Jew’s harp and sheet music
Here at Munnharpa, we’ll be regularly publishing transcriptions of Jew’s harp tunes. So here are a few thoughts about using sheet music, along with concrete explanations of the thinking behind the notation.
By Ånon Egeland
Translated by Lucy Moffatt
It’s easy to see problems with using sheet music in Jew’s harp teaching. The notes on the instrument are ‘invisible’ and can’t be pointed out through fingering, keys or the like. They have to be heard. In this respect, the Jew’s harp is very similar to singing.
The question of whether there is even a place for sheet music in Jew’s harp teaching – or traditional music teaching in general – is a relevant one, but we’ll leave that discussion aside for now. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of listening when learning to play the Jew’s harp. Nonetheless, though, that doesn’t negate the value of using sheet music. In the context of the Jew’s harp, this means having to learn to recognise the individual degrees and their ‘flavour’ – which isn’t as hard as it sounds, although it does take practice.
The benefit from day one is that the process sharpens your ear. That is something that will be invaluable to any performer. Even people who don’t read music will find that transcriptions can be a useful tool when learning new material, since they make important aspects of the music visible – especially the kinds of details that are often a source of uncertainty for beginners, such as which notes are closed, and where to place the strokes.
About the notation
I have chosen G as the tonic for several reasons:
It is in the middle of the ideal range for melodic playing.
Jew’s harps tuned to G have become something of a standard, in teaching contexts among others.
The score has no accidentals, which makes it neater.
The notation presupposes that each degree represents harmonics, with the deviation from equal-tempered tuning that this implies (see the table in the article about building repertoire). A sharp sign (#) is used to distinguish harmonic 15 from harmonic 14.
Strokes occur at the beginning of each slur.
Placing the melodic register for the Jew’s harp in the correct octave isn’t as easy as you might think. I’m not the only person who hears harmonic 8 on a G harp as g/G3 (a fourth below middle C = c’(C4). That should mean that the Jew’s harp had a tonic of 24.5Hz, which is suspiciously low. However, measurements that Emeritus Professor Tellef Kvifte took using modern digital tools in January 2025 tell a different story. Harmonic 8 on a G instrument lies at 784 Hz, which should imply a tonic at 98Hz. In other words, it looks as if the Jew’s harp and the composition of the harmonic plays tricks on our ears when we try to decide which octave we’re hearing. I challenge anyone with a G Jew’s harp and a tuning app on their mobile phone to try for themselves!
Luckily, this doesn’t have any major implications for the notation. We can simply hop over that question by saying that the notated g’/G4 = harmonic 8. That way, the G notation can also stand in for all Jew’s harps, regardless of their tuning. Even so, the question of what we’re actually hearing – or the difference between humans and machines – is an exciting one. For me, this is yet another example of how unfathomable the Jew’s harp is!
The score below shows the compass for a Jew’s harp in G, up to harmonic 20. The first three harmonics are rather theoretical and aren’t used in practice. Harmonic 4 is possible to produce, at least on a high pitched instrument. In our context, however, there is no room for either it or harmonic 5, because the notes in this part of the harmonic series are too far apart to play melodies that would be meaningful in the traditional Norwegian style. Black noteheads indicate that the epiglottis is closed.
