Online edition of The Official Newsletter of the Jew's Harp Guild
- The Pluck-n-Post -
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Contents:A Word from the
Executive Director A Jew's Harp Travelogue Part III:
Hildesheim, Germany Pictorial Archive Bulletin Board: Post Your Notes Online Newsletter Archive |
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 A Word from the Executive DirectorJanet Gohring — JHG Executive Director |
Hello Jew’s harp friends, The New Year is bringing some changes to the Pluck-N-Post. With this first issue of 2005, I’d like to welcome our new Pluck-N-Post editor, Gordon Frazier (many of you will know him from past festivals and as the editor of another Jew’s harp journal, Pluck). Welcome! Gordon . . . we look forward to all your creative talents! We say goodbye to our previous PNP editor Mark Poss (who has moved to California) and thank him immensely for creating the PNP from the beginning . . . and acting as editor these many years. Words cannot express our appreciation and gratitude for the fine job he has done. Thank you and best of luck to you, Mark, in your new travels. Guild Membership I’d like to remind everyone NOW is the time to re-new your Guild membership. If you find a membership renewal form with this newsletter packet, it means you have not yet renewed. THIS WILL BE YOUR FINAL NOTICE. Please remember . . . your membership helps keep the Guild alive and helps fund the annual North American Jew’s Harp Festival. We need YOU! Webmaster Needed We still need a webmaster to replace Mark Poss. Mark has graciously offered to stay on as webmaster until we find a replacement. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please contact me. (For details of what's required, see Mark’s article in the last issue of the PNP). North American Jew’s Harp Festival Its time to start thinking and planning for the 2005 NAJHF. We are working with the city of Bay City to incorporate our festival with their event, "Pearl of Tillamook Bay-The Reason We’re Here." I think this combination will make both events even better and we look forward to a weekend of city-wide events. Mark your calendars for August 5th and 6th. We still need a T-shirt / Festival logo for 2005 so I want to encourage our members to submit any design or ideas they might have. We would like to have a finalized logo by April 1st, so please get your designs in as soon as possible. You can e-mail or mail them to the Guild. International News Have received a couple letters from our Scottish Jew's harp friend, Lindsay Porteous. He has obtained a housing benefit and will be able to remain in his Tron House with all his instruments. He hopes to be able to attend the next International Congress. He has high praises for the double DVD from the Norway 4th Congress. He says the filming quality is excellent and has good close-ups of the different playing styles. The Guild has a small stock of Lindsay's latest Cassette, "Lindsay Porteous and Friends," and you can order one from us for $10 plus $2.00 shipping. Thanks for keeping in touch, Lindsay! Local News Oregon’s own Jew’s harp maker, Bill Gohring, is receiving excellent reviews on his latest Jew’s harp, the Blue Dolphin. Ordering details are included in the ads portion of this newsletter (page 6). I wish each one of you a wonderful New Year with lots of opportunities for spreading the "word" about Jew’s harps and sharing its wonderful vibrational tones with the universe.
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Welcome to our new Jew's Harp Guild Members: Klaus Hempel, Blomberg, Germany Bob, Rochelle & Skye Feltz, Beavercreek, Oregon, USA |
2005 Jew’s Harp Guild Board Janet Gohring, Executive
Director |
A Jew’s Harp Travelogue Part III: Hildesheim, Germany
By Gordon Frazier
| While in Molln, Austria, I bought several large chocolate
Jew’s harps as gifts. When I got to Germany I gave one to my friends Caro and
Anna-Lisa; they immediately mounted it above their kitchen door, then tied a string to a
real maultrommel and hung that beside its chocolate replica. Perfect. I knew this
would be a fun visit. Carolin (Caro) Beijo and Anna-Lisa Meckel study art and music at a university in northern Germany. Stephan Eberthäuser lives south, in Bavaria, which is where Caro and Anna-Lisa are from as well. |
 ^ Stephan and Anna-Lisa, in the kitchen: Jam, and jammin’. |
| Stephan is a truly exceptional maultrommelist [Jew’s harp player]. He spent several months living in southern India, seeking out players and master makers of the Indian morsing. His time there was well-spent, and is evident in his playing. | |
I met all of them at the Trump Congress in Norway in 2002. When I e-mailed Caro and Anna-Lisa from the States that I was planning a trump-related trip to Europe in January of 2004, they wrote back to say that I was welcome to stay with them, and that they would arrange for me to visit a music class and perform a concert while there. Also, they hoped that Stephan would be able to visit during my stay.
So after visiting Austria and Hungary I headed north to the small university town of Hildesheim, where I stayed in the rambling flat Anna-Lisa and Caro share with Karen, Florina, and Otah the cat.
I was in the midst of a musical odyssey of sorts, but I was also being a tourist, so one day Caro and Anna-Lisa gave me a tour.
