Post by Michael Messer on Nov 2, 2019 13:34:19 GMT
Something weird, wonderful and kind of interesting for a rainy Saturday in South East England.
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The Paul Gardie/Harmony Orchestral Harp Guitar
By Gregg Miner - November, 2019
The strangest harp guitar – or perhaps guitar of any type, of any period – most people have ever seen...
Were they serious?!
Actually...yes, very.
This is the story.
I remember seeing a small photo of it decades ago in a guitar book, then again in 2000 in the book Dangerous Curves (the catalog of the well-known BMFA exhibit put on by my friend Darcy Kuronen, forever afterward to be known as "a guitar guy."). But the instrument was still so obscure that Darcy never knew at the time that the instrument was patented.
That was the first of the two specimens to come to light; the other was rumored to exist (a few had seen it), but was secreted away in storage until the family decided to finally part with it, giving me the incredible opportunity to acquire it. A third specimen was seen by my friend Michael Schreiner "in a Wurlitzer music store window in Chicago about 1982. I was in town for the NAMM show and the store was located next to the 'L' (elevated train)." Another – possibly the same one ("in pieces") – was spotted by a different person a long time ago in a Chicago music store.
Eight were allegedly built, in Harmony's high end custom shop, by their master craftsmen with the finest materials. None were believed to have been ever marketed or sold. Instead, they may have remained in the possession of William Schultz, founder and president of the Harmony Company of Chicago. Schultz presumably gave them to special friends and relatives, and one certainly to the inventor, blind virtuoso multi-instrumentalist Paul Gardie.
I can tell you this. They sound fantastic. And yes, there is an incredible stereo effect, both for the listener and player.
At right is the entry I wrote for the 2017 catalog of our harp guitar exhibit at Carlsbad's Museum of Making Music: Floating Strings: The Remarkable Story of the Harp Guitar in America.
On this page are newly published photos we took for the book. (Copyright and courtesy of The Museum of Making Music)
Below - until I have the time to do a proper rewrite - are copies of the blogs I wrote about it that tell the sequence of events (with current updates) – a remarkable story in itself!
Here’s a story I want to do before it gets too old (it’s almost 2 months already). It’s taken me awhile to finish the research, and I’m still missing one critical piece of information on the instrument’s label (or label of the other specimens) – but I’ll eventually get that and add it later (sloppy, I know, but that’s how this blog thing seems to work).
These pictures were recently sent to me by a couple different friends. I’m not sure if that’s the owner himself, but apparently he sent the photos to a couple guitar stores (including Gryphon) looking for information. 8/1/14: As I discovered (and suspected), this was Stewart Hart in Maine, then acting custodian of the instrument for owner Jeff Hart, his cousin. 11/1/19: This is the instrument I now own.
I confirmed that this is indeed a new (third, I believe?) specimen of the hilariously over-the-top “pushmi-pullyu” harp guitar. We think that these were all made by the Harmony company (this would have been early, in their high-end custom shop). As I said above, I’ve never seen the proof (label image), though it is more than likely.
This unmistakable instrument is familiar to most of us. I’m still trying to remember/track down my previous awareness of it (feel free to help!). I vaguely recall some old book or article showing one of these. I don’t remember if that writer knew, or only speculated that it was made by Harmony. More recently, when I saw the Dangerous Curves book, I also remember thinking that theirs was a new specimen. Perhaps I, or someone, had compared images of the 2 specimens and noted differences – ornamentation, or something else. The specimen loaned for the Dangerous Curves exhibit in Boston, which appears in the book, was a very nice
The owners (Alex and Dave Usher) later brought it to the Winfield festival in 2006, where a newsman snapped Stephen Bennett playing it for the local paper, and roving HG.net reporter Joe Morgan captured these images. That’s the owner, Dave, at left. The new one above looks like an exact duplicate of the Usher’s instrument, with the very fancy and intricate pearl binding. As I said, I can’t seem to locate an image or notes on any other specimen(s). Can anyone help me out here? I’d like to contact the Ushers for label info, and of course, the owner of the recent new specimen. And if anyone can track down the older published image/specimen that I’m thinking of, please let me know. (11/1/19: As soon as this blog appeared, the Usher family got in touch and were immensely helpful. Ultimately the Harts contacted me as well. As for the "old book image," that now appears below.)
It’s amazing, frankly, that more than one of these was ever made. I mean, seriously! It’s equally mind-boggling that it was ever dreamt up, designed and patented. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the inventor was blind. True! The patentee, one Paul Gardie, is somewhat infamous from an appearance in The Cadenza magazine. But this photo has been floating around for ages with no one really knowing the circumstances. With the help of the new BMG Bibliography by the heroic Jeff Noonan, and (somewhat) complete digital images and PDFs of the Cadenzas & Crescendos (thanks to Arian Sheets and myself, Paul Ruppa, and later, Paul Fox), I was able to find several entries for Gardie in the journals.
