generally played solo, or as a solo part, to which girlfriends would respond with a sung chorus in a cyclical, antiphonal format. As Nguni languages are pitched, melodies were modelled on the tonal inflections of a spoken phrase; their meanings clearly discernable to local speakers and thus referred to as ‘songs’.

Most players will use a back-to-forward

striking technique, and because they tended to play cheap commercial instruments that were pitched reasonably high, they were not able to exploit a large range of harmonic overtones. Examples 1 and 2 below 3 illustrate two basic motifs played on the jews harp (isitweletwele ) in my area of research. The melody line represents the harmonics that are isolated from the fundamental note by the careful manipulation of the mouth cavity. The notes indicated below the melody line represent the fundamental note, which operates as a drone throughout. These songs are cyclical, and once the basic phrase is established, the performer will begin to explore more elaborate possibilities with harmonics, thus establishing a complex polyphonic relationship between fundamental melody and its overtones. The D given in the bass clef is not the fundamental, but the first sounding harmonic of the F fundamental.

I have been working with elderly jews harp players in the borderlands of north-eastern South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique for

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Mozambique for the past six years. My work has focused on the recovery of the jews harp repertoire with women who last played the instrument some 30-40 years ago. Their decline in this region was due partly to the introduction of radios and cassette players, which the men brought back from seasonal work conducted on the gold mines in Johannesburg. Labour migration to the cities had become necessary following the forced removal of the communities from their ancestral lands in the 1940s and 50s, which had been undertaken to make way for the establishment of a large game reserve 4 . This resulted in the dramatic loss of agricultural land and resources, and rendered the communities exceptionally poor.

With the establishment of the game reserve, so the area became interlaced with fences that encapsulated the flood-plains and mountains with borders and boundaries, cutting across the everyday movements of women to their fields and water sources, and severing links with their families in neighbouring countries. The jews harp has been played ostensibly to accompany walking vast distances, their repetitive rhythms and cyclical melodies used to provide impetus to movement; concealing any pain they may have felt in their feet and legs. However, with the loss of the spatial context for the songs, so the instruments slowly began to lose their cultural moorings, and by the mid-1970s, they disappeared altogether.

Following the removal from their lands, life became increasing difficult for the borderland communities, and for women in particular. Having to endure long periods without their men, women had to carry the burden of responsibility for their families by farming new lands, and by taking on odd jobs to generate cash. Many began selling home- brewed beer, but as this was deemed illegal, they became increasingly targeted by the border police, who not only carried out frequent raids on their homesteads and fields,

but also set up a menacing system to monitor their everyday activities and movements.

Jews Harps and Human Rights Having collected a repertoire of more than 150 jews harp songs, I have been astonished at how many of them depict a life of fear, anxiety and extreme vigilance. From songs that had previously been associated with frivolous girlish meanderings, their role as instruments of protest and mobilization become clear in the songs that were composed during the late 1950s and 60s 5 . Yet by contrast with toyi toyi, which was later used to amass thousands of protesters on the city streets, the protestations manifest in jews harp songs carried meaning through their practice in the everyday, providing a reflection on the immediate, visceral experiences of women in response to increasing poverty and political repression, and offering consolation – however fleeting - through the collective performance of non- cooperation.

One of the most poignant in this body of jews harp pieces is a song that makes direct reference to the removal of people from their homes in what is now Ndumo Game Reserve. This song lies at the core of peoples’ bitterness about land dispossession and loss of rights. It is a simple song; its simplicity alluding to the panic experienced by the arrival of the vehicles of the parks authorities:

Balekani nonke (run away everyone) Kukhona okuzayo (‘something’ is coming) Gijimani nonke (run away everyone) Kukhona ukuzayo (‘something’ is coming)

MaFambile explains: We were running away from the white man from KwaNyamazane (the place of antelopes/ wild animals) called Umthanathana 6 . We were not removed at once. My father had two homesteads. They started by moving the cattle to this side. Then we moved to another homestead. Others were left on that side. They were later arrested and forced out. They were

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arrested if they were found with an antelope. If they were found fishing in the river, they would arrest you. You couldn’t eat your fish freely. They chased everyone then; they said they didn’t need them there. They chased us from our land. We’re now suffering from hunger. We don’t eat anything and we don’t have any water. Our cabbages are getting dry. We were drinking from the big river they called Banzi. Today, that’s where they built a hotel for the tourists 7 .

Angela: Did anyone try to resist the game reserve authorities? Fambile: No, they just took their belongings and ran. Even today we miss that place! There we were free to go to Mozambique to visit our relatives. Now we can’t do that. If we go back, we are arrested. We have graves there but we have no access to them to talk to our ancestors. We remember the places where we lived and used to meet to dance 8 .

Following their removal from the game reserve, jews harp songs increasingly describe a life of regulation and police control. Some of the songs expressed these experiences indirectly:

Emsebenzini kukhala ingolovane [The bell/ siren (of the train) is calling us to work] 9

This song refers to the train that would take the men to the gold mines in Johannesburg. It was unlikely that the women would have seen or heard trains as the men would be transported long distances by bus to the train stations in Siteki in Swaziland or Pongola in South Africa, and few women ever travelled to these towns. MaMkete, the composer of this song, explained it thus:

Once I saw a train when I was coming from Pongola where I had been in prison. I was arrested for brewing alcohol and sent to jail for 3 months. I was young and strong then, not like now, but still, ‘singing’ it helped to soothe my heart.

Other songs were more specific:

Iveni liyalandela (the van is fetching (following) us)

MaSiphiwe explains:

This song says that I’m running away from the police van. The van is inspecting the homesteads to find out whether the women are making alcohol from sugarcane 10 .

The following example describes the constant examination by the police of women’s identity documents, a draconian system established in the 1950s to monitor the movements of all black South Africans:

Naliveni Bakithi naliveni (there is the van, my people, there is the van) Naliveni Bafana naliveni ( there is the van, boys, there is the van) Balekani Bafana naliveni (run boys, there is the van) Lizonibopha ( they will arrest you/tie you up )

MaFambile explains the song:

From Ndlaleni’s house we walked all the way from Makanyisa, playing isitweletwele (jews harp). That’s what we were doing when we were going to ‘eat sugar’ (to buy sugar at the trading stores). And we were singing “iveni” because the police were giving us problems. They wanted us to pay for ‘dompas’ 1 1 . We remember that song well. That is why we still sing it 12 .

