Music mastery
Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library.
WORDS Wendy Riley
The Jew’s-harp is an instrument that boys are particularly fond of twanging, but the music that is generally got out of it is not nice.”
The ancestor of the mouth organ, the Jew’s Harp, is one of the oldest instruments in the world. By the time European whalers, traders, and sailors brought it to Aotearoa New Zealand, the instrument had been in use in various forms throughout the settled world for millennia.
Neither a harp nor of Jewish origin, the name is believed by some to be a corruption of the French “jeu-troupe”, meaning “toy-trumpet”.
One of the most famous stories of a Jew’s Harp in European history concerns a soldier in the service of the 18th Century Prussian King Frederick the Great. On guard under the King’s window, he played the Jew’s Harp masterly and impressed Frederick, who gave him his discharge and 50 gold coins.
In 1826, a German pastry chef further “elevated a vulgar toy to the rank of a beautiful and perfect musical instrument.” Karl Eulenstein modified his instruments and composed melodies. Playing “sixteen to twenty different harps, substituting one for the other”, he could reach four octaves. However, playing the Jew’s Harp severely damaged Eulenstein’s teeth. When his last undamaged upper tooth broke off, he turned to his guitar and music teaching for his living.
Māori had their version of the Jew’s Harp, called rōria and made of kareao (supplejack), wood, or bone. Rōria have a slender tongue and are plucked to create sound through vibration. The mouth is used to manipulate the sound and produce various resonances. Consequently, the European Jew’s Harp was popular among Māori, who were readily able to master it.
Okains Bay Museum has three Jew’s Harps in its collections. One is from the Ngāi Tahu kāika at Pā Bay, found with several items of European origin among a collection of ‘classic’ Māori material excavated there in the late 1950s. It is reflective of the period of cultural encounters that shaped the lives of Ngāi Tahu on Banks Peninsula in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.