The first appearance was in the June, 1915 Cadenza journal, in their coverage about the Guild Convention held the previous month. This is where the infamous photo (first) appeared. The multi-page minutes and activities of the convention first mention him being admitted as a new Professional Member, and include a short speech he made to the group about a Chicago mandolin club he had recently taken over leadership of. He is later pictured with his HG, a specimen seemingly identical to the Usher instrument. Nothing is said about the exceedingly strange “new instrument.”
A month later (July), the competing Crescendo journal does their report of the convention, where, interestingly, they list the Harmony Mfg Co and Paul Gardie separately as exhibitors (coincidence? I think not). They highlight Gardie as “one of the especially interesting features,” describing him as “the blind guitarist from Chicago” and the “inventor of the Gardie Orchestral Harp-Guitar.” They praise his instrument very highly, now noting the unusual shape, but without being disparaging. No mention is made as to the manufacturer. They describe him as an excellent player (“one of the finest we have heard”), despite the fact that he was unable to see the fingerboard. He played both the “better class” of music but also several ragtime pieces (“unusual on the guitar”). What a sight (and sound) that must have been! I can’t tell from the photo what his strings were – the top strings seem to be very thin, indicating steel, but these old images are always misleading. Guild members played their “better class” of music almost exclusively on gut strings, and I would suspect Gardie did the same – even with the ragtime repertoire.
One month later, in the August Crescendo, a presumably different reviewer gives an even better review of Gardie’s performance at the Convention banquet. Clearly, he was the hit of the convention.
Several months later (Jan, 1916), Crescendo ran the same Cadenza photo, now calling Gardie “the phenomenal harp-guitarist” (spelling his name wrong; Gardy).
Later that year (Sept, 1916), Cadenza mentions an upcoming November recital-concert with Gardie as one of two soloists, “with orchestra assisting.” He seems to have kept himself busy after this, as there is next a 1922 patent for a new banjo head he invented, and in 1928, the Music Trade Review had an announcement of Harmony’s new line of Roy Smeck instruments (hmmm, there’s Harmony again), with the demonstrations – on all instruments – being done by Gardie. So clearly, Gardie was still player enough to pinch-hit for the great vaudeville star.
Getting back to the matter at hand, it seems to me that this instrument is really the “Gardie Orchestral Harp Guitar,” not the Harmony harp guitar (even though they may have built more than one). Presumably, Gardie commissioned or partnered with Harmony to build him the first. Beyond the Cadenza and Crescendo entries, our smoking gun is the patent – applied for on May 24, 1915 (before its first appearance at the Guild Convention) and issued to Gardie on May 16, 1916. Besides the infamous body outline with its full, second guitar-shaped bass sound chamber, the patent features an intriguing hollow neck (not the only time this feature appears in patents). This was to provide even more resonant air chamber volume. A second page of drawings shows the 2 body chambers with full open airways through the neck, but I can’t imagine how the headstock could’ve been hollowed out anywhere. Perhaps one of John Thomas’ famous guitar X-rays is in order!
Again, hearkening back to my very first blog article on patents, I find it inexplicable that the patent was unknown to me until exactly one year ago (2009), submitted by my colleague Paul Fox). 11/1/19: As I mentioned above, it seems that no one – including curator/scholar Darcy Kuronen of the BMFA during his Dangerous Curves exhibit – had uncovered the patent, other than of course the late Michael Holmes, who listed it in his 2011 patent index (though, with no image and only the entry "guitar," no one would have located it easily). Witnesses on the patent include a C (?) Gaylord, Irwin Bowman, E. D. Steele, A. C. Fischer, and D. C. Thorsen – were any of these Harmony employees? The detailed patent drawing must surely be patterned on the actual finished instrument. Assuming that Harmony built Gardie’s own instrument, did they put their standard label in it? And could one of the surviving instruments be Gardie's own?
I still wonder whose specific design it was. If Gardie, what was his reasoning?! As a scholar and historian, I’m of course fascinated and seriously interested in this aspect. But the devil in me can’t resist the obvious jokes about whether it turned out like this because Gardie couldn’t see what his collaborators were drawing...