Many of the songs recount actual incidences with the police and have subsequently found their way into a common repertoire. With the passing of time, their original references may have become obscured, as is the case with the following song, which alludes to an incident where a policeman appeared to have come off second best as a result of his activities:

Solo: Mabopha’ ubopha abanye (The one who

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arrests others) Chorus: Uyeheni mayebab shii ! (Statement of shock) Solo: Uzwile ulayezile (You got a taste of your own medicine [literally ‘you learned from painful experience] Chorus: Uyeheni mayebaboshii! (Statement of shock) Solo: Isandla sengwenya (The hand of the crocodile) 13 Chorus: Uzwile ulayezile (You got a taste of your own medicine) 14

In the following, more sinister song, people celebrate the death of a policeman who may have been attempting to extract money from people for yet another apparent violation of the law:

Uyadela Babo (you are happy, oh yes) Babulal’iphoyisa (they killed a policeman) Ngoba imali bayifaka ebhokisini (they put the money in the box) Babulala iphoyisa (they killed a policeman) Imali bayefaka ebhokisini (put the money in a box) 15

Some songs represent actual defiance and outward protest.

Baleka mfana lashona ilanga (Run boy, the sun is setting) Gijima mfana (Run boy) Awekho amanzi (There is no water) Awekho amanzi, asemfuleni (There is no water; it is in the river) 16

This song uses natural imagery to motivate a

particular political scenario. In it, the setting sun alludes to the rights of the local community that are gradually being corroded by the apartheid system, and while there appears to be no recourse to justice (i.e. no water in the house), there may well be possibilities to reclaim these rights (i.e. there is water in the river) on condition that people have the courage to demand them. Such an overtly political song appears to have been amongst the last to be composed before the jews harp stopped being played.

Conclusion In this paper, I have explored the notion of protest at the margins as resounded in jews harp songs made popular at the local level. I have argued that these songs provide an equally dense ethnographic register of human rights violations in apartheid South Africa as did those that were rallied to by the thousands on the city streets to the accompaniment of the iconic ‘ toyi toyi ’ rhythm. Yet while no less compelling in their appeal for economic, social, cultural and political rights, their physical and political marginality has meant that they have remained unrepresented in South African “struggle” memory. Drawing on the notion that jew harp songs provided highly situated, historical evidence of women’s experiences in particular, this paper seeks a place in a growing body of local and particularist histories in post-apartheid South Africa where issues of memory and identity have become pivotal to the reconstitution of political discourse and practice in the region.

1 The derivation of the word ‘toyi-toyi’ is much debated. Meaning 'to move forward while remaining in one place', it describes the physical exercises used by Zimbabwean combatants during their war of Independence in the 1970s. It was subsequently adopted by young black South Africans who crossed the border into Zimbabwe to receive military training in the early 1980s, and was later introduced by them as a form of popular street protest in Soweto and elsewhere in South Africa.

2 Nguni refers to a linguistic cluster broadly comprising Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa and Shangane/Tsonga-speaking people. In my area of research, people speak 3 languages: Zulu, Swazi and Thembe-Thonga (related to Shangane-Tsonga).

3 See Impey, A. ‘Sounding Place in the Western Maputaland Borderlands’ in Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa , vol. 3, 2006 (55-79)

4 The area was declared a protected zone in the 1920s but communities only began to be removed from the reserve in

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the1940s. The final removals were conducted in the late 1960s. 5 I have been able to date the songs by their association to the women players with whom I have been working. As

these women are all in their mid-50s and over (the oldest is in her 80s), some songs were inherited from their mothers and grandmothers, dating them back some 100 years. Those songs composed by the women themselves date them to the 1960s and 70s; this is confirmed by the political themes of the songs, which clearly link them to the politics of the era.

6 Umthanathana, which literally means ‘the one who speaks contemptuously and we shut our ears’, was the name given to the official responsible for the removal of the communities from the game reserve.

7 A tourist brochure advertises this area thus: “ Ndumo Wilderness Camp: Proclaimed in the 1920s, Ndumo Game Reserve, (formerly known as Ndumu), is one of South Africa's oldest and most scenic parks. It is situated in northern Natal and just south of the Moçambique border. The Nyamithi and Banzi Pans, which are surrounded by beautiful yellow Fever Trees, are the focal points in the reserve. These pans are on the Pongola and Usutu floodplains and attract wildlife in large numbers. The Ndumo Reserve is not well known, even to many South Africans, as accommodation has previously been limited. Now, Ndumo Wilderness Camp has been built on the edge of Banzi Pan. The view from the camp's deck over the Banzi Pan is one of the most extraordinarily scenic of any camp in Southern Africa .” http://www.eyesonaf rica.net/south-afr ican-safari/ndumo.ht m [accessed 10/11/08]

8 Interview with Mrs. Fambile Khumalo, 1.9.03/Eziphosheni 9 Song by Mrs. Makete Nkomonde. Recorded 18.11.03/Usuthu Gorge 10 Song by Mrs. Siphiwe Cele, recorded 31.8.03/Eziphosheni 1 1 ‘Dompas’ refers to the identity document that had to be carried by all black South Africans during apartheid, which

was used as a form of social control to monitor employment status and movements. If caught without the document, people were fined and often also sent to prison.

12 Song by Mrs. Fambile Khumalo, recorded 5: 1.9.03/Eziphosheni. 13 The crocodile is frequently used as a figure of danger and foreboding in Zulu and Swazi poetry. 14 Recorded on 28.8.03/Usuthu women. 15 Recorded on 27.8.03/Usuthu women 16 Sung by Mrs. Mkhize on 3.9.03/Eziphosheni.

BA LIN ES E GE NG GO NG : CU LT UR E, TH EO RY AN D TE CH NIQ UE

Deirdre Morgan

The following article has been adapted from my Master’s thesis, “Organs and bodies: The Jew’s harp and the anthropology of musical instruments” (University of British Columbia, 2008). The full thesis and its accompanying bibliography can be downloaded at this link: https:// circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/1559 . Additional Jew’s harp writing, audio/video and photos can be found on my website at www.overtonearts.com .

In tr od uc ti on The Jew’s harp is unique among instruments, and in its apparent simplicity it is deceptive. It has been adapted to a wide array of cultural contexts worldwide and a diverse range of playing techniques, which, upon closer examination, reveal much about the cultures that generate them. Drawing on perspectives from organology, ethnomusicology, comparative musicology, ethnography, material culture, and the anthropology of the

body, I examine the Jew’s harp on three levels: physically (the interaction between the human body and the body of the instrument), culturally (the contexts in which it is used), and musically (the way it is played and conceptualized as a musical instrument). Using the Balinese Jew’s harp genggong as a case study, I demonstrate how the study of musical instruments is an untapped reservoir of information that can enhance our understanding of the human relationship with

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sound. Although the music of Bali has been studied at length, the genggong remains virtually unknown to scholars, both in Bali and abroad. One of the most fascinating things about the Jew’s harp is the way that this tiny instrument adapts itself to the musical structures of the many different cultures in which it is found. In the case of the genggong, I look at the complex phenomenon of the instrument’s adaptation to the cultural-musical aesthetic of Bali, how it is used to reflect quintessentially Balinese concepts of tuning, scale, and interlocking rhythmic figurations.

