DATE: Tue, 24 Nov 1992 12:15:12 CST From: Dick Anderson Subject: James Girton questions re: Overblows
James Girton asks:
* Did Levy say anything in his video about where the concept of overblowing * came from? Did he invent it? It seems like such a bizarre concept and * such an amazing coincidence that it just _happens_ to fill in the "extra * notes" that are missing from the diatonic harmonica. Maybe they were * actually designed to do it...
Howard Levy claims, (and properly so), to be the first person to use the overblow musically to play chromatically on any 10 hole harmonica. He says that after playing the piano for a long time, he took up the harmonica and somehow he just knew the notes were in there. (It sounds like divine inspiration to me.) He began to do the "overblow" in 1969 and has become a master mechanic of harmonicas to boot.
As far as whether the Richter tuned 10 hole harp was designed to do this. I don't think Herr Richter was thinking of anything but cold hard CASH when he put this tuning together. He wanted an instrument for the masses. Inexpensive. One which would play the popular two chord music of the massses. A nice C chord anywhere you blew and a nice G chord in the bottom draw holes. (That's why he compromised the full scale in the lower register.) As for why he turned around the tuning on the upper register so that the draws are lower than the blows. He did that for economy. It would have taken one more hole to continue the scale the same way as the "solo tuned" 12 hole harps.
He probably didn't know that you could "bend" notes let alone "overblow" them.
The invention of the harmonica is a chronicled in the "Harp Handbook". It is fascinating that a boy's toy (Buschmann) inspired a musician and businessman (Richter) to re-design it for function and economy. Which inspired a manufacturing genius (Hohner) to mass produce the instrument and export it to America. Where it touched the lives of the common man in post-civil war America and was affordable by the newly freed slaves so they could add their African music influence to the create moaning bends of "the blues". And that after more than 50 years, a kid from Chicago, (Levy), would find the "other half of bending" by overblowing the low notes and overdrawing the higher notes. What a long strange trip it's been!!!
When I explain this history of the harmonica to my beginner classes, I use the word "Serendipity". The harmonica is much more than the inventor foresaw because of the discoveries of an unlikely group of people driven by many disconnected events. An improbable success, smiling smugly at us from behind the glass counters of nearly every music store in the world.
love to talk harps,
dick....
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Dick Anderson CCMO New Matls Engineering Telnet 229-3110 Hewlett Packard Direct Dial 1-303-229-3110 3404 E Harmony Road HPDESK dick_anders~p4000 Fort Collins Colorado 80525 mail anders~pfcpq.fc.hp.com