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This continues at - harpguitars.net/history/harmony/harmony.htm?fbclid=IwAR1XbzXGS_eZLDegMcx_LtTIZ0aLJ4IpRKAtSvzIck_1CcuckxakTCOinmE
--------------------
Shine On
Michael
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The Paul Gardie/Harmony Orchestral Harp Guitar
By Gregg Miner - November, 2019
The strangest harp guitar – or perhaps guitar of any type, of any period – most people have ever seen...
Were they serious?!
Actually...yes, very.
This is the story.
I remember seeing a small photo of it decades ago in a guitar book, then again in 2000 in the book Dangerous Curves (the catalog of the well-known BMFA exhibit put on by my friend Darcy Kuronen, forever afterward to be known as "a guitar guy."). But the instrument was still so obscure that Darcy never knew at the time that the instrument was patented.
That was the first of the two specimens to come to light; the other was rumored to exist (a few had seen it), but was secreted away in storage until the family decided to finally part with it, giving me the incredible opportunity to acquire it. A third specimen was seen by my friend Michael Schreiner "in a Wurlitzer music store window in Chicago about 1982. I was in town for the NAMM show and the store was located next to the 'L' (elevated train)." Another – possibly the same one ("in pieces") – was spotted by a different person a long time ago in a Chicago music store.
Eight were allegedly built, in Harmony's high end custom shop, by their master craftsmen with the finest materials. None were believed to have been ever marketed or sold. Instead, they may have remained in the possession of William Schultz, founder and president of the Harmony Company of Chicago. Schultz presumably gave them to special friends and relatives, and one certainly to the inventor, blind virtuoso multi-instrumentalist Paul Gardie.
I can tell you this. They sound fantastic. And yes, there is an incredible stereo effect, both for the listener and player.
At right is the entry I wrote for the 2017 catalog of our harp guitar exhibit at Carlsbad's Museum of Making Music: Floating Strings: The Remarkable Story of the Harp Guitar in America.
On this page are newly published photos we took for the book. (Copyright and courtesy of The Museum of Making Music)
Below - until I have the time to do a proper rewrite - are copies of the blogs I wrote about it that tell the sequence of events (with current updates) – a remarkable story in itself!
Here’s a story I want to do before it gets too old (it’s almost 2 months already). It’s taken me awhile to finish the research, and I’m still missing one critical piece of information on the instrument’s label (or label of the other specimens) – but I’ll eventually get that and add it later (sloppy, I know, but that’s how this blog thing seems to work).
These pictures were recently sent to me by a couple different friends. I’m not sure if that’s the owner himself, but apparently he sent the photos to a couple guitar stores (including Gryphon) looking for information. 8/1/14: As I discovered (and suspected), this was Stewart Hart in Maine, then acting custodian of the instrument for owner Jeff Hart, his cousin. 11/1/19: This is the instrument I now own.
I confirmed that this is indeed a new (third, I believe?) specimen of the hilariously over-the-top “pushmi-pullyu” harp guitar. We think that these were all made by the Harmony company (this would have been early, in their high-end custom shop). As I said above, I’ve never seen the proof (label image), though it is more than likely.
This unmistakable instrument is familiar to most of us. I’m still trying to remember/track down my previous awareness of it (feel free to help!). I vaguely recall some old book or article showing one of these. I don’t remember if that writer knew, or only speculated that it was made by Harmony. More recently, when I saw the Dangerous Curves book, I also remember thinking that theirs was a new specimen. Perhaps I, or someone, had compared images of the 2 specimens and noted differences – ornamentation, or something else. The specimen loaned for the Dangerous Curves exhibit in Boston, which appears in the book, was a very nice
The owners (Alex and Dave Usher) later brought it to the Winfield festival in 2006, where a newsman snapped Stephen Bennett playing it for the local paper, and roving HG.net reporter Joe Morgan captured these images. That’s the owner, Dave, at left. The new one above looks like an exact duplicate of the Usher’s instrument, with the very fancy and intricate pearl binding. As I said, I can’t seem to locate an image or notes on any other specimen(s). Can anyone help me out here? I’d like to contact the Ushers for label info, and of course, the owner of the recent new specimen. And if anyone can track down the older published image/specimen that I’m thinking of, please let me know. (11/1/19: As soon as this blog appeared, the Usher family got in touch and were immensely helpful. Ultimately the Harts contacted me as well. As for the "old book image," that now appears below.)
It’s amazing, frankly, that more than one of these was ever made. I mean, seriously! It’s equally mind-boggling that it was ever dreamt up, designed and patented. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the inventor was blind. True! The patentee, one Paul Gardie, is somewhat infamous from an appearance in The Cadenza magazine. But this photo has been floating around for ages with no one really knowing the circumstances. With the help of the new BMG Bibliography by the heroic Jeff Noonan, and (somewhat) complete digital images and PDFs of the Cadenzas & Crescendos (thanks to Arian Sheets and myself, Paul Ruppa, and later, Paul Fox), I was able to find several entries for Gardie in the journals.
