Idiosyncrasies and Fascinatin’ Rhythms
Music for Banjo, Jew’s Harp, Flexatone, Historical Keyboards, and Calliope
The composer must always be conscious of instrumental colour and be prepared to make use of the more rarely used instruments. Indeed, if the theft of an antique instrument happened to occur in one of our museums … [we should] suspect a composer of performing the deed.
ELDON RATHBURN1
A distinguishing feature in many of Rathburn’s scores is his nostalgic engagement with instruments commonly associated with folk and domestic music. Folk, popular, and country music, household pianos, a long-standing make-your-own music tradition, and a strong value placed on music education – both private and in the public education system – were all well-established features of musical life in Saint John in the early twentieth century.2 “Mother used to play the piano, square dances and popular music,” Eldon recalled in later years. “Some of that music is coming back to me, maybe because I’m getting older … banjos and Jew’s harps in particular.”3
Banjomania
It is clear that the banjo played a prominent role in the musical-cultural context into which Eldon was born and in which he had his earliest musical experiences. He had further exposure to the banjo during the 1930s when he toured as a pianist with Don Messer and the Lumberjacks. Together with the piano, the banjo was an ideal instrument for music making in the home, in church basements, and in public dance halls. With the advantage of portability and a unique sound that carried far, it was also especially well suited to outdoor settings and barn dances. Virtually from the time of its invention the ubiquitous banjo was used to accompany fireside singalongs in New Brunswick’s lumberjack camps, where music was an important diversion that made daily life tolerable. “Crusty old [logging] foremen were known to hire a good singer,” we learn from Donald MacKay’s The Lumberjacks, “even if he was not much of a logger.” “We had more entertainment in the pine camps than you’d have in town … some of the greatest musicians you’d ever hear tell of.”4 Figure 7.1 shows a remarkable and intricately composed photograph of hamming banjo players and a mock conductor rafting on a calm Saint John River. This snapshot, captured by the prolific Fredericton photographer George T. Taylor ca. 1880, conveys some of the jolly spirit of the New Brunswick banjo craze of the late nineteenth century.5
Figure 7.1 • Hamming banjo players and mock conductor pose for a photograph while rafting on a calm Saint John River near Fredericton, circa 1880s. Reproduced from a glass negative.
It is impossible to appreciate the history of banjo music in New Brunswick without considering the impact made by the arrival of the province’s so-called “Black Loyalists.” On 30 June 1779, when the American Revolutionary War had passed the tipping point, Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of the British army, issued a decree from his headquarters at the Philipsburg Manor House in Westchester County, New York. Clinton’s “Philipsburg Proclamation” offered freedom and land to all black American slaves who had left their enslavers and sought protection from the British forces.6 Although Clinton had hoped the proclamation might entice slaves to join his army in the battle against the revolutionary patriots, its terms and protections were guaranteed whether or not slaves who sought sanctuary had agreed to fight for the Crown. The promise was a simple one: “To every negro who shall desert the rebel standard, full security to follow within these lines.”7 The British war effort was in tatters and the troops were in disarray. When the British forces retreated northward, thousands of black slaves retreated with them, together with tens of thousands of other Loyalists who had sided with the British during the Revolutionary Wars. The refugees and former slaves pledged their loyalty to the Crown, and left their country for the promise of a better life in British North America. Black Loyalists constituted roughly 15 per cent of the approximately thirty-five thousand Loyalists who arrived in the Atlantic provinces in 1783. Among them, fully one-third would settle in New Brunswick, a colony that was established for the Loyalists in 1784 in honour of King George III, after it had been excised from the province of Nova Scotia. Thirty years later, at the end of the War of 1812, the community was further augmented when four hundred more emancipated slaves – later known as “Black Refugees” (to distinguish them from the “Black Loyalists”) – settled in New Brunswick.8
For the Black Loyalists, the Revolutionary War was seen as their War of Independence as much as it had been for the American Patriots. Initially inspired by a slogan associated with the Phillipsburg Proclamation, “freedom and a farm,” many of the Black Loyalists would soon find that it would ring hollow. In some cases the promise of land was simply broken, and many ended up working as blacksmiths, tailors, farm hands, cooks, and housekeepers. When land grants were offered, they were smaller than those given to the other Loyalists, and the scrub lands granted were largely unsuitable for cultivation or livestock.9 But the newly established New Brunswick black community was used to adversity, and they brought with them a rich folk music tradition that had always brought both joy and a liberating catharsis to their challenging lives in America.
