The Story of the Zither, Part 2

So what’s the story with the zither? I don’t know a lot about it, but we’re pretty sure it was my great-grandma Pauline Wilmesherr’s. She died fifteen years before I was born. My mom remembers the zither being in the attic of her mom and dad’s house (218 W. Elm in Jefferson City) when she was growing up. Mom doesn’t remember anyone ever playing it. (For reasons mentioned in my previous post, I can see why it fell by the wayside. Also, at some point, it got out of tune and started losing strings, so . . .) I suspect that one of Mom’s three elder siblings might have had something to do with the missing strings, but who knows; maybe the damage occurred in the previous generation. We were all kids once.

I discovered the zither in an old trunk in my parent’s garage when I was about ten. I don’t know how it came to be in my parents’ basement, except that Mom must’ve acquired it when her parents moved into their new house on Jefferson Street in the 1950s. All that stuff in the Elm Street house had to be gone through. They must have found it in the attic and wondered what to do with it, and Mom must have said, “Oh, I’ll take that; I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but we shouldn’t throw it out.”

I don’t remember how I found it, or why I was snooping around in that old trunk, but there you go. From then on, I was curious about it. With Mom and Dad’s permission, I took it up into my room. Several strings were missing, and it was dreadfully out of tune. Bing! Bong! Thud. Buzz! Twannnng! (So fascinating!)

Not long after this discovery, I carried it with me on one of our many trips to Jefferson City to visit my grandmas. Perhaps this was about the time my Grandpa Renner was in his final illness. Anyway, this memory stands out not only because of what happened with the zither, but also because it was a rare occasion when I was visiting with Grandma Schroeder by myself. If my brother was there, he might’ve been inside reading a book or something. Anyway, my parents weren’t there, so I was alone with Grandma, and with her BFF, Marie Korsemeyer. (Everyone loved Marie.)

And it was nice outside, and we were sitting on the backyard patio enjoying the early evening. We must have had a meal and then remained out there, sitting and chatting as the light left the sky. Like Sue and I do today, in the exact same place.

I don’t remember if they told me to go get the zither or if I did it on my own, but I ended up playing it for them. And those two old ladies sat there and graciously clapped and cackled and encouraged me as I strummed and pounded and plucked that poor old, out-of-tune zither. I played one “song” after another. It didn’t sound like anything. At best, it might’ve sounded like avant-garde music. At best, it was primitive. At best, it was, um, rhythmic. At best, it was emotional. They encouraged me, and they seemed to be having as much of a good time as I was.

. . . I suspect that the more they drank, the better I sounded!

Anyway, I will never forget that evening, and my thoughts often drift to that memory when I sit out in the backyard on pleasant nights.

I rarely (if ever) got Grandma all to myself. As time went on, in my young adult life, the memory of that one evening brought moments of crushing embarrassment, tumbling upon me, once I was old enough to realize how horrid it must have sounded. But today my cringing is tempered by a deep appreciation for their graciousness and their willingness to play along with my childish game.

At some point in my childhood, I tried to tune it, using a pliers—a horrible idea, since it chewed up the tuning pins. And the pins, and the tuning didn’t hold, and several strings were still missing, anyway . . . And so it sat for years, until I moved back to Missouri in the late 1990s, and my parents gave the zither back to me.

And that’s when I was finally in a position to do right by it. In the fall of 1998, Sue and I took it to Music Folk in Webster Groves, Missouri, and I asked them if they could do anything to fix it.

The guy examined it and said it could probably be fixed, but, he reasoned, for the price of fixing it, I could simply buy another zither that was already fixed up, so, um, why bother—? Just hang it on a wall. But I explained that it isn’t just some old curiosity I’d bought at a garage sale—it had been my great-grandma’s. And I wanted to hear its voice.

So I left it with them and returned the next week to pick it up. They did a brilliant job with it! And it ended up not being too expensive, in my opinion. The labor charge of $100 was the biggest single component of the cost; then, the all-new strings cost nearly $50, plus new tuning pins and some miscellaneous expenses for glue and such, since they removed old glue and nails and reglued the pin blocks, glued the side seams, seated some loose pins . . . the total ticket came to $172.46. Do you think that was an outrageous expense? I don’t. To me, it’s like buying art: Follow your heart.

