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From: Winslow Yerxa <76450.32~ompuServe.COM>
Date: 03 Dec 96 03:40:26 EST
Subject: 100-hole chromatic

TO: internet:harp~arply.com

Pat Missin writes:

OK - yu suused me owt: I cat'n type! I was reefering to a
100-hole crhomatci, obviuosly.

Aw, Pat! You keep giving all the good stuff away. Now people are
gonna start asking, so I might as well tell them . . .

The 100-hole chromatic has a long history, but almost none of the
early instruments survive. A harmonica with 100 holes in one row
is, naturally, very long, and it could easily take an entire tree
branch to make the comb. Unfortunately, the first ones were made
in Greece, where firewood is very scarce. Even a plastic-combed
model would not be safe. Having centuries ago burnt up all the
available wood (100-hole chromatics included), they are now
burning all the discarded plastic they can find.

Originally the 100-hole chromatic was made with 1 reed per hole.
The inventor, Gouernios (sometimes transliterated into the latin
alphabet as Wvernius), had the idea of making an instrument with
a chromatic range of 9 full octaves:

11 semitones x 9 plus top octave note = 100

This didn't go over well in the land of Pythagoras, and the
omission only added fuel to the flames. Anecdotal tales of
Wvernius perishing on a sacrificial pyre with his instruments,
however, appear to be apocryphal.

However, the idea did not die. Phoenix-like, it rose again in
China, where an early member of the Huang family, tired of
stacking several individual diatonic harmonicas in the
traditional Asian practice, got the idea of stacking multiple
reedplates and combs into one instrument. By combining 11 combs
and 12 eight-note reedplates (actually, 8 eight-noters and 4 plates
with 9 notes - I am told the extra 4 notes had little utility but
were a matter of feng shui), he came up with an enormous dagwood
sandwich. Each reed was in its own cell, to eliminated the need
for windsavers -replacing them would have been a major
undertaking.

Each reedplate was tuned in thirds over two octaves, to a major
scale, giving all the chords in that scale. All 12 major scales
were included, one on each reedplate. With a curved mouthpiece
and reedplates ground to be flush with the lacquered and polished
surface, the player could glide over the surface to play any
diatonic chord laterally, and any scale vertically (due to a
cunning vertical arrangement of reedplates. Harmonic minor
versions were also produced but, for practical reasons, a tremolo
version (i.e. 200 reeds) was never attempted, and, despite its
enormous versatility, this design never caught on in Asia.

Later, in post-WWI Vienna, microtonal music began to make serious
inroads. Rather than bend notes to get the quarter-tones, an
Austrian composer took his cue from Renaissance keyboard makers
who split the black keys into separate flat and sharp keys, and
came up with a microtonal slide chromatic with four reedplates
and three combs, and not two slide positions (out and in) but
four (out, in, double in and all the way). Basically, one set of
reedplates was tuned to C and C# like the standard chromatic,
while the other set was tuned a quarter-tone sharp from these.

Technically, this should really be considered a 13-hole
chromatic. With the mouthpiece and slide assembly removed,
though, it did have 104 separate reed cells. For reasons
never explained, the last four cells were blank.

Look at a regular 12-hole slide and you'll see a sort of checkerboard
alternating pattern - where the upper hole is exposed, the lower
is covered, and vice versa. But with this instrument, the pattern
of exposed holes ran in a cascading stairstep pattern, ascending
from left to right. The idea was to start with a 4-note tone
cluster of qaurter tones, then selective remove the lower notes
from the cluster one by one. However, as this slide pattern needed
considerable room, the physical placement of the reed cells
was stretched out so that the instrument ended up about a
half-meter long. Need I comment on its neglected state?

All these instruments have been solidly documented, and
corroborated by reliable witnesses. What has never been proven is
the hula harp, although the rumor has an irritating way of
persisting. About 1956, during the height of the hula hoop craze,
a European immigrant in Los Angeles is said to have tried
embedding pitch pipes in brightly colored plastic hoops about 14
inches in diameter (large enough to encircle the average head). A
hundred notes were said to have been included, in sequences that
would play popular tunes of the day. However, no-one could quite
get the hang of moving their heads in a way to get the thing
rolling around at mouth level while getting enough of an
embouchure going to play a tune. Those who insist on the
veracity of this story claim that disused hula harps started
turning up at love-ins and other psychedelic gatherings about 10
years later, where two or three stoned-out attendees would hold a
hula harp while one of their companions stood in the middle and
whirled around while playing glissandos on the now badly
out-of-tune instruments. (The entirely spurious story of a
head-mounted rack version for folk guitar players has been hotly
denied even by those who stoutly attest to the other parts of this
pitiful delusion.)

By the way, I might as well tell you that if you visit the
Harmonica Museum in Trossingen, you probably won't see these on
display. If you ask the curator about them, he's sure to deny
everything and treat it as a joke. You must understand that this
is an important part of his job. You might as well go to the
Vatican and ask to see their vast collection of erotic art. It
just *isn't done* - except for serious scholars with the right
credentials, on a need-to-know basis. Open this stuff up to the
slavering public and they'd soon be overrun by weirdos.

Now, Pat, are you satisfied? Gee, and I thought you were my friend . . .

Winslow Yerxa
Harmonica Information Press
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