Figure 7.2 • James Bohee and his brother George: the “Bohee Minstrels” advertisement, ca. 1890, International Hall, Piccadilly Circus, London.
The early American banjo – an adaptation of the African gourd “molo” or “bania”10 – came to occupy a central place in Afro-American traditional music long before it became popularized by the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century.11 In 1783, the banjo came to New Brunswick with the Black Loyalists. Its popularity grew rapidly with the touring minstrel acts of the nineteenth century, the wildly popular New Brunswick–born “Bohee Minstrels” in particular. Eldon would have been well familiar with the legend of James Douglass Bohee (1844–1897) and his brother George (1856–1930), grandsons of New Brunswick Black Loyalists and two of the most legendary banjo players of all time. The Bohees were born and raised in the north end of Saint John, “Indiantown” as it became known in the nineteenth century. In about 1860 the Bohee family moved to Boston, then the epicentre of North American banjo manufacture and pedagogy.12 There the Bohee Brothers became renowned for their banjo virtuosity and for the popular song and dance shows they performed throughout the Maritimes and along the American eastern seaboard.13 After touring North America in 1878, the Bohee Brothers sailed for England in 1881 with two other minstrel groups, the “Callender’s Georgia Minstrels” and “Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels.” The Bohees would thrive in London, where they spent the remainder of their careers as concert promoters, touring performers, and theatre managers.14 It became fashionable for both commoners and aristocrats to study the banjo with the Bohee brothers in London, where they established what would become known as “the London School of banjo playing.” Their long list of banjo students included the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and other members of the royal family.15 Figure 7.3 shows a sketch from George DuMaurier’s satirical English Society (1880). It reflects the English banjo craze that was launched with the arrival of the Bohee Brothers in London, and underlines how nineteenth-century class-conscious English society, with its entrenched notions of high and low culture, was challenged (or at least bemused) by the phenomenon.16 James Bohee died of pneumonia in 1897 while on tour in Ebbw, Wales, at age fifty-three. In his obituary the Bohee Brothers were described as “the best banjoists in the world.”17
Figure 7.3 • Sketch and caption from George DuMaurier’s English Society, a book of captioned illustrations on Victorian life.
Eldon also knew the story of another celebrated Saint John banjoist of the late nineteenth-century. According to a Boston concert review published in 1898 in Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal, Frank Whetsel stood “at the head of the class” among the leading players of the day.18 Whetsel, who had studied with the renowned banjo pedagogue George Lansing in Boston, is described by the reviewer as “a skillful manipulator of the banjo [who] fairly took the audience by storm and was rapturously encored for his masterly performance.”19 The same year, an advertisement for Whetsel’s Saint John teaching studio reveals how community music instruction had become a commonplace feature of domestic life in turn-of-the-century New Brunswick:
Frank H. Whetsel is a busy man with his banjo and mandolin classes in this city, Fredericton and Sussex. The Fredericton class, which comprises eighteen ladies and gentlemen, is held on Fridays and Saturdays at Windsor Hall, and on Mondays at the Sussex class, nine strong, meets at the Queen Hotel. Mr. Whetsel’s city pupils are constantly increasing, but he still has vacant time for a few more.20
Growing up in Saint John, Eldon would have heard weekly radio broadcasts of the “Maritime Farmers’ Barn Dance,” featuring banjoist George Hector and his combo.21 Hector (1911–2004), New Brunswick’s “Whistling Banjoman” and roughly Rathburn’s contemporary, was born in Gagetown, a short distance from nearby Queenstown, Eldon’s birthplace.22 More precisely, Hector was born in the so-called “coloured settlement” of Elm Hill – the older generations called it “The Bog” – that was established across the Otonabog Lake from Gagetown.23 A descendant of black refugees who had come to New Brunswick from Virginia in 1812,24 Hector became widely known throughout New Brunswick as an entertainer and banjoist par excellence. He had also worked as a chauffeur for New Brunswick millionaire Howard Robinson, a media mogul who was vice-president of the New Brunswick Telephone Company and vice-president of the Saint John Telegraph and Times newspaper. Robinson also owned Saint John’s CHSJ radio station, and from this position of influence he sponsored a series of Hector’s concerts and arranged to have them broadcast weekly. Starting in the late 1920s, when Eldon was entering his teen years, George Hector and his popular “Barn Dance” combo performed regularly in Saint John and toured widely throughout the Maritimes. Hector continued to pursue his performing and recording career until the late 1980s.