About this time, Mom had a reunion with her Trinity Lutheran 8th-grade graduating class. There, she had chatted about the zither with one of her classmates. And that fellow, Jimmy Sommerer, owned one of the original books of music that had been made for these types of instruments. He gave her photocopies of the book. (Samples are in my previous post.) What a neat coincidence!

No, I don’t play much on the zither these days. I’m not very good at it. (The strings all look alike!) That night in Grandma’s backyard might have been my high point! Seriously, I do play it occasionally in the living room or the backyard, but as I’ve said, it’s only good for straightforward tunes. I can do a pretty decent rendition of “Silent Night” and “O Tannenbaum.” (At least they’re rather slow.)

Another thing I’ve liked about it is that when I play my trumpet in the same room as the zither, it rings in sympathetic vibrations with the trumpet. (Musicians have taken advantage of this effect with brass instruments and pianos, where the piano’s sustaining pedal is kept pressed down while a trumpeter or trombonist points her bell into the piano’s raised lid and plays. The effect is eerie and rich—it’s the same principle as with an Indian sitar.) When I play a loud note, especially pointing toward the zither, every string capable of harmonizing with the overtones in the trumpet note vibrates lightly, and with so many strings sounding, the zither exhales a cloud-chord in answer to the trumpet, like an echo. I have always loved that. An echo—in so many ways.

Great-Grandma Wilmesherr’s Zither

My recent post about the rebirth of my old guitar, and reuniting with its voice, reminded me of a similar triumph of heart and intuition over conventional economic thinking.

In this case, it’s a much, much older instrument—a Columbia Special model no. 2 fretless zither, ca. 1900, which has apparently “kept its value.” Thanks to a small investment from me. On ebay, I’ve seen similar zithers (same brand, about the same size, model, and vintage) that are pretty crapped-out (cracked, no strings, missing parts) being sold for around $30 or $50.Ones in decent shape start around $125 and go up from there, depending, in large part, on how fancy or unusual they are. And mine is in pretty good shape. Hey, you can tune it, play it, and all the parts are there.

I’m betting this zither dates to about 1895 to 1908, and there’s a good chance it was purchased via a Sears catalog. Zithers were also often sold personally, for example by door-to-door salesmen, apparently often by college students making money over the summer. Also, naturally, music dealers also sold them in their shops.

Columbia zithers during this period sold for between 4 and 8 dollars. An old ad I saw online has the no. 3 model selling for $6, so the no. 2 (which this is) was probably at the lower end. If you bought music with it, it would’ve cost extra. Adjusted for inflation, $4 in 1900 would be worth about $124 today—see what I mean? It’s held its value.

Specifications. It’s a “Columbia Special” zither no. 2, manufactured by the Phonoharp Company based in Boston. People today call these types of zithers “chord zithers” or “fretless zithers.” This name distinguishes them from so-called guitar zithers, which have a guitar-like fretboard on the long side that makes a portion of the instrument capable of being fretted and strummed something like a mountain dulcimer.

This is called a “chord” zither because there are dedicated groups of four strings on the long side, and each of these groups is an entire chord that can be strummed at once, as an accompaniment. In this instrument, there are four groups, thus four chords. From left to right (or outside to inside), the chords are C, G7, F, and Am. Which is to say, I, V7, IV, and vi. And that’s all you need to play songs like “Silent Night,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” “Old Hundred,” . . . hmm, even “I See a Bad Moon a-Risin’.” If you’re singing (and not trying to play) the melody, you can accompany yourself perfectly well with just those four chords. Ta-da!

We know how the strings are to be tuned because there’s a cardboard label attached along the base of the instrument that shows the note for each string. More on this in a second.

To the right of the four chords are fifteen melody strings—two octaves of C major scale, C to C to C: Do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti, do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti, do. It’s like having two octaves of just the white keys of a piano. Sorry, no sharps or flats! You’re pretty much stuck in the key of C major (or A minor), or maybe you can kinda fake it in the keys of F or G, if you skip the B flats or F sharps that are required by those keys. Or, you could retune those notes. Anyway, these melody strings, true to the name, are for plucking the melody with one hand, while you strum the chords with the other hand.

I should note that you can also pluck certain of the chord strings so you can add to the number of low notes you can play, but they’re out of sequence, and you have to know what you’re doing to descend below the C on the melody strings. You’ll have to pick the low B out of the G7 chord, the low A out of the F (or Am) chord, low G out of the G7 chord, low F out of the F chord . . . and whatever. It’s kind of cuckoo at some point.