PA RT I : A CU LT UR AL BI OG RA PH Y

John Wright, a well-known Jew’s harp player, once said of the instrument: “An enormous amount of information is hidden within [its] very simplicity” (J. Wright 1972:59). Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the Jew’s harp is the deceptiveness of this simplicity, and much can be revealed by tracing the social and historical trajectory of a single Jew’s harp tradition. Using the conceptual tool of the “cultural biography of things” (Kopytoff 1986), this chapter biographizes the Balinese genggong, charting the instrument’s development, circulation, and contextualization in Bali. By asking where it comes from, who makes it and how, and identifying the recognized periods in its life thus far, this section illustrates how its use and valuation have changed over time (ibid.: 66- 67). Bali is an island in the Indonesian archipelago well-known for its rich cultural heritage. Soon after I began studying and playing Balinese gamelan music in Vancouver, I was bitten by the gamelan bug. Aware that Bali had a unique Jew’s harp playing tradition about which very little had been written, I decided to combine a visit to the island with an investigation into the Balinese genggong. At first, my focus was on playing technique, or

more accurately, getting the notoriously finicky genggong to emit any sound whatsoever. However, as lessons and interviews progressed, I became increasingly aware of complex social dynamics and ideological forces underlying the ways in which the instrument was played. Realizing that the history and social dynamics of genggong playing were inseparable from the playing itself, I began assembling the varied and often conflicting stories told in both written and oral sources. While the following history does not claim to be complete, it is intended to reflect the various versions of the story of genggong as faithfully as possible. Furthermore, the case study presented over the next two chapters is still in its preliminary stages, and is intended as a springboard to future research.

G en gg on g

“This diverting instrument, cut from the rib of the sugarplum leaf, is heard everywhere, strummed by children and men alike, in quiet solitude or in a companionable little group” (McPhee 1955:79).

While Colin McPhee’s 1930s era description of genggong wins points for its whimsy, it nonetheless bears pointing out that there are no sugarplums in Bali, nor is the instrument strummed. The Balinese genggong, rather, is an idioglot type Jew’s harp made from the leaf stem of the jaka sugar palm tree (see Figure 1.1). It is carved from a single rectangular piece of wood that can range in length from 14cm to over 20cm, and in width from about 1.6cm to 2cm. A piece of cloth, ribbon, string, or dried leaf is attached to the left end of the instrument for the left hand to stabilize it with. On the right end is affixed a string that is tied to a smaller piece of wood, which is grasped by the right hand and jerked crisply to the right to set the frame and the lamella into motion. The left hand’s stability counterbalances the right hand’s motion, providing the traction that allows the tongue to vibrate properly. In heteroglot metal Jew’s harps, this is accomplished by the instrument’s pressure

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Figure 1.1: Two genggong from Batuan village. Above: Outer face of instrument. Below: Inner face of instrument.

Figure 1.2: Three enggung from Batuan village. Middle instrument reversed to show underside.

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against the player’s teeth; the genggong is instead placed lightly between the player’s lips without touching the teeth. Genggong may have developed from its simpler cousin and alleged precursor, the enggung (see Figure 1.2) 1 . On the Sachsian principle that the simpler form of the instrument is the oldest, it is likely that the enggung, a single free reed enclosed in a frame and activated solely by the breath, came first. Since enggung is easier to engineer, genggong may very well be the result of a morphological elaboration on an enggung-like instrument. Whatever the case, both instruments continue to be used in association with each other today 2 . Today, both genggong and enggung are made from jaka wood, and everyone, even the fiercely proud Batuan musicians, agrees that the best jaka trees grow in Karangasem. The best wood for genggong is the old wood, but the oldest jaka branches sit at the very top of the tree, beyond reasonable climbing height. The potential genggong maker has no choice but to wait until a branch gets so old that it finally dies and falls to the ground, where it can be collected and set to dry in the sun. The art of making genggong requires patience, and for every ten genggong attempted, only one good quality instrument is made.

Origins and Early Development

At first, genggong seems to have been an instrument that was played alone, by oneself. A player of the genggong would show his abilities by improvising on melodies that he knew. Genggong were played by farmers as a way of relaxing in the rice fields, and sometimes they were played at home. (Rai 1998: 36)

Genggong appears to be a very old instrument, but since it is made of wood which decomposes relatively quickly, there is very little material evidence on which to construct a chronology of the instrument’s presence in Bali. Most people agree that genggong was invented by farmers in the rice fields; practical interpretations hold that it must have been the product of idle whittling to pass the time, its form and function stumbled across by accident,

while more poetic sensibilities maintain it was inspired by the sounds of the wind, the rustling of trees in the breeze, and of course, the ubiquitous croaking frog choruses found all over the island. Whatever the case, it can be assumed that genggong was first and foremost a solo instrument, used to pass the time in contemplation and imitation of the natural sonic environs. Fischer (1986) makes a connection between musical instruments that arise out of the “pure joy of sound” and those used in courtship in Oceania: Some instruments can indeed only serve the pleasure of an individual as their sound is so quiet that it can only really be heard by the player (e.g., jaw’s harp). Particularly jaw’s harps, musical bows, panpipes, end- blown and notched flutes are all played for personal enjoyment in Oceania. It is notable that these are precisely those instruments to which love magic properties are ascribed. (156)

In Bali, according to many people’s best guess, the genggong too arose out of the pure joy of sound. It was primarily an instrument for personal pleasure, but one that could also be played in the company of others; a player could play alone, in a pair (as in the courtship context), or even in a small group of other genggong players, although it was generally not used with other types of instruments. Rai concedes that:

It was not rare for someone to play genggong with the intention of attracting the ladies, as is often done with the flute. This tradition is not just true for Bali, but also is true in many places, such as in Europe, in Laos among the Hmong people, and others. It should be mentioned that with the rapid pace of development in the world these days, the use of the genggong to attract women is more rare. (1998: 37)

