Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

Author:Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bathroom Readers’ Press

Largest free concert ever: Rod Stewart’s 1994 concert in Brazil. 3.5 million people attended.

“Fixed-reed” instruments, like the clarinet and the saxophone, use a reed that vibrates against some other part of the instrument. On the clarinet or sax, it’s the mouthpiece, which is attached to a tube with holes in it. Cover the holes and you change the pitch.

The sheng had multiple free reeds set inside bamboo tubes, which allowed chords (multiple notes that sound good together) to be played. For thousands of years, the sheng and similar instruments were played all over China and Southeast Asia.

FREEING THE PITCH

Fixed-reed instruments had been played in Europe for centuries (and some say that even those were introduced from Asia), but free-reeds had not. In 1776 French Jesuit missionary Pierre Amiot sent several shengs from China to Paris—and people who heard them loved them. Within a few years, European instrument makers were building their own free-reed devices, making instruments such as the harmonium and the reed organ.

In 1821 a 16-year-old named Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann was experimenting with different ways to combine pitch pipes in order to create a new instrument. He soldered together 15 pipes of different pitches, similar to the sheng and, without knowing it, made the next big step toward the modern harmonica.

THE INS AND OUTS

Buschmann’s harmonica, known as the aura, was an immediate hit, and soon other instrument makers began experimenting with the design. In 1825 a man named Richter (his first name is unknown) came up with the idea of a 10-hole, 20-note configuration, one row of reeds activated by inhaling, the other by exhaling.

Richter arranged the notes with the common person in mind: no matter where the mouth is placed, it would always play notes that were in harmony—that sounded good—together, whether inhaling or exhaling. That’s why the instrument is called a “harmony-ca”—it’s always in harmony. Richter’s three-octave model has barely changed at all. (Pretty impressive when you consider that a grand piano has an eight-octave range but weighs about 1,000 pounds—4,000 times as much as a harmonica.)

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