Many of Hildesheim’s older buildings were flattened in March of 1945 in a raid by Allied bombers. Bombers tended to avoid cultural sites, but that ban was not as stringent late in the war. The three of us walked along cobblestone streets and visited some that were left, including the church in the photo on this page. (Ironically, one of the few spots left unscathed in the raid was the only military target in the area, a factory hidden in the nearby woods.) Downtown, only the old Guild House and the façade of one church were
left standing after the war. However, the church and the other buildings in the central
square were painstakingly reconstructed in the 1980s. They did such a meticulous job it
will surely fool future archaeologists. A highlight of my trip—come to think of it, a
highlight of my life—was a visit to Kafenion, a delightful little coffee house
and bakery with the best hot chocolate in the world (as far as I know). It always comes down to food. Back at the flat, the kitchen was the central gathering place. And once Stephan arrived the next day after hitchhiking up from Bavaria, we spent a lot of our time sitting around the table eating, drinking, chatting, and of course playing music. |
 ^ A medieval church, damaged but intact. |
We had memorable conversations on deep topics; we also talked about spit. Once while we were playing music Stephan leaned his head sideways at a 90-degree angle for a few seconds without missing a beat on the maultrommel. When asked about it afterwards, he explained that he was getting rid of a little saliva build-up. What a great tip! I then told them that when I was young I thought the name of the instrument was "juice" harp, due to the fact that after playing for awhile my mouth got all juicy, causing me to fling bits of spittle with every twang.
This conversation took place during one of our many jams. Stephan played maultrommel, morsing, and harmonica; I played Jew’s harp and Clackamore, Anna-Lisa played jazz flute, a little didjeridu and once, just to make me feel that I was really in Germany, her accordion.
So my time in this university town was spent studying music, history, and the culinary arts. But I also brushed up on a little science.
My reading material on the flight from Seattle was a beginning textbook on musical acoustics, for I had been invited to visit an acoustics class at Hildesheim University and I wanted to be able to converse on the topic in a nominally competent way.
As it turned out, I had no such opportunity, because I was just a source of raw material. The acoustics instructor wanted me to play various Jew’s harps so he could record them and make sonograms, which he then projected on a screen for the class to see. Although it was interesting to see the peaks and valleys of Jew’s harp harmonics rendered visually, I would have liked more tech talk. (I’d read a book on it, after all!) The sonograms did, however, look cool.
While at the university we saw some of Anna-Lisa’s publicity materials. A born promoter, she had plastered the campus with posters advertising the concert that evening, and she had a seemingly endless supply of little flyerettes to hand out to everyone she passed, in the unlikely event they had not seen one of the posters.
After seeing her efforts it was not surprising that the concert was well attended. It was billed as a gesprächskonzert ("talking-concert"), so I spent the first half expounding on and demonstrat- ing plucked linguaphones from around the world. I was aided by a huge world map, requisitioned from the geography department by the ever-resourceful Anna-Lisa. It was a great map, but I had one problem with it that I discovered while looking for Bali. "Hey, this is all in German!" I blurted, to the amusement of the crowd.
The second half was a straightforward concert including a fiddle tune, some blues, and William Tell on the Clackamore. Then I asked Stephan up to the stage and we filled the rest of the time with improvisational duets. We had been playing together for only a few days, but meshed well, so sounded like we had played together for much longer. It was great fun.
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On one piece both of us played instruments in the key of E. They were not precisely in tune to each other, so before the concert Stephan suggested we match our pitches by placing a small bit of wax on the tip of my Jew’s harp’s lamella (which slows down the vibration and flattens the pitch slightly). It worked just dandy, but not long after we began to play the wax fell off. We should have been out of tune at that point, but to my surprise it sounded okay. But then, I don’t exactly have perfect pitch. I worried a little about those in the audience who probably did, but finally shrugged to myself and we continued with the duet. |
I needn’t have fretted, as we really were in tune. Stephan explained later that he heard me go sharp, so compensated by gently pressing his left thumb to the base of his harp’s lamella, which sharpened his tone slightly to match mine. Nice: fine-tuning on the fly. Stephan was continually impressing me with such displays of maultrommel expertise.
After the concert we invited the audience up to talk and look at instruments. Later, one of the instructors at the university approached us. He had arrived too late to hear the concert, but was interested in the instrument. He had a great recording of maultrommel music, he told me—had I, by chance, ever heard of John Wright? Yes, I know John, I said (from both the Yakutsk and Rauland congresses). "You know him?" he asked, taken aback. I grinned and nodded. It’s a small world . . . but the world of the Jew’s harp is even smaller.