Though the use of genggong in courtship has sadly fallen out of favour, I did meet one female player of the genggong, Ni Wayan Sunting. Well into her seventies, she still recalled many of the tunes that were said to be courtship songs, and played them for me with her younger brother I Ketut Naba. Many of these older genggong pieces are also found in the repertoire of the gamelan angklung , a four- tone metallophone ensemble. According to

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Colin McPhee, the compositions in the angklung repertoire are “said to have their origin in the simple folk tunes known as the gending genggong ” (1966: 255). However, it is not clear which came first, as many people say that both the repertoire and tuning of genggong were derived from angklung. The connection between genggong and angklung will be expanded upon in Part II of this article. Genggong is primarily a secular entertainment; despite reports of genggong being used during marriage and tooth-filing ceremonies, its presence at a ceremony is considered to be purely for the entertainment of the people, and not intended for the gods (Rai 1998: 40). Genggong has also been known to make appearances in other secular genres. Cakepung , an all-male social folk dance, which originated in Karangasem, begins at the banjar (community hall) with the singing of classic love songs and the imbibing of liquor. As the evening progresses and the effects of the alcohol begin to be felt, the occasion turns into a raucous song and dance party that continues well into the night. At these occasions, “One or more of the men may have a Jew’s harp ( genggong ) in his pocket; he will dance and play at the same time” (Bandem and deBoer, 1981: 111). Because of its portability and relatively quiet sound, genggong was ideal for bringing out at informal gatherings, allowing its player to demonstrate his skills on the solo instrument. Like cakepung, genggong is thought by many to have come from Karangasem, a claim which is substantiated by the presence of genggong among the Balinese communities on the neighbouring island of Lombok, which was once a vassal state of Karangasem. Seebass et. al. (1976) noted the use of genggong on Lombok, as well as a second type of Jew’s harp called selober , whose lamella was plucked directly with the finger instead of being activated by the pulling of a string, and which Seebass concluded had died out on Bali after vain attempts to find it there (45). As tends to be the case with bygone

genres, the older generation nostalgically laments the passing of the good old days, and the case of genggong is no different; when asked, musicians and taxi drivers alike seem to unanimously recall a time when “everyone used to play”. For many, genggong making and playing was a family tradition; most active players today were taught by a family member, and recall playing together either at home or in the banjar. One genggong player in his eighties said that genggong was more popular in Bali before Indonesian independence (1945), and that it has declined this century as dance has become more popular. Another genggong player agreed that while genggong is now used to accompany dance, “real genggong” is meant to be a purely instrumental ensemble. Today genggong is played primarily for tourist performances in an ensemble combined with other instruments.

G am el an G en gg on g

All solitary people tend to while away the time by song, or by making a palm-leaf or a bit of wood or a catgut string sing for them. So solitary peasants or girls in palaces amused their idleness by combining the tones of several genggongs . It is the ideal accompaniment to whispering voices, suppressed laughter, small pleasure parties in water palaces. Out of these modest beginnings has grown the genggong orchestra, which has become famous in several villages for its delicious music. (de Zoete and Spies, 1938: 250)

Creation of Gamelan Genggong Genggong, like many of the arts in Bali, underwent a massive refashioning during the tourist wave of the 1930s. Many community art forms were redesigned and staged as new performance genres. The most notable of these is the vocal ensemble kecak , or “monkey chant”, a theatrical form famously created and popularized by the Dutch painter Walter Spies in the 1930s, which continues to be a mainstay of Balinese cultural tourism today. According to I Wayan Rai, the current director of the Bali Arts Institute (ISI), genggong was not formalized into a gamelan ensemble until the twentieth century, and was actually the result of foreign influence. Rudolph Bonnet, a Dutch

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painter who lived in Ubud in the 1930s, frequently held get-togethers for his foreign friends that included performances by local musicians and dancers (Rai 1998: 37). Legend has it that Bonnet, upon hearing the sound of a single genggong, suggested that several genggong be brought together and combined with other instruments to form a group (ibid.). Thus, the first arts organization ( sekaa ) devoted to the art of genggong was formed around 1939, and called “ Genggong Catur Wangsa Budaya Ubud ” (ibid.) 3 . Prior to the formation of the Ubud group, the Canadian composer Colin McPhee had also tried to revive genggong in 1938 in the nearby village of Sayan. His intention to form a practicing children’s gamelan club in Sayan began with a suggestion to the local boys that they form a sekaa genggong (genggong club). That genggong ensembles existed before 1939, and not solely in Ubud, is substantiated elsewhere; Beryl deZoete and Walter Spies (1938) observed genggong being played in the villages of Batuan and Sanur in the 1930s. In both cases, they report that the ensemble was accompanied by dance; a solo dancer would emerge from among the seated genggong players, in pantomime of a frog character. To complicate matters further, McPhee’s description of the material taught to his boys group indicates a level of musical complexity that was not thought by many of my teachers and informants in 2007 to have emerged until after the 1960s. After only two months, however, the Sayan group disbanded; according to McPhee, “the genggong club lost interest because the teacher came from too near by and…his music was out of date” (1955:83). Today, genggong is mostly played by men as it is considered by many to be too difficult to teach to children. In Bali this is saying something, as children play other gamelan instruments to stunning levels of proficiency. Truth be told, the patience required to construct a genggong is rivalled only by the patience required to learn how to play it, and it is easy to be deterred by the instrument’s perplexing playing technique.

Genggong Revival: The Frog Dance The most famous genggong groups of the last forty years have emerged from Batuan village, a community well-known for its musicians and artists. During the 1960s, genggong underwent a surge of popularity in Batuan; many of the young men picked it up, and a banjar (community) group met regularly to practice in the home of the local priest, sometimes playing during prayers and religious ceremonies at the Pura Desa temple. In 1968, the banjar group officially became a sekaa, named “Batur Sari”. From about 1970 onwards, tourism in Bali was booming and many private performances were being commissioned from Batur Sari. It was in this climate of genggong enthusiasm that the famous dancer I Made Djimat, one of the founding members and teachers of Batur Sari, came up with the Frog Dance, a new performance context for the genggong ensemble. A storyline was added to make the ensemble more entertaining and provide it with a dramatic framework, and a new dance choreographed to enact the characters. The plot is based on the Balinese version of the Princess and the Frog folktale, which is familiar to Western audiences save for some notable twists. The titular frog begins the story as the human King of Kauripan, whose fondness for hunting dragonflies angers the god Siwa. Siwa turns the king into a frog as punishment, promising to remove the curse if the frog marries the beautiful princess of the neighbouring kingdom of Daha. Frog and princess meet and fall in love, Siwa returns to give his blessing, and they all live happily ever after 4 . In 1973, Batur Sari moved from the priest’s house to the home of Nyoman Artika, who with his two younger brothers still leads the group today. That same year, Djimat left Batur Sari to make his own genggong group, called Panti Pusaka Budaya. Since then, copycat groups have appeared all over Batuan, all doing a similar version of the Frog Dance. As of 2007, there were groups actively performing the Frog Dance in Batuan, Ubud 5 ,

