Harmonica

The harmonica is a free-reed wind instrument that produces sound when air is blown across its reeds, causing them to vibrate. Musicians hold the pocket-sized harmonica in one or two hands and blow into the instrument's holes. Sliding the harmonica to the left and right while blowing causes the instrument to produce different notes. Because musicians use their mouths to play harmonicas, the instruments are sometimes called mouth organs or mouth harps.

The ancestor of the harmonica is an ancient Chinese free-reed instrument called the sheng, which produced sounds in much the same way as a harmonica. European interaction with eastern Asian societies during the Middle Ages and the early modern era introduced free-reed instruments to Europe, but the first harmonica as it is known today was invented in Germany in the 1820s.

By the mid-1800s, musicians throughout Europe and the United States were playing harmonicas. The instrument became especially popular in America, where it was eventually incorporated into folk, blues, rock and roll, and other musical forms. The harmonica is one of the best-selling instruments in the world in the twenty-first century.

Background

The ancestor of the harmonica is generally thought to be the sheng, a free-reed instrument that ancient Chinese musicians were playing around 3000 BCE. Shengs looked nothing like harmonicas, but they produced sound in the same way—musicians blew air across a reed that was attached to the instrument at one end and free at the other. The air caused the free end of the reed to vibrate, and these vibrations made the sheng's sounds.

During the next several thousand years, European explorers traveled to China and other places in eastern Asia and experienced the cultures there. The explorers brought many Asian inventions back to Europe with them. Free-reed instruments such as the sheng had arrived in Europe by the 1600s. The instrument was not an immediate sensation among European musicians. In the late 1770s, the French missionary Pere Amiot began adopting the sheng's free-reed mechanics to create a more European-style instrument. Other European instrument makers attempted to do the same over the ensuing decades.

A commonly reported historical narrative claims that the German instrument maker Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann was the first to adapt the free reed for use in what became known as the harmonica. The story claims Buschmann patented the instrument in 1822. However, Buschmann's involvement in the invention of the harmonica cannot be verified.

Around 1825, the German instrument maker Joseph Richter devised a harmonica model that became the foundation for most modern harmonicas. The instrument was rectangular and about four inches long. It featured an inner chamber containing twenty reeds and flat metal covers over the top and bottom of the chamber. Holes in the front of the harmonica allowed musicians to blow air across the interior reeds to play notes. The harmonica was diatonic, which meant that each of the ten holes could be used to play two notes, one created by blowing and one created by inhaling.

Harmonicas were inexpensive to produce, and the instruments were selling well throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by the 1830s. In 1857, the German businessperson Matthias Hohner started a harmonica company of his own. He expertly marketed his product. Within a few years, Hohner's company had become the top seller of harmonicas in Europe. In the early 1860s, Hohner began selling harmonicas in the United States, where he hoped to find an audience among the country's sizable German American population. It was in the United States that the harmonica truly exploded as an instrument of popular music.

Overview

The use of the harmonica by European immigrants in the United States brought the instrument to a wider audience, and it soon became part of the country's burgeoning folk music scene. American folk music of the mid to late 1800s was a fusion of traditional European music and existing American musical styles. Early American players of the harmonica were soldiers, cowboys, and farmers, mostly from the American South and West. These people added the instrument to folk arrangements that included banjos and fiddles.

The harmonica also became a popular instrument among African Americans in the South. Many former slaves incorporated the harmonica into their distinctive blend of African music, religious hymns, and work songs. These musical arrangements were the roots of blues, which became its own musical genre in the early decades of the twentieth century.

One of blues music's most notable contributions to harmonica playing is the process known as note bending. This is possible only on diatonic harmonicas. Bending a note on a diatonic harmonica involves carefully controlling the pressure of one's breath so the air being blown into or sucked out of a hole alters the sound of the note normally produced by the reed in that hole. Bending harmonica notes is considered an essential skill in playing the blues harmonica, and it requires dedicated practice.

The sounds produced by note bending became essential to the blues as the genre developed a more urbanized quality in the 1940s and 1950s in cities such as Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois. Blues musicians began amplifying their harmonicas by cupping a microphone in their hands directly against the instrument. This fed the harmonica sounds through an amplifier and produced loud, concentrated notes that became hallmarks of the raucous Chicago blues of the 1950s.

Blues musicians who notably incorporated the amplified harmonica into their music included Little Walter, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Sonny Boy Williamson II. In the 1950s and 1960s, the harmonica was taken up by a diverse range of musicians in the genres of rhythm and blues, folk, country, bluegrass, jazz, and rock and roll. In the early twenty-first century, about ten million harmonicas were sold around the world every year. The United States accounted for about two million of these sales.

Bibliography

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