The first appearance was in the June, 1915 Cadenza journal, in their coverage about the Guild Convention held the previous month. This is where the infamous photo (first) appeared. The multi-page minutes and activities of the convention first mention him being admitted as a new Professional Member, and include a short speech he made to the group about a Chicago mandolin club he had recently taken over leadership of. He is later pictured with his HG, a specimen seemingly identical to the Usher instrument. Nothing is said about the exceedingly strange “new instrument.”
A month later (July), the competing Crescendo journal does their report of the convention, where, interestingly, they list the Harmony Mfg Co and Paul Gardie separately as exhibitors (coincidence? I think not). They highlight Gardie as “one of the especially interesting features,” describing him as “the blind guitarist from Chicago” and the “inventor of the Gardie Orchestral Harp-Guitar.” They praise his instrument very highly, now noting the unusual shape, but without being disparaging. No mention is made as to the manufacturer. They describe him as an excellent player (“one of the finest we have heard”), despite the fact that he was unable to see the fingerboard. He played both the “better class” of music but also several ragtime pieces (“unusual on the guitar”). What a sight (and sound) that must have been! I can’t tell from the photo what his strings were – the top strings seem to be very thin, indicating steel, but these old images are always misleading. Guild members played their “better class” of music almost exclusively on gut strings, and I would suspect Gardie did the same – even with the ragtime repertoire.
One month later, in the August Crescendo, a presumably different reviewer gives an even better review of Gardie’s performance at the Convention banquet. Clearly, he was the hit of the convention.
Several months later (Jan, 1916), Crescendo ran the same Cadenza photo, now calling Gardie “the phenomenal harp-guitarist” (spelling his name wrong; Gardy).
Later that year (Sept, 1916), Cadenza mentions an upcoming November recital-concert with Gardie as one of two soloists, “with orchestra assisting.” He seems to have kept himself busy after this, as there is next a 1922 patent for a new banjo head he invented, and in 1928, the Music Trade Review had an announcement of Harmony’s new line of Roy Smeck instruments (hmmm, there’s Harmony again), with the demonstrations – on all instruments – being done by Gardie. So clearly, Gardie was still player enough to pinch-hit for the great vaudeville star.
Getting back to the matter at hand, it seems to me that this instrument is really the “Gardie Orchestral Harp Guitar,” not the Harmony harp guitar (even though they may have built more than one). Presumably, Gardie commissioned or partnered with Harmony to build him the first. Beyond the Cadenza and Crescendo entries, our smoking gun is the patent – applied for on May 24, 1915 (before its first appearance at the Guild Convention) and issued to Gardie on May 16, 1916. Besides the infamous body outline with its full, second guitar-shaped bass sound chamber, the patent features an intriguing hollow neck (not the only time this feature appears in patents). This was to provide even more resonant air chamber volume. A second page of drawings shows the 2 body chambers with full open airways through the neck, but I can’t imagine how the headstock could’ve been hollowed out anywhere. Perhaps one of John Thomas’ famous guitar X-rays is in order!
Again, hearkening back to my very first blog article on patents, I find it inexplicable that the patent was unknown to me until exactly one year ago (2009), submitted by my colleague Paul Fox). 11/1/19: As I mentioned above, it seems that no one – including curator/scholar Darcy Kuronen of the BMFA during his Dangerous Curves exhibit – had uncovered the patent, other than of course the late Michael Holmes, who listed it in his 2011 patent index (though, with no image and only the entry "guitar," no one would have located it easily). Witnesses on the patent include a C (?) Gaylord, Irwin Bowman, E. D. Steele, A. C. Fischer, and D. C. Thorsen – were any of these Harmony employees? The detailed patent drawing must surely be patterned on the actual finished instrument. Assuming that Harmony built Gardie’s own instrument, did they put their standard label in it? And could one of the surviving instruments be Gardie's own?
I still wonder whose specific design it was. If Gardie, what was his reasoning?! As a scholar and historian, I’m of course fascinated and seriously interested in this aspect. But the devil in me can’t resist the obvious jokes about whether it turned out like this because Gardie couldn’t see what his collaborators were drawing...
----------------------------------------------
This continues at - harpguitars.net/history/harmony/harmony.htm?fbclid=IwAR1XbzXGS_eZLDegMcx_LtTIZ0aLJ4IpRKAtSvzIck_1CcuckxakTCOinmE
--------------------
Shine On
Michael
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