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Sanur, and Budakeling (and undoubtedly others). Many of these groups were hiring Batuan genggong musicians for their performances and supplying the rest of the ensemble from local talent, indicating a current shortage of those proficient on the instrument. Writing in 1981, Bandem and deBoer noted that: “Genggong is often heard nowadays at Balinese tourist hotels, where it is used to provide a kind of pleasant background music” (112), and very little has changed in this regard. The new Ubud group, Pondok Pekak, stages their version of the Frog Dance for tourists biweekly, and groups are often hired for private parties at hotels. Every year, there is at least one genggong performance on the bill of the month-long Bali Arts Festival ( Pesta Kesenian Bali ), and genggong musicians in both Pejang and Tenganan villages are now featured in music-themed commercial tours of the island.

Instrumentation The instrumentation of gamelan genggong varies from group to group, but generally consists of instruments borrowed from other ensembles. Generally speaking, the instruments used in gamelan genggong tend to be inexpensive, and are often made from bamboo and wood rather than metal. In addition to its low cost, a mostly wood-based ensemble is quieter, and means the genggong do not have to vie for superiority volume-wise. The modern gamelan genggong usually consists of the following instruments 6 : 1) one or two suling (small flutes) that function to introduce and play the melody of the piece; 2) one small kendang (double-sided drum), taken from the arja (Balinese opera) ensemble, and played in the solo drumming style of that ensemble. Functions to carry the rhythm and give cues and accents; 3) Several genggong, (usually four to eight, but varies depending on the group), playing an interlocking elaboration on the basic melody (this will be examined further in Chapter Four); 4) One set of cengceng (small cymbals), which

have the function of enriching the rhythm, and also with the drums in making angsel (rhythmic accents and cues). 5) Two guntang , or tawa-tawa (slit drums) one small and one big. These are taken from the folk ensemble gamelan joged . In gamelan genggong, the bigger of the two functions as the gong (hit by a mallet with the right hand while the left hand waved over the open left side of the tube to make a gong-like vibrato). In some groups, a gong pulu (two big iron keys suspended over a box resonator, one tuned slightly higher than the other and struck in unison to create a beating effect) is used instead of the large guntang. The smaller guntang, also called klentit , functions as the time-keeper 6) A klenang (small kettle gong), that interlocks with the small guntang, playing on the offbeat;

While this is the standard grouping used in the Batuan Frog Dance, the actual instrumentation of the gamelan genggong ensemble varies by region as well as by individual group, and some groups, like the one in Pejang village, use an all-genggong ensemble without any supporting instruments. According to Rai (1998), the 1930s era genggong ensemble consisted of several genggong, suling , guntang , cengceng , enggung , kendang , and a bottle that was hit with a small piece of wood 7 . Pak Pandji’s list of Balinese gamelan ensembles (1973) lists the ensemble as consisting of “8 or more mouth harps, suling, tawa-tawa (guntang), rebana (frame drum), ricik (rattles), 1-2 drums, and vocal” (2). Seebass et. al. (1976) noted that the instrumentation of a genggong ensemble in Barajulat village on Lombok was similar to that found in Bali: “The smallest possible ensemble is a duo of two genggongs…often there are bigger groups and those enlarged with suling , ricik , and one or more guntangs . Thus the genggong instrumentation is the same on both islands” (45). The 2007 instrumentation of the genggong group in Budakeling village (Karangasem

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province) varied from the standard Batuan set- up, replacing the kendang with several smaller percussion instruments, and using a rebab (spike fiddle) to play the melody instead of the suling. The instrumentation is as follows: Several genggong to play the melodic line and ornamentations; two guntang; two ricik (coconut rattles, used with the same musical function as cengceng); an unnamed instrument made of two large snails’ shells stuck on wooden prongs (it is played by passing a finger or a stick between the two shells, and functions as a sort of rasp, used to imitate the sound of a frog); three “blown genggong” as a sound of the big frog (enggung); two unnamed bamboo instruments (to function as the sound of rain); one rebab (spike fiddle, used by this group instead of suling to play the melody); two unnamed coconut shell instruments (to function as the sound of frogs); and one gerantang (pitched bamboo tube). When asked about these instruments, some of which had no names, the group’s leader Ketut Naba explained that they were all old folk instruments; he preferred this instrumentation because he felt that simpler, older instruments better complemented the ancient genggong.

Accessories Glumpah , also called tebeng , is a small, hand-held resonator made of pig skin or dried leaf. Sometimes painted paper with decorative carvings is glued on the side facing the audience. It is held in the player’s left hand (the hand that also stabilizes the instrument), and amplifies the sound of the genggong so that the player can better hear their part in ensemble playing. The glumpah doesn’t make genggong sound significantly louder to an audience, but is primarily for the benefit of the person playing the instrument. It is usually seen in performances of gamelan genggong, where the relatively quiet instruments risk been drowned out by the other instruments in the ensemble. As such, it is generally not used in solo playing as the genggong doesn't have to compete for volume 8 . Gambir (Balinese), or tanah merah

(Indonesian), is a type of red clay that, in addition to being one of the ingredients in the popular betel nut chew, is also used to change the pitch of genggong. It comes in a hard block, and water must be added to make it malleable. Once softened, a small piece can be stuck to the free end of the instrument’s tongue, at the point where it narrows. This makes the tongue heavier, thus lowering the pitch. It is safer to tune this way, as removing any material from the instrument creates changes that cannot be undone. In this way, genggong players can tune to each other and the suling. Most genggong groups use instruments that are all tuned to each other already, i.e. made specifically for the group in a batch, but the inconsistencies of the genggong making process mean that further adjustments are often needed. Part II will examine the tuning and playing of genggong, its relation to gamelan angklung, and its repertoire in detail, illustrating how the rich panorama of Balinese music has been mapped onto a small piece of wood.

