Building repertoire on Jew’s harp

Ånon Egeland. Photo by Tellef Kvifte.

By Ånon Egeland
Translated by Lucy Moffatt

The older recordings of fantastic Jew’s harp players like Mikkel Kaavenes, Aani Rysstad and Andres Rysstad are an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This music calls for tunes to be varied both melodically and structurally so that they sound fresh and new every time they are played. The bottom line is that it’s perfectly fine for performers to ‘recycle’ older recorded Jew’s harp material: That alone offers more than enough challenges and subtleties for a lifetime of meaningful exploration.

That said, there aren’t very many older recordings and those that do exist are limited to a small number of regional styles. At the same time, many Jew’s harp players are keen to use their own local repertoire, where older Jew’s harp recordings may be notable by their absence but fiddle material is plentiful. The solution for many players is therefore to do what Jew’s harp players have done since time immemorial: transfer the repertoire from other instruments, usually the fiddle.

But the process of transferring tunes poses certain problems, especially now, when most people are surrounded by music that is rarely very compatible with the Jew’s harp. That’s why it may be helpful to offer a few basic facts.

Know what notes you can play

First and foremost, it is obviously important to know which notes are available for melodic Jew’s harp playing. Some notes – especially the fourth, sixth and seventh scale degrees – noticeably deviate from the twelve-tone equal-tempered (TET) norm, while other degrees are missing altogether. Note that the Jew’s harp has two different seventh degrees, one minor (overtone 14) and one major (overtone 15). The first of these is produced with the epiglottis open, the other with the epiglottis closed. The octave below only contains the low, minor seventh. The sixth is also missing in this octave.

The table below may be helpful. It shows how much a given note on the Jew’s harp deviates from the equivalent note on a TET instrument. The cent is the standard unit for measuring tonal nuances that do not exist in the TET system. 1 cent is 1/100 th of a semitone. A TET semitone is, in other words, 100 cent, while an octave is 1200 cents. The table clearly shows that the largest and most audible deviations are in overtones 11 and 13, both of which lie roughly midway between the minor and major variants of the corresponding degrees on the TET scale.

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Melodies that require the use of the TET variants of these degrees often work poorly on the Jew’s harp and can prove particularly confusing in a teaching context. Instead of showcasing the overtone qualities of the Jew’s harp, the use of such tunes makes the Jew’s harp sound ‘off-key’ or out of tune. That’s why it’s best to work with music that is in more or less the same tonal landscape as the Jew’s harp. Luckily there’s a wealth of such tunes in Norwegian traditional music, especially in the vast fiddle repertoire.

Edit the tune

Some challenges do arise: as a rule, fiddle tunes have larger compass than the Jew’s harp. In addition, a key variation in many fiddle styles is to shift the tonal centre, playing the same motif with a different tonic. This is impossible on the Jew’s harp (unless you switch between two or more harps, Austrian style). The solution must therefore be to edit the tune to the best of your ability: filter out the modulated sections and pick out the essential motifs. Vocal versions of fiddle tunes can often be helpful examples in this context.

Here is an example of one such adaptation. The starting point is a transcription made by Olaf Frøysaa in 1922. At that time, he had been awarded a state stipend to collect music in his hometown of Iveland. The tune is not known in the living tradition. You will find the original, XII Halling, here. And here you can hear an interpretation of the halling arranged for two fiddles and a violoncello da spalla.

Unfortunately, Frøysaa’s transcription contains an error that often recurs in his manuscripts: for some reason, all the hallings, even those that should be conventionally notated in 6/8, are consistently written in 2/4. We know this because many of the tunes are still well known today. That is not the case here, however, so the only reason to claim that the 2/4 time signature is wrong is that something about it jars rhythmically, whereas the tune works perfectly well in 6/8, it works very well. (The well-known tunes that Frøysaa notated wrongly give us insight into his reasoning, allowing us to transfer the unknown tunes to a more suitable notation as well.)

Two parts and coda

This tune is also a good example of the kind of modulation mentioned above. It actually consists of just two parts + a short coda. The two parts are first played on the upper strings, but then moved down to the middle strings, with identical fingering. In other words, the whole tune is transposed down a fourth and becomes twice as long.

My version for the Jew’s harp leaves out the modulation, retaining only the two parts and the coda. The tune also calls for a minor seventh, so overtone 14 works well. As I mentioned above, this degree doesn’t occur in the older recorded Jew’s harp material – but using it here is precisely what gives the tune a little touch of innovation.

We don’t know whether Olaf Frøysaa’s source ‘double-stomped’ in his hallings – i.e. stomped twice per beat (either on the first and third quaver or the first and second). In the transcription of my Jew’s harp version below, I have simplified matters by going for a single stomp on the first quaver. The stroke pattern consistently follows the bowing pattern, i.e. the accented changes in bowing direction, on the fiddle. This applies to the whole tune, with the exception of the coda, which makes it a great introduction to this type of halling!

Start off by establishing the stomping. Count steadily and stomp as shown in bold:

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Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Continue with the same underlying pulse and clap the stroke pattern shown in bold:

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The result is visualised below:

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

This particular combination of 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 against 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 1 should prompt a nod of recognition from anyone with a passing knowledge of African rhythms. It would of course be exciting if there was actually a connection between the musical cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and this type of Norwegian halling.

However, I very much doubt there is any such ancient cultural link, and choose instead to see it as a fascinating example of how very different cultures can develop the same musical ideas independently of each other.

You can hear my Jew’s harp interpretation of the tune here.

And, finally, here is a template for my version: