Hi everyone, my name is Rich Walter. I am the curator for USA / Canada and Europe
here at MIM. I am standing in front of a whole wall of zithers. For those of you
who are curious what a zither is, it really is a broad term or it applies to
a broad, broad family of instruments you can find all over the world.
What it means, it is a stringed instrument and the
strings are stretched across the whole resonating body of the instrument.
So rather than, let’s say, a lute, where you have a body and then a neck and strings
that are stretched across, a zither, the strings are stretched across that
whole body and there is not a separate neck assembly.
Again, you can find them all over the world in Africa, the Middle East, all throughout Asia,
throughout Europe, and there are a lot of ways to play them, as well. As far as
getting that string in motion and getting that string to vibrate and
causing the sound, you can strum them, you can pluck them with your fingers, you can
actually hit them with mallets. Sometimes they have a built-in mechanism, in fact,
some of these really unusual ones have a lever that you
press like a key and that gets the string vibrating.
One familiar category of fretless zithers are autoharps. You may have
heard autoharps played in old Carter Family recordings, even June Carter,
Johnny Cash’s wife, was known for playing the autoharp. There have been some great
autoharp instances in popular music as well—John Sebastian with the Lovin’ Spoonful.
So it’s seen as sort of a folk instrument that got really popular in
the late 1800s, early 1900s. These types of zithers were available pretty
affordably from mail-order catalogs, like Sears Roebuck and things like that.
Many of them literally had a note and a number system printed right on them and
so if you purchased one of these zithers from, let’s say, a catalog, you might
receive the instrument and it could come with a song book and on the first
afternoon when you opened it up, if you followed along there would be songs
where the notes would be listed, but so would the numbers, and you could basically
play music by numbers and follow the sequence of numbers and suddenly hear
yourself playing familiar melodies. So it was really designed to make music
widely available and accessible in people’s homes. They didn’t need a lot of
music training. They could basically follow the numbers and start playing
music and over time learning how these melodies work and these instruments work.
Some of them have a combination of chords that you can play and then
another way of playing a melody note on top of it. So some really unusual designs
for people to play music in a fairly straight forward music-by-number kind of
way if they wanted to. We are really lucky to have this diversity of instruments
thanks to Garry Harrison, a gentleman who spent many years collecting a huge
variety of zither types, fretless zither-types, and he donated that
collection to MIM in 2008 just a couple of years before he passed away sadly in 2012.
But we are really fortunate to have a very comprehensive assortment of
fretless zithers from North America thanks to his years of collecting and
the way he was really passionate about these. So zithers are instruments where the
strings are stretched across that full resonating body. We have got a lot of
examples on this side of the gallery, but one of our more recent exhibits is Dulcimers.
Dulcimers are a sub-category of zithers. These are a combination of
hammered dulcimers and this large rectangular one is pretty similar
to what you might find called a Hungarian cimbalom. So we have got
hammered dulcimers where you strike them with little, thin mallets, but also
mountain dulcimers, or Appalachian dulcimers. So, the classic
Appalachian dulcimer would be this hourglass-shaped style.
This one so closely associated with Jean Ritchie in fact that her name
is inside of it. Jean Ritchie not only popularized the Appalachian dulcimer as
a singer and performer and folk musician, but she started making dulcimers.
She really had a great hand in making these popular all over again. So that’s one
from Jean Ritchie. But over on the right side, I really like this contrast because
we have two more dulcimers, basically mountain dulcimers. On the right-hand
side, a pretty plain, straight forward box-shaped resonating body, again with the
strings stretching across the whole body because it is a zither. That’s a
perfectly functional, suitable, dulcimer type. Then next to it, a more modern
mountain dulcimer. This one was made by Bonnie Carol who is also an excellent
dulcimer player, both hammered dulcimers and mountain dulcimers. I love this one
because it shows that even instruments that tend to be associated with folk
traditions, maybe kind of rustic craftsmanship, plainer styles, with
imagination and with motivation to make a really high-quality, fine dulcimer,
Bonnie has been making custom mountain dulcimers with really beautiful tone
woods. This figured maple with koa wood
bindings. I mean it is basically the same type of treatment you would find on a
high-end custom guitar. It’s got this really cool set of arches underneath the
fingerboard, if you can see that. That allows a player to put a capo, to wrap a
capo device on the fingerboard. So he or she could play in different keys and
modes. I mean it is really suitable to play a wide variety of music. Not just
folk music. You could play rock and roll. You could play popular music on these instruments.
So, Bonnie Carol. Just one example of a woman making really sophisticated, high-quality
modern dulcimers that are part of a much longer, deeper tradition not only of
dulcimers but zithers from around the world. So again, zithers is a term that
that applies to an amazing variety of instruments and next time you visit MIM
we hope you not only take a closer look at some of these dulcimers and
zithers on display, but you will find zithers all over the world as you go
through the galleries here at MIM. So hope you enjoy seeing some of those on
your next visit and thanks for listening.