PA RT II: TIM BR E, TU NI NG AN D TE CH NI QU E

But then why three tracks devoted to the trivial, commonplace genggong ? (In Bali, genggong music is at the low rung of the ladder. I have never understood the disproportionate appeal to outsiders of this minimal jug band of a gamelan, which can basically make only one sound and play one tune. Focusing on it is like opting for Mozart's musical dice game over his symphonies, and confusing their relative artistic merit.) (Tenzer 2000b)

As we have seen, elitist dismissals of the Jew’s harp based on a perceived lack of value go all the way back to the seventeenth century, and have not been subject to much scrutiny until recently. At the heart of such opinions lies a question not of value, but of perception. John Blacking wrote, “It should […] be our task, as anthropologists, to experience others’ bodies through our own bodies” (1977: 6). Likewise, it could be said that our task as ethnomusicologists is to experience others’ music through our own bodies. To dismiss

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genggong because the way it is used is not complex enough is to overlook both the complexity of the physiological process that goes into creating the tones on the instrument, and the phenomenon of adapting the musical concepts of a metallophone orchestral ensemble onto a small, mouth-resonated instrument made of wood. It is in the limitations of the Jew’s harp that its very possibilities lie; on it, a few select tones are extracted from an entire harmonic spectrum of possibilities in order to express and highlight a particular view of the sound universe. So far, this study has looked at various approaches to the study of musical instruments, the technology and contexts of the Jew’s harp family of instruments, and the development of Jew’s harp use in Bali. Returning to the original questions posed in my MA thesis, the present section focuses on the musical conceptualization of genggong in Bali, asking how its playing technique is determined by physical and social constraints, and noting the overlapping of these categories. I will explain how social constraints, including the perception of pitch, scale, paired tuning, and interlocking parts, emerge in conjunction with physical constraints, such as the necessity of regular breathing and consistent activation of the lamella, which together shape the genggong playing technique. Sc al e an d T un in g

As each Genggong produces only one vibrating tone, at least two are needed to produce a melody. (deZoete and Spies 1938: 250)

The misconception that genggong (and Jew’s harps in general) only produce one note is based in the fact that the fundamental pitch

can be heard droning underneath the harmonics played above it. To the untrained ear, the fundamental frequency can sometimes seem to dominate and obscure the other frequencies present; with time, however, the subtler overtones become clearly perceptible. Far from being able to “make only one sound and play one tune”, genggong has a four to five tone range, which means that it is capable of playing the same material as the larger metallophone ensemble angklung. Despite the limited number of tones in a Balinese scale, the interlocking kotekan figurations used by both genggong and larger gamelan ensembles have shown how “A small array of building blocks can produce a large vocabulary of possible combinations” (Vitale 1990: 6). Using the same principle, genggong is also capable of musical complexity, and it is simply incorrect for it to be seen as a subordinate art form.

Scale As discussed earlier in my thesis, the pitches available on any given Jew’s harp correspond closely to the pitches of the harmonic overtone series. A fundamental pitch contains within it many partial wavelengths; these partials (harmonics) vibrate at frequencies that are multiples of the fundamental. The first harmonic is the fundamental itself, the second harmonic is two times the frequency of the fundamental, the third, three times the frequency, and so on. As a result of this equation, the first few harmonics are widely spaced from each other, but as the series progresses the distances between pitches lessens. Figure 2.1 represents the overtone series on a theoretical genggong

Figure 2.1 The overtone series for a fundamental of low C

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with a fundamental pitch of low C. However, only a handful of these overtones are within the mouth cavity’s possible range of movement. As a result, only the overtones five through ten are actually playable, and it is these pitches which are used to constitute the genggong “scale”. This scale is considered by the Balinese to be related to the slendro scale, to which the gamelan angklung is also tuned 9 .

Slendro, Angklung, and Solfège Slendro is a five-tone tuning system that is said to have been imported to Bali from Java, along with the seven-tone system pelog . While pelog is characterized by a series of uneven intervals between its pitches, the pitches of slendro tend to be more equidistant. These two systems are the conceptual foundation for most of the tunings used on Bali, although in practice, both gamelan and vocal pitches do not always fit neatly into either one (Gold 2005: 34). Most gamelan tunings are pentatonic extractions of pelog ; the gamelan angklung, to which genggong is said to be related, is a four-tone derivation of slendro. Angklung were originally bamboo rattles each of a single pitch, a number of which were shaken in succession to play a melody. The modern gamelan angklung consists predominantly of small bronze metallophones, and the ensemble is used both recreationally and for temple festivals. As mentioned earlier, gamelan genggong and gamelan angklung share much repertoire, though it is not clear which is older.

The Balinese solfège system gives each of

the degrees of any given scale a name, and as the majority of scales are pentatonic, the following five syllables are used: ning , nong , neng , nung , nang . Ning , by definition, is the first degree of the scale, though this varies according to ensemble. On gamelan angklung, for example, the first scale degree is often considered to be neng . Figure 2.2 shows how slendro is conceptualized on gamelan angklung, using the degrees of the scale and their names.

Laurence Picken notes that: “Remarkably enough, the scale of the gamelan Angkloeng : G A B D, the 123.5 sequence of the commonest Chinese mode…is considered by the Balinese to be identical with the four chief notes produced by a Jew’s harp, genggong : G Bb C D, that is 134.5, and tunes for the one are played on the other”(1957: 171) 10 . Interestingly, Picken (drawing from McPhee) names the very pitch values that correspond to the genggong with a fundamental of C in the table above, only starting with G as the first scale degree. So, while the middle two notes of the angklung and genggong scale sequences differ slightly from each other, the Balinese allow for the slight discrepancy as the intervals of the genggong (overtone) scale are closer in relationship to slendro than to pelog. Having said that, the “slendro” used on genggong is further complicated by the concept of paired tuning, which employs two genggong of different fundamental pitches, and therefore, different harmonics.

Paired Tuning The principle of ombak , roughly translated as vibrato, is at the core of tuning in Bali. In a

Figure 2.2 Typical four-tone slendro conceptualization on angklung

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gamelan ensemble, all the instruments are tuned in pairs, with one slightly higher and the other slightly lower. When the same note is sounded on both instruments, a visceral pulsating effect is created, not unlike the tangible vibration of a large gong. The higher instrument is said to be pengisep , while the lower is pengumbang . A pair of instruments may also be referred to as lanang (male; high- pitched) and wadon (female; low-pitched). In the case of genggong, whether there are two players or ten, the instruments are always used in lanang-wadon pairs. During my fieldwork I had observed that the relationship between the two fundamentals of the pair usually hovered around an interval of a minor third. Curious about how this interval was arrived at, I tested the perception of paired tuning by asking several different genggong players to select matching pairs of genggong from an assortment of instruments with different tunings. The process was not what I expected: each time, the person would pick up an instrument, and instead of listening to its fundamental pitch, he would play a scale or a brief melody, listening closely to the instrument’s overtones. For genggong players, tuning wasn’t about the fundamental; I later learned that the spectrum of sound generated by the lamella is full of many non-harmonic partials, and it is often difficult to perceive a definite pitch for the fundamental (Rai 2004: 39) 1 1 . While I was straining to hear and construct an intervallic relationship between the genggong fundamentals, the fundamental pitch had absolutely no effect on tuning as far

as my teachers were concerned. A pair of genggong were instead determined to be a good match based on the pitches of the overtones arrived at in actual playing. In this way, the low ning of the genggong wadon was meant to match the high ning of the genggong lanang (see Figure 2.3).

