Harmonica

• 1. Introduction

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  The harmonica fits in a pocket, yet it has been called the Mississippi saxophone. Behind each of its small holes sits a chamber holding at least one reed, a flat elongated spring of brass, stainless steel, or bronze. When a player's breath reaches that reed, it alternately blocks and unblocks a slot, and a tone leaps out. It is also known as the French harp or the mouth organ, and it turns up in blues, folk, classical, jazz, country, and rock. How does a strip of metal the size of a fingernail bend its own pitch until it wails? Why do players still dip their harmonicas in water? And how did an instrument once dismissed as a toy for the poor end up in the pocket of an American president and in works by serious classical composers? Those questions run through the chambers of this small, stubborn machine.

• 2. The Anatomy Of A Reed

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  Twenty reeds and ten air passages make up the most common harmonica, the diatonic Richter-tuned instrument often called a blues harp. Each reed is secured at one end over a slot that serves as an airway, leaving the free end loose to vibrate. The player uses lips and tongue to direct air into or out of the holes along the mouthpiece, which covers one edge of the instrument for most of its length.

  Reeds carry their pitch in their own dimensions. A reed that is longer, heavier near its free end, or more flexible near its fixed end produces a lower pitch. A shorter, lighter, or stiffer reed produces a higher one. Tuning a harmonica means changing one of those three properties, reed by reed.

  Mounting position decides how a reed answers the breath. On most modern harmonicas a reed is affixed above or below its slot rather than in the plane of the slot. It then responds more easily to air that pushes it into the slot, behaving as a closing reed. That single design choice lets a blow reed and a draw reed share one air chamber and sound separately, with no flaps of plastic or leather needed to silence the idle one. That sharing of a chamber is exactly what makes the instrument's signature trick possible.

• 3. Bending The Note

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  Bending is the technique that gives the blues harp its wail, a drop in pitch produced by adjusting the embouchure. On chromatic models, or any harmonica fitted with wind-savers, a player can bend an isolated reed. On a diatonic or other unvalved harmonica, a player can instead lower or raise the pitch produced by a pair of reeds sharing one chamber, the move called overbend, overblow, or overdraw. In those two-reed changes the normally silent reed does the work, the opening reed sounding while its partner is being played, such as the blow reed speaking while the player draws.

  Nineteen notes sit ready on the diatonic harmonica, but players reach for more. The term bending was possibly borrowed from guitarists, who literally bend a string to shift its pitch, and it produces the glissandos heard across blues and country harp. In the 1970s, Howard Levy developed the overbending technique, the family of moves also known as overblowing and overdrawing. Combined with ordinary bending, it let players reach the entire chromatic scale.

  Position is the other way a single key of harmonica multiplies its range. By choosing a different keynote, a player works in a different mode. The Mixolydian mode, whose root is the second draw or third blow, yields a major dominant seventh key prized by blues players for its dominant seventh note. The Dorian mode, rooted on the four draw, produces a minor dominant seventh key. Players built a slang around these positions that can baffle other musicians, calling first position straight, second position cross, and third position slant.

• 4. Comb, Plates, And Covers

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  The comb is the main body of the instrument, and its name may come from its resemblance to a hair comb. Assembled with the reed plates, it forms the air chambers that house the reeds. Combs were traditionally cut from wood, but are now also made of plastic, specifically ABS, or of metal, including titanium for high-end instruments.

  Wood and water have a long, awkward marriage inside a harmonica. A wooden comb can absorb moisture from the player's breath and from contact with the tongue, swelling enough to make the instrument uncomfortable, then contracting and threatening the air tightness. In chromatic harmonicas, whose dividers between chambers are thin, swelling and shrinking can crack the comb, since nails hold it immobile, and the cracks cause disabling leakage. Some players once soaked their valveless wooden diatonics in water to swell the seal tight, and modern players still dip their harmonicas for the way it affects tone and the ease of bending notes.

  The reed plate gathers several reeds into a single housing, usually of brass, with steel, aluminium, and plastic used occasionally. Reeds on the inner side of the plate, inside the comb's air chamber, answer blowing, while those on the outer side answer suction. When the plates are bolted to the comb they can be replaced one at a time, useful because reeds drift out of tune with normal use and some notes fail sooner than others. The all-plastic harmonica designed by Finn Magnus in the 1950s broke from this entirely, molding reed and reed plate from a single piece of plastic.

  Cover plates sit over the reed plates and shape the tone, since they project the sound. Open stamped designs of metal or plastic simply give the player something to hold, while enclosed designs such as the Hohner Meisterklasse and Super 64 or the Suzuki Promaster and SCX offer a louder quality. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, covers were not uncommonly fitted with special features such as bells that a button could ring.

• 5. Plugging In

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  Marion "Little Walter" Jacobs played his harmonica into a "Bullet" microphone marketed for radio taxi dispatchers, and the instrument has never sounded the same since. That microphone gave his tone a punchy midrange that could carry over an electric guitar. Tube amplifiers added their own growling overdrive when cranked, lending body, fullness, and grit. Cupping his hands around the instrument, Little Walter built a flexible chamber that produced a powerful, distorted sound reminiscent of a saxophone, the source of the nickname Mississippi saxophone.

  Later players stacked on effects units, including reverb, tremolo, delay, octave, overdrive, and chorus. John Popper of Blues Traveler uses a customized microphone that bundles several of these into one handheld unit instead of a chain of separate boxes. Many players still favor tube amplifiers over solid-state, hearing the vacuum tubes as warmer and more natural in their overdrive. Guitar amplifiers such as the Kalamazoo Model Two, the Fender Bassman, and the Danelectro Commando have all been pressed into harmonica service. Some folk players go the other way and use a plain vocal microphone such as a Shure SM 58 for a clean, natural sound.

