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30:20

Good morning, friends. Welcome to the Wednesday livestream from Dulcimer Crossing. I'm Erin May. I'm your hostess today. I just wanted to let you know, if you've been following Steve, Eulberg had surgery last week, and, he got to come home from the hospital yesterday.

He's doing fine. He's focusing on healing and recovering well. If you wanna read more about that, he has a CaringBridge page and you can find that information. He posted an update yesterday, but, he's doing well. I just get to be here while he works on his recovery process.

So I went on, deep dive down the rabbit hole last night that took me into learning about, bowing mountain dulcimers. And so I'm gonna share a little bit about what I found, because that sounds fun to me. When I go down a rabbit hole, then I like to share what I found. So hopefully, you enjoy that too. So I'm gonna start by just bowing my dulcimer a little bit so you can hear it.

Okay. So I was using a bow from a bowed eulberg. Actually, that's the bow that I have. I've tried violin, fiddle bows before, and there's kind of pros and cons to both. And when I looked up pictures and videos of people using bows on dulcimers, I saw both kinds of bows.

Actually, most of the historic pictures we have of, like, early bows being used were sort of curved bows like this, not the straight bow you would see, with a violin bow. So I, and I also read that if you hold it more in the middle than on the end of the bow, because of bowing forward and backward, that actually gives you better control. My bowing technique is not great. So that's definitely a work in progress for me. You may also have known that I wasn't playing on my regular dulcimer.

So the rosin that you put on the bow to make it grip the strings is sticky, which is what makes it grip the strings. And it leaves behind some sticky residue. So what I have done is I've taken this cardboard dulcimer, which, was a dear friend of mine's, and I have decided that this is my dulcimer I'm gonna try bowing on. And so then I don't have to worry about picking with my pick over the sticky residue from the rosin. You can also just clean your strings with a cloth after you play with a bow.

So, it's fine to use all one dulcimer, but, that's the reasoning for that. So I was first introduced to the sound and the concept of the bow dulcimer through David Schnaufer. His project, the Tennessee Music Box, included bowed dulcimer sounds, and he would often tour with a Tennessee Music Box style dulcimer, and he would sometimes bow it when he did his concert. And so I heard him bowing the dulcimer. And the story that I remember him telling is that in his research, they started finding these box shaped dulcimers.

So they were just rectangular boxes as opposed to having the curves, and they were finding them largely around middle and eastern Tennessee. And so in that part of the Appalachian region, you got the boxes. So they're often now called Tennessee music boxes, and he started collecting them, trying to seek them out, find them, and learn more about them. And they started to notice that some of them had white powdery kind of residue under the strings where you would normally strum, and it wasn't matching up with the kind of flex off of a quill, a turkey quill that you would get. It was sticky.

And so they did some more research and figured out that it was rosin and realized that they were probably being played with a bow. So he started trying it, and the sound that you get from bowing the dulcimer with all of the drone strings simultaneously is pretty similar to a bagpipe. And so, there's some information, from him about that. So, I wanted to play you just a little bit of that recording that was my first recording with the a Tennessee Music Box being played with a bow. So this is David Schnaufer's recording of 10,000 charms off of the Tennessee Music Box album.

Alright. So that's David Schnaufer. I also found a video of Steven Seifert bowing, Tennessee music box. So you can actually watch and see the technique, and he would have learned that technique pretty directly from David. So I'm gonna show you that one in a second.

So you can just see a little of it. And I'll put these links in the chat comments too. It took me a while to find this one because he doesn't say Beau Dulcimer in his title. Alright. So that's, Steven Seifert playing a Tennessee music box, and you can see from that video that he was using a fiddle bow.

You can see that he had it on a table in front of him. And that's always how David played it too. It was actually in on a table in front of him. And the frets were only under the melody string, which was typical of the earliest mountain dulcimers. Yes.

I will I will put the links to the videos in the chat after I after I finish up. Yeah. For sure. So they're not fretted differently. The Tennessee music boxes they found with the rosin and the Tennessee music boxes they found without them were basically the same.

So the instrument itself was not constructed any differently. So then I went diving a little bit into what are these sort of ancestral instruments that came before the mountain dulcimer as we know it in Appalachia, and would would there have been bows involved in any of those instruments? So I picked up my copy of Ralph Lee Smith's The Story of the Dulcimer book, which is the second edition is still in print. That's what this one is. And so you can check out that book.

It's a cool resource because he has lots and lots of pictures of the instruments that probably led to the development of the mountain dulcimer. And these are in sort of music cataloging systems, generally referred to as schtteholt. But one of the interesting things in this book is that he found no record of anyone in America actually calling them a Scheitholdt. And when I was in Germany, I found very few people referring to any of these instruments by the name Scheitholdt. That seems to be more of an academic name for it than a colloquial or folk name for it.