Genggong lanang is considered to be the leader and uses the same four-tone conceptualization of slendro as angklung, with ning as the highest pitch in the scale. Genggong wadon, on the other hand, uses a low ning. In genggong tuning practice, the low ning of wadon and the high ning of lanang should be tuned roughly an octave apart, so that lanang is slightly higher (pengisep) and wadon is slightly lower (pengumbang). Musically, genggong lanang is the leader as well, and it will often play the opening melody or introductory section of a piece. If a suling is being in this function instead, the suling’s high ning must match the high ning of genggong lanang. Genggong wadon typically has a range of harmonics from the 5th (low ning) to the 9th (high nang). While genggong lanang technically has the same range, in practice its scale usually starts on the 7th harmonic (conceptualized as neng) and goes to the 10th (high ning). Occasionally, lanang will play either a low nong (below neng) or a high nong (above ning), but the high nong is often difficult to sound as genggong lanang’s fundamental is usually too high to make that

Figure 2.3 Tuning of a lanang-wadon pair of genggong (pitch values are approximate)

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harmonic reachable. Not surprisingly, genggong makers have a hard time tuning pairs of instruments to each other. As mentioned earlier, only about one genggong emerges from every ten attempted, and it’s rare that any two come out the same pitch. Thus, a genggong maker cannot simply make all his lanang instruments at once and then make a batch of wadon instruments to match. Instead, a maker will often work on several instruments simultaneously, working the wood not to any standard of pitch, but to a standard quality of sound or timbre. The resulting instruments, which may vary widely in pitch, are then adjusted to each other using gambir until they are deemed to be a good pair.

Pl ay in g Te ch ni qu e Colin McPhee recounts the pedagogical approach of the genggong teacher he brought to Sayan, who insisted that the children learn to sing the tunes using the solfège syllables

before playing them on the genggong:

Each night the children sat in a ring on the verandah, the teacher in the center, chanting as they learned the wordless tunes. Most of these were brief, repeated over and over without a break. They then began to learn longer pieces, composed of two sections—the first, the polos or plain, sung in unison, and the more animated finale, the chandetan , a syncopated two-part affair, in which two separate but interlocking rhythms are combined to create an unbroken musical continuity. It sounds complex, and it is, but not to the Balinese, who throw themselves into such passages with sheer delight…It was only after a month had passed, when the chorus knew a dozen or more tunes and had gained some precision in ensemble, that the genggongs were produced. (1955: 79)

This teacher’s approach, reminiscent of the vocal chant genjek to which genggong is said to sometimes be a part of, highlights the importance of Balinese solfège to the musical conceptualization of the genggong.

Basic Technique: Solfège and Phonemes While it is clear that the solfège note

Figure 2.4 Scale of a genggong wadon with fundamental C

names correspond to the pitches played on genggong, how are these pitches sounded in practice? The key to genggong technique is to whisper the phoneme, or the most minimal defining unit of the note’s name, into the instrument. In Balinese solfège, it is the vowel of each note’s name which is its defining characteristic. Figure 2.4 demonstrates the phonetic correlation between the solfège name of each note and the phoneme enunciated into the instrument.

In the act of playing, the enunciation of a particular phoneme shapes the mouth to produce a particular resonance, which corresponds to one of the partial harmonics (overtones) of the instrument’s fundamental pitch. Rai (2004) explains: “Although the lamella by itself produced the one kind of sound quality, with complex non-harmonic partials, and thus without clearly defined pitch, the adjustments of the mouth cavity and the blowing or inhaling, can dramatically change

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the sound quality and permit to amplify the partials that can be perceived as the pitches of the melody” (39). Compared with other Jew’s harp playing techniques, genggong uses an open glottis, using the oral cavity at its maximum resonant capacity. That is what gives genggong its characteristically deep and guttural sound. It is interesting that the same partials (the 5th through the 9th harmonics, for example, E, G, Bb, C, D on a Jew’s harp with a fundamental of C) can be sounded when the glottis is closed—but can be arrived at with different phonemes. However, the resonance is totally different with a closed glottis, and open glottis playing is much louder because of the extra resonating cavity. When I began learning how to play genggong, I was astonished at the complexity of this technique. Without any frame of reference, I struggled to configure my mouth to the correct resonances without understanding the different between an open glottis and a closed glottis, or how whispering “ning” was supposed to create the exact pitch of ning. Pak Marca, my primary teacher from Batuan, summed up the challenge of genggong by contrasting it with suling: on suling, you can stop a hole and get a sound, but “genggong you play with your mind. If you want the sound neng , you have to think neng ” (personal communication 2007). The imaginary aspect of the instrument is part of what makes it so hard to play, and the would-be genggong player needs time to work out the combination of muscle memory and visualization required to play it. As Marca put it, “This instrument is

very easy, but very difficult.”

Kotekan Technique: Breath and Accentuation Genggong is not just used to play melodic material, but to create the interlocking figurations known as kotekan which are a staple feature of modern Balinese music. Genggong kotekan is not a direct transposition of the patterns used on the large bronze gamelans, but rather an adaptation of them, shaped by the physical challenges of translating a metallophone part onto a mouth- resonated instrument. The way kotekan is used on genggong stems from the necessity of certain playing techniques physically dictated by the Jew’s harp itself. Many Jew’s harp traditions employ the use of breathing in and out in rapid succession, as it keeps the momentum going on the instrument and allows for faster playing. Rai explains that:

To make a good sound, you have to use a technique that is called ngengkahin , ( menghembusi in Indonesian), but in general, genggongs can make the tones ding, dang, dung, and deng [genggong lanang]. Two of the aforementioned tones, that is, dang and deng, are made with the technique of ngengkahin (exhaling), and dung and ding are not (inhaling). (1998: 36)

As kotekan patterns generally consist of sixteenth notes, half the notes are played while exhaling and the other half are played by inhaling. When playing a melody consisting of quarter notes or eighth notes, this technique is unnecessary as its primary function is to facilitate speed. Therefore, in melodic playing,

Figure 2.5 Accents and passing notes (genggong wadon)