These zithers were incredibly popular in the early 1900s. As ever, people loved music and wanted to be able to play an instrument in their parlors. Remember: homes had parlors in those days, because people entertained each other in the evenings. Family, friends, neighbors. There was no radio yet, so people had fun by reading, singing, acting, reciting poetry, you name it. Anyone who could play an instrument had a valuable skill!

One big attraction of a zither was that it offered chords as well as melody, something like a tiny piano, and everyone wanted a piano! But it cost a lot to put a piano in your parlor. Not only were pianos expensive, but also they took up a lot of space, were hard to move, required a specialist to tune (and repair), and everyone knew that you needed to practice like crazy to learn how to play it. And pay for lessons. Or, as one zither advertisement put it, “receive a musical education.” Sounds daunting, doesn’t it!

These zithers promised to be more affordable, and they were less expensive, more portable, and came with a new (new-new-new!) method of learning to play that (supposedly) bypassed the drudgery of learning to read music. Each of the melody strings was labeled sequentially with a number (the low C was “1,” the D above it was “2,” C an octave higher than the low C was “8,” etc.), and the zithers came with music notated especially for them. It was basically a sort of tablature, coded so that you could start learning “Yankee Doodle” by plucking the following strings in this sequence: 8-8-9-10-8-10-9, 8-8-9-10-8-7 . . . It’s basically a coded solfège system, with numbers 1, 8, and 15 as “do,” 2 and 9 as “re,” 3 and 10 as “mi,” etc.

Also, to show people which chords to play when, the four chords were numbered 1–4, and those numbers were marked below the music staff in the appropriate places.

To get people started even more easily, there were special cards printed and trimmed to fit underneath the strings that gave an even more visually intuitive way of learning.

So whatever happened to these zithers? They sound so pretty! Here’s what I think.

First, the autoharp, a closely related instrument, is a definite improvement, if all you want is chords. Press a button and then strum all the strings. The strings that don’t belong to a chord are simply dampened by the button mechanism. Press the “G” button, strum all the strings, and you hear a nice, full G chord. You don’t need much skill to figure it out, plus you get a lot more different chords to choose from, so you can play in lots of keys, and with other instruments, too.

Second, playing these fretless zithers is not as easy as their manufacturers made them out to be. You do have to practice a lot to get used to the distances between strings in order to play the melody you want. Which is to say, accuracy is a challenge. Also, the chord strings are grouped so closely together, it’s easy to accidentally pluck adjacent strings.

Additionally, it was probably a pain to tune these zithers. Today, you can use an electronic chromatic tuner that tells you when each string is in tune. In the early 1900s, you had to tune by ear (difficult for an amateur), and you had to get at least one of the notes correct with a tuning fork, pitch pipe, or some other instrument. If you had a piano around, you could tune it to that. But then, if you had a piano around, you probably didn't need a zither. Obviously, if an instrument is not in tune, it's not much fun to play.

Third, they made a confusing variety of zithers—even from the same company. Among Columbia Zithers, there were the 2, 2¼, 2½, 3½, 3¾ etc., plus the Guitar Zither, the Mandolin Harp, the Marxaphone, Celestaphone, etc. All with different configurations and capabilities. The play-by-number system meant that you had to be sure the music booklets you got would work with your instrument you had. Or else it meant that a big book of music might not have many songs that would work for your particular instrument: “Aw, shoot, this song only works for the Zither No. 3¾, and I have a 2.” How frustrating.

Fourth, and perhaps the biggest reason: musical tastes changed drastically in the first few decades of the 1900s, and a younger generation came of age. Zithers were great for playing simple folksongs, hymns, popular sentimental ballads, and so forth, but starting in the 1920s Americans were getting radios and beginning to love jazz! Tastes were changing; people were swingin’!

The Jazz Age is one reason why ukuleles became so popular in the 1920s: with just four strings, you can strum darn near any chord you want, even “weird” chords like diminished and augmented chords, and chords in unusual keys that require barring. These chords make amateur guitarists kind of flinch, but uke players have little problem.

So, while zithers were great for playing earnest, straightforward songs like “The Blue Bells of Scotland,” and “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home,” people were going nuts over tunes like “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’-Bye),” with its C#°7, G7#5, Eb°7, and other spicy chords. You just can’t play “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” without a bunch of accidentals.

Anyway, that’s what I think. Regardless, the zither is a treasure to me and a valued connection to my ancestors. More on that in my next post.