  The neck rack solves a different problem. It clamps the harmonica between two metal brackets on a curved loop that rests on the shoulders, freeing the hands to play another instrument such as an acoustic guitar. The original racks were bent from wire or coat hangers. The device became a tool of folk musicians, one-man bands, and singer-songwriters including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Eddie Vedder, and blues singers Jimmy Reed and John Hammond Jr.

• 6. A Family Of Forms

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  Forty-eight chords can live inside a single chord harmonica, laid out in four-note clusters, each sounding a different chord on inhaling or exhaling. The chromatic harmonica takes a different route to range, using a button-activated sliding bar to redirect air to the chosen reed-plate so that all the flats and sharps become available. Its 12-, 14-, and 16-hole models are tuned to equal temperament and let a musician play in any key with one instrument.

  The tremolo-tuned harmonica carries two reeds per note, one slightly sharp and one slightly flat, and the beat between their waveforms creates a wavering, warbling sound. Orchestral harmonicas, by contrast, are built for ensemble playing. The horn harmonicas common in East Asia use a single large comb with blow-only reed plates top and bottom, and their larger reeds and enclosing horn give a timbre that often stands in for a brass section. The polyphonia lays all twelve chromatic notes in a single row.

  Newer designs keep arriving. The ChengGong harmonica pairs a 24-hole diatonic body, ranging from B2 to D6 across three octaves, with an 11-hole sliding mouthpiece that yields 24 chords. The Suzuki SSCH-56 Compact Chord packs 48 chords into a 14-hole chromatic enclosure. The pitch pipe sits at the simplest end, a specialty harmonica that gives singers and players a reference pitch, so close to its cousins that early pitch pipes differed from harmonicas mainly in name.

• 7. From Vienna To New Jersey

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  Around 1820, free-reed designs began appearing in Europe, drawing on instruments like the Chinese sheng, which the French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, who lived in Qing-era China, had helped make known. Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann is often cited as the inventor of the harmonica in 1821, though others built similar instruments at the same time, and in 1829 Charles Wheatstone produced a mouth-organ he named the Aeolina.

  The instrument first surfaced in Vienna, where harmonicas with chambers were sold before 1824. In 1826 Joseph Richter created Richter tuning, also credited with inventing the blow and draw mechanism, and his tuning was eventually adopted nearly universally. Copying spread fast. The violin manufacturer Johann Georg Meisel of Klingenthal bought a chambered harmonica at a Braunschweig exhibition in 1824, and with the ironworker Langhammer had produced hundreds by 1827. In 1830 the Trossingen cloth maker Christian Messner copied one his neighbour had brought from Vienna, and by 1855 Trossingen held at least three harmonica businesses, of which only C. A. Seydel still operates.

  In 1857 Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker from Trossingen, began producing harmonicas and became the first to mass-produce them. He began supplying the United States by 1868, and by the 1920s the diatonic harmonica had largely reached its modern form. Hohner first made the chromatic harmonica in 1924. The center of the trade has since spread to South Korea, Japan, China, and Brazil, while Hohner remains the dominant manufacturer in the world.

  The United States once had two notable makers, both in Union, New Jersey. The Magnus Harmonica Corporation, whose founder Finn Magnus is credited with developing plastic harmonica reeds, was one. The other was the Wm. Kratt Company, founded by the German-American William Jacob "Bill" Kratt Sr., which began with pitch pipes and in 1952 secured a patent for plastic combs. The most recent American contender, Harrison Harmonicas, folded in July 2011, and in October 2012 a Beloit, Wisconsin investment corporation, R&R Opportunities, bought its assets to study reviving the Harrison B-Radical.

• 8. From Toy To Therapy

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  Abraham Lincoln carried a harmonica in his pocket, and the instrument gave solace to soldiers on both the Union and Confederate sides of the American Civil War. Frontiersmen Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid played it too. Yet for years the harmonica was still regarded as a toy and associated with the poor, even as the first jazz and traditional recordings appeared in the United States in the mid-1920s. Those included "race records" with solo work by DeFord Bailey and hillbilly sides by Frank Hutchison and Gwen Foster, and it was in those years that players developed tongue-blocking, hand effects, and the second position known as cross-harp.

  Radio helped lift the instrument's standing. A New York program called the Hohner Harmony Hour taught listeners to play along and gained wide popularity after the 1925 White House Christmas tree was adorned with fifty harmonicas. By the 1930s the harmonica's versatility had caught the attention of classical musicians, and the American Larry Adler became one of the first to perform major works written for it by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Benjamin.

  In East Asia the instrument grew its own traditions. The harmonica reached Japan in 1898, where the tremolo harmonica was the most popular form. In 1913 Shōgo Kawaguchi, known in Japan as the Father of the harmonica, devised a tuning better suited to Japanese folk tunes, and in 1931 Hiderō Satō announced a minor key harmonica. In Hong Kong, players such as Lau Mok and Fung On promoted the chromatic harmonica, and the Chinese YMCA Harmonica Orchestra, begun in the 1960s, grew to 100 members.

  The harmonica even reached the lungs of patients. Playing it means inhaling and exhaling strongly against resistance, building a strong diaphragm and deep breathing, an exercise pulmonary specialists compare to a PFLEX inspiratory muscle trainer used to rehabilitate COPD patients. When President Ronald Reagan suffered a punctured lung in the 1981 attempt on his life, his breathing therapist was Howard McDonald of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, whose director Pierre Beauregard hoped the episode might win the group a chance to play at the White House, a chance that never came.