So he said in in some places there's no reference to what it was called. It just was an instrument that they had. So I find that really interesting. But here's a picture of these schaitholds on the top and you can see that there's a short bow next to one of them. And these were all found in the United States.

You can see in the top two, on this end, there was sort of a short stick, or I think they were a piece of bone, actually, from what I've been finding, like a, like a rib bone or, or something from, you know, an animal that they had butchered, and they would save the parts, right? And they would use all of the parts, and they would use those as plectrums in some places. And then of course we see the turkey quill as a plectrum, but the bow shows up with that instrument in this picture. So, and then underneath of that are some different shapes they found of, historic instruments that led to the development of what we now call mountain dulcimers. So, yeah, the frets were only under the high string and all of those early instruments, not all the way across the fretboard.

And they were often like fence staple or something, so they were pretty rough hewn. Yeah. So then I went digging and everywhere that historically I had heard of shiteholdt, I had only seen it played with a feather quill. And like I said, I found that one picture in the Ralphie Smith book that had it. And then I found, a video of someone playing what they refer to as a shiteholdt with a bow.

And so I'm gonna try to share a little bit of that and and singing with it. Let me make sure it's sharing the sound. Hopefully, you'll be able to hear this one a little bit better because I think I didn't press all the right buttons before. Okay. So, current video of someone playing a replica schreithold instrument, you could see that it had 3 strings, just like our mountain dulcimers now tend to have 3, sometimes 4 strings, and it also had the diatonic fretting and only under the melody string.

And, actually, the fretboard was only under the melody string in that one, and the other two strings didn't even have, like, the fretboard underneath them. In the Tennessee Music Box, you saw the fretboard had all the strings under it, but the frets were only under that one string. So those are just little different kind of developmental things that happened. We also know that one of the related instruments to the current day mountain dulcimer is the Icelandic langspiel, and the langspiel was historically always played with a bow or usually played with a bow as far as I have seen. I apparently didn't save that video where I could grab it really, really quickly.

So I will, I will look up a video of the lang spiel and and send to you. I also went deep down the rabbit hole of langolikes, which are not a bowed instrument, but are the kind of Swedish and and Norwegian ancestry instrument. And I'm finding all of my links about the langolike and not all of my links about the langolike, But, I first learned about the Lang spiel actually at the Walnut Valley Festival in Windfield, and there's a group of people from Iceland who tend to come to that festival. And, the first time I met them, they asked me what I play, and I said mountain dulcimer, and they kind of stared blankly at me, which is not surprising because even in America, very few people actually know what it is. I certainly didn't expect someone from Iceland to know what it is.

And I pulled it out of the case and their eyes lit up, and they said, it's a Langspiel. And we've they're almost have almost died out in Iceland. There's almost no one playing them, but we know this instrument as an Icelandic folk instrument. And so I thought that was really cool and really special to be able to share that kind of cultural connection with them, between Iceland and the United States. And, again, the lang spiel was always bowed.

Then there's also the development of Ken Blum's bowed dulcimers, which he designed as sort of a crossover instrument specifically to be played with a bow and to create an easier to play sort of threaded version of a violin or cello. And I found a really cool documentary with him where he kind of talks about how he started, getting into this idea of playing of of building these boat dulcimers. So I'm not gonna play the whole thing of that, but I just wanted to play, like, a little smidgen of that for you. Bow dulcimer is a modern form really of the viola da gamba. It's a bowed instrument that allows people who don't have huge amounts of time, cash, or inclination to devote themselves to the violin, the viola, or the cello to get a reasonable sound out of a bowed instrument and do all those things without too much hassle.

Okay. The documentary that little bit of a documentary, it's only 4 minutes long. It's worth checking out. It's called the Bode Dulcimer Project. I'll put the link in the chat, but I wanted to let you guys hear how Ken Bloom plays the the Bode Dulcimer and how it sounds.

So here's a snippet of Ken Bloom and, Rachel Sprinkle who has studied the bow dulcimer technique under Ken, playing a duet of of the Scottish tune, the slocket light. It's really pretty. I could keep listening to that for one time. So that's the bow dulcimer, and the viola da gamba was a sort of renaissance era instrument that was essentially a fretted violin. And so this idea of sort of combining the idea of, like, a zither instrument with a fretboard down the center of the instrument and the bowing and the viola da gamba kind of idea of having a fretted bowed instrument merges in Ken Blum's version of the bowed dulcimer.