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the notes are all generally sounded by exhaling, while in faster kotekan patterns the rapid in and out breathing is used. What Rai doesn’t mention, however, is that some of the notes are accented while others are not. The genggong lamella has a relatively short sustain, and must be constantly kept in motion by pulling the attached string. A loose but precise snapping of the wrist at regular short intervals not only keeps the genggong sounding, but affects the music played on it. Figure 2.5 shows how the accents coincide with the technique of inhaling and exhaling during a sixteenth note kotekan pattern:

Therefore, the pitches ning, neng, and nang are accented sixteenth notes and nong and nung are unaccented, effectively acting as passing tones between the stronger pitches. When a genggong kotekan pattern is sung, as was done by the genggong teacher in Sayan in 1938 as well as by many of my teachers in 2007, it gives a sense of a general melodic contour. When the same pattern is played again on the instrument with the percussive accents in the right places, an entirely different rhythmic pattern emerges from the stream of notes. The emphasis on certain notes and not on others is where the truly genggong-style patterns emerge. There are, then, two layers in a genggong kotekan pattern: the first is the overall melodic flow of sixteenth notes, and the second is the rhythm that emerges as certain notes are accented and others are not. The superimposition of these two layers, i.e. accented notes with audible passing notes in between, is part of what gives genggong music its unique sound. Fu rt he r Q ue st io ns On a few occasions, I encountered elderly genggong players who did not play kotekan. Two men from Batuan, both in their eighties, played parts which consisted mostly of eighth notes without passing notes. This was a slower, reduced playing, at half the density of the sixteenth note kotekan patterns. Both would occasionally add a passing note, but only

between non-adjacent tones, and would not do so frequently. Younger genggong players said that this was a simplified technique, which didn’t cause as much physical exertion as the faster way of playing. Could it have also been a remnant of an older style of playing? While fieldwork has provided some clues as to how genggong is culturally and musically constructed, it has also generated many questions for further investigation. To what extent are the melodies and kotekans of genggong related to those of gamelan angklung? To what degree are genggong parts improvised? What kind of consistencies and discrepancies exist among different versions of the same piece? While I have done some preliminary musical transcription and analysis of genggong repertoire, the current sample size of my recordings is not broad enough to represent the full range of genggong styles on Bali; much remains to be done. In the future, such musical excerpts will be key to understanding how the playing techniques outlined in this article are realized in performance practice.

C on cl us io n Although this study is in its preliminary stages, it is my hope that it will contribute to a growing body of work on the Jew’s harp, raising awareness of the ways in which we use and define musical instruments, and how they, in turn, define us. In proposing a theoretical and methodological framework for future research, I have suggested that a clearer picture of the Jew’s harp in all its various permutations must take account of phonetics and acoustics, and contextualize this information in terms of performance practice. Once a significant database of this information has been generated, deeper analyses of different versions of the instrument will be possible, combining the strengths of both comparative and ethnographic approaches. Finally, it is my overarching goal to use the Jew’s harp to better understand the human relationship with sound. Throughout its many forms, the intrinsic nature of the Jew’s harp

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links it to love and courtship, magic and communion with spirits, the masking and modulating of the voice, and the passing of time in solitude; it is equally a vessel for the sacred, the profane, and the mundane. The body of the instrument itself is a lyre plucked, a reed blown, a buzzing insect, a motion of water or wind, and a surrogate tongue that speaks for its player. Further shaped by the multitude of playing techniques and contexts, from percussive accompaniment to melodic solo, from imitation of the sounds of nature to articulation of vowels and words, from groups to pairs to individuals, and from competition to cooperation, the primordial simplicity of the Jew’s harp generates a kaleidoscopic image of human musical experience, bound up equally in the tiny machine fine-tuned by the master metalsmith, and the trinket bumping around inside the child's pocket.

E pi lo gu e Since completing my MA thesis in 2008, I have remained actively involved with the Jew’s harp, giving lectures and workshops both locally and internationally on a regular basis, as well as performing. In the summer of 2010, I resumed fieldwork activity—this time spending five weeks documenting Jew’s harp activity in Europe. Since returning home, I have been developing a documentary film project exploring the Jew’s harp and the international community and events that have developed around it. I am thrilled to be attending the 7th International Jew’s Harp Congress in Sakha-Yakutia in June 2011, and am looking forward to gathering more footage and connecting with many fine Jew’s harp players, makers, scholars, and enthusiasts. As the incoming Executive Director of the Jew’s Harp Guild in North America, I remain committed to sharing the joy and preserving the art of this special instrument for generations to come.

1 The term “enggung” refers to the name of a type of frog (Rai 1998), while the term “genggong” is probably pureonomatapoea.

2 At some point during the 1980s and 1990s, at least one instrument maker in Peliatan was carving elongated instruments which included both a genggong and an enggung cut out of the same piece of wood. The enggung was carved into the far left end, and used as the handle when the genggong side was being played, and vice versa. See Crane 2004: 92-95 for photos.

3 Genggong for the Four Peoples/Cultures of Ubud. 4 According to I Wayan Sudirana (personal

communication, 2008) there may a connection between this story and the storyline used in the Arja Godogan (Balinese opera about a frog character).

5 Not the original Catur Wangsa Ubud group, which appears to have disbanded, but a new group called Pondok Pekak.

6 The following list is compiled from Rai (1998: 38- 39) and my own fieldnotes.

7 According to Rai, the bottle functioned as a rhythmic enrichment, similar to an instrument called gumanak , from the flute ensemble gamelan gambuh , which consists of two small metal rods struck against one another. Rai notes that the 1930s-era genggong group of Ubud is the only group to have used the bottle, but deZoete and Spies (1938) describe a “bottle fixed on the back of a wooden tortoise and beaten with a stick” used by a genggong group in Batuan village as well.

8 Although the genggong is the loudest of wooden Jew’s harps, the problem of volume is never totally resolved in performance, and today genggong players are almost always amplified with microphones; some of the subtlety of the instruments’ overtones is inevitably lost in the process.

9 There is no standardized pitch in Bali, so attempting to reflect the pitches used on genggong with Western notation based on equal temperament is necessarily inaccurate (nor are the values of the harmonic series congruent with equal temperament). This system, however, provides a useful tool for illustrating general concepts of tuning and composition on genggong.

10 Here Picken was referring to a study done by Colin McPhee (1937) on the angklung, “Angkloeng gamelans in Bali” published in the journal Djawa , p.122, in which he discusses the relationship of genggong tuning to angklung tuning.

1 1 While at the same time, ironically, some people can only hear the fundamental and not the partials.

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