As he had missed the concert, Stephan and I played an impromptu duet for him. Just like Sundays at the early Jew’s harp festivals in Sumpter, I thought, when we regularly played mini-concerts for those who missed out on the Saturday happening. That’s us maultrommelists: always happy to oblige.
However, I was not at all happy that my time in Hildesheim was almost over. But I had a plane to catch, so the day after the concert I bade a fond farewell to my German friends and hopped on the evening train.
My original plan had been to spend time in Amsterdam on the way back to visit friends there, but I messed up. I had scheduled my return flight thinking the university concert was earlier in the week; also, I did not count on the trainleaving so infrequently, or, for that matter, to take so long. The gist: instead of extra time in Amsterdam I ended up with no time at all. My train arrived at 10 am and my flight left at noon.
Which is cutting it way too close. I try to arrive at airports early because of the extra time it takes me getting through security, for once the screeners get an eyeful of the pronged metal in my carry-on it makes them, shall we say, curious. Amsterdam was no exception, but to my surprise, this time their biggest concern was my wooden kazoo. Apparently when looking through an X-ray scanner, if you squint and hold your head just so, you can imagine it being part of a dismantled handgun.
As our plane chased the sun west across the Atlantic, I mulled over that incident, and what it said about the world—no, worlds—we live in.
One of those worlds is the world of the Jew’s harp. Although it covers a lot of territory, it is a small world with no borders, where everybody knows everybody; it is an intimate world, where friends make music in pubs, or by a campfire, or around a kitchen table.
And one of the other worlds we live in is the world of "security," an increasingly skittish place with sharply defined borders, where everyone is a stranger; a world where paranoia can transform a peripatetic musician into the owner of a loaded kazoo.
Myself, I prefer the world of the pub, the campfire, and the kitchen table. The world without borders. The world where a kazoo is—sometimes—just a kazoo.
I’ll see you there.
—Gordon Frazier
Note: The first two parts of JH Travelogue (Upper Austria & Hungary) appeared in the 2004 spring and summer issues of PNP. Send in your own travel stories—ideally this will be a regular feature.
Just a quick note to let you know how much fun we
had at the Jew’s Harp Fest. Everyone was great!!!
Thanks so much ... Rochelle Feltz
Wow! Feel like a fresh caught twanger. Stopped at
the festival on Saturday. Spent a couple of hours just hanging around enjoying the goings
on and the one-on-one with a world traveler and his boxes and boxes of Jew’s harps.
Perfect weather as the front porch jam grew in size and inspiration. Had combined this
stop with a business trip so only had a short, very enjoyable stay. Must thank Oregon Art
Beat for the TV show that started it all for me. Thank you so much.
Dennis Pollmann
Dear friends, We are pleased to inform you our new on-line store
ETHNOMUSICA is fully operative now. It has a forum in which you can share with all the
friends, not just your musical interest, but things of a different kind. We also have a
newsletter you can subscribe to. Our web address is: www.etno-musica.com.
All the best, Sergio Arbizu Rodriguez
Malaga, Spain
Hello. I am a percussionist from India. I play a similar version of
the Jew’s harp called Morsing. I have been playing the past 10 years ... morsing and
Jew’s harp are very similar instruments. Morsing is played very widely in southern
India. Highly complex rhythm patterns are played during the concerts and a wide variety of
different sounds are produced. I strongly suggest the Guild should listen to morsing ... I
will send you some recordings of mine for your website. I hope the Guild will archive
these recordings as many samples of morsing I have heard on internet are far away from
what truly it is and don’t exhibit even a
minuscule of morsing’s capabilities. I am in desperation to find out the origin of
morsing in India ... how it came to be here and how it started in India ... if you could
help me out in this regard I would be ever grateful.
Warm regards, Bharadwaj R. Sathavalli bharadwajrs@gmail.com
Great website, a pleasure to see and hear. Do you know of any
stockist/maker in Scotland?
Derek C. Dunbar dunbar.house@btopenworld.com
The Jew's Harp Guild
69954 Hidden Valley Lane
Cove, OR 97824
| From: Peter S. Balkan I believe that these Jews Harps are among the most impressive in looks but, unfortunately, they do not play nearly as well as they look. The steel for the tongues is obviously NOT of the high-quality spring steel that we've come to expect in European instruments. Also, the attachment of the tongue to the frame appears to be my simple soldering. I seriously doubt that these instruments could endure extended playing. Again, there is also a bamboo version. But they are gorgeous. |
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Compact Disc - DBS-2707 - Total Time : 61:47
US$12.00 each + US$ 3.00 S & H in USA (US$ 5.00 international).
Send check or money order to:
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Eureka, CA 95501
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Summary:Highlights 1998 - 2000 There’s nothing else like the
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| North American Jew's Harp Festival 1997 Highlights CD The CD features 20 of the
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