And, you know, he'll say he created that particular instrument, but he created it out of ideas from these historic instruments, which is the same thing that happened with the mountain dulcimer. And when you kind of go back and forth from records we have of old instruments and forward to the way, like, traditions have developed over time, you can see all of these intersections between the different, cultural ideas. And Ralphie Smith says in the story of the dulcimer book that, it's pretty clear that the German would have been the primary instrument probably that was influencing the development of the Appalachian dulcimer just because of the prevalence of finding the historic schightholdt in the same regions that you then find the new new versions of mountain dulcimers developing. But you also sometimes find the Swedish instruments and the Icelandic instruments, and certainly there were mixing and molding of cultures and ideas. And it's, I don't know, really beautiful and fascinating to me to put all of those pieces together and see how modern traditions develop and keep changing and keep developing and new things come forward.

And, actually, Jamie, I love that you were, posting the links to your videos because your videos of how how you were experimenting with different kinds of bows on your dulcimer were also some that I watched in this process of delving into the information. And the the guitar bows that Jamie tried were, like, really, really short. And the the bowed sultry bow is, for me, the right length for a bow if I'm sitting the instrument in my lap, which is how I've been taught to play the mountain dulcimer right as an instrument that sits in your lap. But a lot of the earlier instruments that we've found and that we have documentation of, we're pretty sure they set them on a tabletop. Right?

And the Langelay, the Swedish one, when I was looking at pictures of it, there's actually a picture of the the bottom side of it, Langley, and it doesn't have a back on it. It was just like the top and the sides of the instrument and the back was nothing, and then they would set it on the table and the table would become essentially the bottom soundboard for it. I also heard a story about a place in Belgium where the barns would have a loft and the musicians for the dances would play in the loft and the dulcimer player or the maybe they would call it Hummel or it might have been called an epinette des Vosges in that region. Again, the names kind of go with regions, but not super concretely from what I can tell there. They would actually take the instrument and they would it had, like, little nails basically sticking out of it and they would put it into the floorboards of the hayloft.

And, so, the whole entire loft became the amplification for this dulcimer like instrument. And so this very quiet instrument, this quiet unassuming instrument that sits on your lap, when you put it into the floorboards of the hayloft, was loud enough to be the primary melody instrument for the dancers without any kind of amplification and electricity. So I thought that was really fascinating. We kind of we kind of associate dulcimer with, like, quiet, peaceful. It's it's among the quieter of all the instruments, but it might not have always been the quiet instrument, and I find that really fascinating too.

So, yeah. Bowing a dulcimer. Why not give it a try? I'll play you one more little little bow dulcimer ditty. Again, I'm not the best at it, but it's fun to play.

Why not? So I have this dulcimer tuned to DAA right now, just like a stand a standard mountain dulcimer tuning. The tune that just came out was that was the a part of Nell the Catfish to a Tree. So that's actually a modern tune, but it fell fell out of my dulcimer and sometimes that's the way you catch them. They just fall out and you pick them up.

Alright. Bowing the dulcimer. If you go try it, let me know how it goes. Jamie, I can't wait to see what you come up with with the new bow that you just got. So that's awesome.

Bow sultry bow, fiddle bow, whatever kind of bow with some horsehair you can find laying around. Give it a shot. See how it goes. I would love to hear. Maybe there'll be a whole resurgence of bowing mountain dulcimers and even more of kimblooms bow dulcimers out there it is pretty fascinating, to listen to the different sounds that you can make so thank you for joining me for the Dulcimer Crossing Wednesday livestream.

We are playing it by ear on whether I'll do the livestream next week or Steve will. So it'll be a surprise. You don't you won't know it in advance. We'll just have to you'll have to tune in and see, upcoming events that you should be aware of. The registration for Quarantine, the big online dulcimer festival just opened on Sunday.

So their registration is open now, and there are lots of available workshops. The dates for Quarantune are February 13th through 15th. The next Dulcimer Crossing live workshop will be on Thursday, January 23rd with Sarah Minor. Sarah Minor has placed in the top 5 in the National Mountain Dulcimer contest the last 2 years. She's a Texas player, and she has a really cool system she uses for, helping visualize how standard notation and mountain dulcimer tablature and playing intersect using a color method.

That's really awesome. So, if you're interested in learning more about how Sarah approaches her dulcimer playing and music making, check out the, Dulcimer Crossing workshops. That's the next live workshop. And then Dulcimer Crossing is in the process of planning and, putting together the first all day hammered dulcimer day event called hammered dulcimer bells and whistles, and that will be in March on March 8th. And registration is open now for that.

If you check out the dulcimer crossing website, you can find the details for the 1st hammered dulcimer day, an all day event featuring hammered dulcimer instruction from 6 different hammered dulcimer players. So those are the things to look forward to. We'll see you back here next week for the Wednesday livestream. Thanks for being here. Bye y'all.

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