["STRAW-FIDDLERS."]
On a certain cold morning in the October of 1824 a young man, scarcely eighteen years old, but with a thin face full of premature intelligence and a poetic sort of beauty, was hurrying through the street of Sklow, in Poland, his cloak wrapped closely about his slender figure, his head thrown back, the felt hat not concealing his eager anxious dark eyes, which, roving here and there, were in reality absent in their expression as young Gusikow reflected on a verdict just passed on him by a prominent physician.
For some weeks he had been suffering from pains in his chest, increased whenever he played his beloved flute, and that day J——, the doctor, had declared that the musician must at once give up his work.
Gusikow, boy that he was, had a young wife awaiting his return in a little house, which he entered with a sad enough expression, for what would they have to depend upon if he was forced to abandon his performances in the theatre, his lessons, his concert tours?
I fancy Michael and Marie Gusikow, poor children, were miserable enough that morning. But genius, especially when it is musical, will not be subdued, and in his wretchedness the lad searched the garret for an old "strohfiedel" he had cast aside long ago as an instrument too insignificant to be of any value. I cannot tell you precisely the origin of the strohfiedel, which was made of strips of fir on a straw frame-work, but it belongs to a most interesting "family" of instruments, the present generation being the wooden and glass xylophones, which we hear nowadays in every orchestra, while one of its prominent traditions is the unexpected producing of musical sounds on glasses partially filled with water, and which has suggested to innumerable boys and girls, I am sure, experiments, from the trial on a finger-bowl to a whole row of glasses on a smooth piece of board. In the quaint old town of Nuremberg some instruments are preserved, known now as harmonicas, which were played with the moistened finger; but I think the instrument best known is that which the composer Gluck is said to have invented, and which, by the name of the "musical glasses," was all the rage in England in 1746. Gluck arranged twenty-six glasses irregularly filled with clear spring water, and upon these he played a variety of music with his fingers slightly moistened. In the Vicar of Wakefield the fashionable London ladies are described as able to "talk of nothing but high life ... pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses," while Horace Walpole, writing the same year, 1746, to his friend Mann, refers to Gluck's performance, but says he thinks he has heard of something of the same kind before. But it was to our own Benjamin Franklin that the improved or perfected harmonica is due. He was in London eleven years after Gluck's visit, and found a Mr. Puckeridge performing on these musical glasses, very well, it is true, but Franklin at once said that something better could be done.
Accordingly he put his scientific wits to work, and the result was an instrument he called the armonica, to which an "h" was added, as being more appropriate, and on this many celebrated musicians performed. It consisted of basins of glass strung on an iron spindle, the lower edge dipped into a trough of water. As an improvement on Gluck's method, Franklin regulated the pitch of the tone by the size of the glasses, not the amount of water in or under them. Mozart and many other well-known composers did not disdain to write for the harmonica, and in 1788 a "Method" for students was compiled. The very simplicity, however, of the instrument made it easy of imitation and improvement. Wood and glass with straw were combined under various names. In the beginning of this century Ernst Chladni, who is called the father of modern acoustics, devised an instrument of glass cylinders, wood, etc., which he called the euphon, from which he evolved another, remarkable chiefly for its power of increased and diminished sound, which he named a clavi-cylinder. Dr. Chladni travelled about Europe with this instrument, giving lectures on acoustics, which started much of the research we benefit by to-day; but unfortunately for certain important work he had on hand, Dr. Chladni died suddenly in 1827.
To return to Gusikow and his little wife, we can fancy the young people on that chill October day accepting the dismal fact that the young artist must lay aside his flute, yet realizing that only by means of music could he earn a living. He took the strohfiedel to pieces, worked over it, practised on it, and at last devised certain valuable improvements; indeed, so far expanding and increasing its power and musical importance that he was talked of by some almost as though he had invented it, and presently he was known as a straw-fiddler of wonderful ability, while his playing revived interest in all the old dulcimers and psalteries, which the straw-fiddle closely resembles.
Gusikow continued to work over his strohfiedel, to improve it, and from his suggestions we have a variety of the wooden, glass, and straw instruments heard on all sides to-day. To what perfection he might have brought his crude materials I can scarcely say, for he was busy with new designs when, in 1837, he fell ill with his old foe, pulmonary trouble, and died at Aix-la-Chapelle, in October of that year, in the thirty-first year of his age.
If boys—and I know more than one of them—have contrived to make a violin out of an old cigar-box and some rough materials, surely they might do something with the ideas suggested by strohfiedels, and their family connections in wood, glass, and chamois-leather hammers.