by Peter Berryman
Maine Attraction
Have you ever wanted to come down the stairs with an object so anciently rooted, gorgeously crafted, mechanically complex, and musically weird that conversation slaps to a halt and ears bug out of their sockets? Well hang on to your folding chair because I have a contender.
Last Thursday, my musical partner Lou and I played a house concert in Camden, Maine, at the home of one of our all-time favorites, the wonderful singer and songwriter Anne Dodson and her equally musical husband Matthew Szostak.
After the show, as we yakked with Anne about such musical concerns as health catastrophes and computer crashes, Matthew drifted upstairs and came back down with a small soft case whose contents completely fried my Speculator.
Swaddled in the softshell nest was what appeared to be Jules Verne's idea of a robotic lute: a hurdy gurdy, built (and sold) by Matthew himself. Not since my last visit to the Experimental Aircraft Association blowout in Oshkosh have I seen such beautifully crafted functional weirdness. The darn thing had inlays, a hand crank, a whirling wheel, strings going every whichaway, a keyboard, tuning pegs, bridges, and even the carved wooden figurehead of a woman peering up at our awestruck mugs.
Matthew explained that the phrase "hurdy gurdy" is often mistakenly applied to the more prosaic "barrel organ" -- that music-box mounted on a monopod that comes with a monkey and a tin cup -- which is actually a completely different instrument, requiring less talent than working a boombox. The hurdy gurdy, however, is a true real-time musical instrument, requiring keyboard-skill with the left hand and crank-skill with the right, which is not so easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy.
As you might expect of one who has the patience and passion to build one of these gizmos, Matthew is highly skilled at playing the thing. Even as one who has spent the last twenty five years riding shotgun to an accordion, I have to say that the music of the hurdy gurdy is as peculiar and strangely unsettling as its visuals. The sound is very much like that of bagpipes accompanying a coffee can full of bumblebees duct taped to the back of a mandolin sliding face-down across a bedspread of torn sandpaper. Like the accordion, the fuzzed electric guitar, and the crumhorn, it's a musical experience that requires some mental adjustment to appreciate, but that makes it all the more intriguing. I do suspect that it has persisted through the centuries not in spite of but because of its disturbing, almost angry sound. As a matter of fact, my big fat Random House says that the name "hurdy gurdy" is a mid-eighteenth century corruption of the Scottish "hirdy girdy" which means "uproar," influenced by the phrase "hurly burly."
So how does this machine work? For a wonderful, clear description complete with diagrams and arrows, Matthew's web site is the place to go. But here's an overview:
As can be seen in this photo of Matthew and his instrument, the overall shape of many hurdy gurdys is like an oversized round-backed mandolin, with a crank at the butt end. This crank, turned by the right hand, spins a shaft upon which is mounted a wooden wheel rising at right angles to the strings out of the face of the instrument, like twirling toast out of a teardrop shaped toaster.
The wheel's edge is resin-coated. One or two melody strings
rub against this wheel as it is cranked, and are thus caused to
make a sound as are the bowed strings of a violin.
Melody is achieved by manipulation of a keyboard by the left hand,
whose keys are attached to mechanical prods which finger the melody
strings, effectively reducing their length, causing them to vibrate
at the frequencies needed for the notes of the melody. The effect
of this arrangement is as though an infinitely long bow is dragging
nonstop across the fingered strings of a fiddle.
At the same time, there are one or more "drone" strings which are not fingered, but are continuously activated by the wheel, adding to the bagpipey sound.
A further defining feature of the hurdy gurdy sound is the "trompette" string, another high droning string which travels across the whirling wheel. The big surprise feature of this particular string is its bridge, called (because of its shape) the "dog," which unlike the fixed bridges of the other strings, is not fixed but is free to buzz against the face of the instrument, driven by the trompette string's vibration. The varying speed of the crank, and thus of the wheel, causes this dog to growl more or less angrily. Moreover, with a sort of flicking motion I watched Matthew incorporate in his cranking, the dog can be made to vibrate in a percussive manner, adding a sort of snare effect to the whole shebang. This machine has its own rhythm section.
As if that weren't enough, some hurdy gurdys also have a number of sympathetically vibrating strings which don't drag across the wheel but sing on their own, driven by and amplifying the vibes of the party going on all around them.
These marvelous ships have been bobbing along the outer reaches of musical history for a thousand years; my sincere thanks to Matthew for bringing me up to date, for permission to mine his web site for much of this information, and for turning me on to the gloriously cranky world of hurdy gurdyness in the first place. Be forewarned, one of these days I may come down the stairs with one myself.
Links and thanks to...
Matthew
Szostak:
http://www.midcoast.com/~beechhil/vielle/index.html
...And Anne Dodson:
Anne
Dodson:
http://www.midcoast.com/~beechhil/ADodson/index.html
Photo courtesy of Matthew Szostak.