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.