Figure 7.4 • George Hector, New Brunswick’s “Whistling Banjoman.”
Having taken a cursory look at the prominence of the banjo in the Saint John musical culture into which Rathburn was born, we will now turn to his contribution to the banjo repertoire. “Although I am not a performer on the banjo, I am extremely interested in the instrument,”25 Eldon wrote. “I like to use the instrument to evoke the feeling of the ’20s.”26 However it was not until 1957, with his score for Low and Koenig’s award-winning documentary film City of Gold (discussed in chapter 3), that Eldon first engaged the banjo as a composer. The banjo’s distinctive wild-west character and cultural-historical connotations are employed to excellent effect throughout the score. Rathburn’s persistent banjo ostinato captures the determination of the tens of thousands of gold seekers as they stubbornly climb the Chilkoot pass. And it later accompanies a lively hoedown that conveys the enthusiasm of an armada of boats departing from Dawson City to the gold fields five hundred miles farther to the north, when the snow and ice had cleared. Due to a union strike in Montreal the soundtrack for City of Gold was recorded in London by an ensemble of outstanding musicians conducted by the legendary Muir Mathieson. In Eldon’s assessment, Mathieson – who would go on to conduct film music classics such as Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) – was “probably the best film conductor ever.”27 (Horror film composer James Bernard concurred, calling Mathieson the “Tsar of music for British films.”)28 Renowned percussionist James Blades took the prominent Jew’s harp part in the City of Gold score, and Eldon noted that it was “easy to find a banjo player over there” (perhaps not surprisingly, given that the British fascination with the banjo had been unrelenting throughout the twentieth century).29 Ten years after the film was released, the score was added to the concert repertoire when Rathburn arranged a five-movement City of Gold Suite for orchestra (1967), with sections titled “The Honky-Tonks of Dawson,” “A Ghost Town Revisited,” “The Chilkoot Pass,” “July 1898,” and “Hymn and Epilogue.”
The banjo also plays a salient role in Rathburn’s score for Gerald Potterton’s The Railrodder (1965), starring Buster Keaton. In chapter 4 we discussed Allan King’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), a feature film in which the banjo figures prominently throughout the score, and Colin Low’s 3D IMAX film Transitions for Expo 86, in which it is also heard sporadically. In the previous chapter we discussed Eldon’s employment of the banjo in his tribute to the locomotives of yesteryear, The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982). The first concert score in which Eldon engages the banjo is The Metamorphic Ten (1971), an ambitious and abstract chamber dectet, written with the support of a Canada Council grant that enabled him to take time away from his duties at the NFB to complete the piece (discussed in chapter 8). Canadian banjoist William Kuinka performs the banjo part on a vinyl recording released by Crystal Records in 1977.30
In the spring of 1991, Rathburn wrote to Walter Kaye Bauer, president of the Fretted Instrument Guild of America. Bauer was a prolific banjo composer, arranger, and director of the Connecticut Bauer Banjo Band, a seventy-member combo that garnered widespread media attention during its heyday in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.31 Eldon asked if he might be able to peruse a catalogue of some of Bauer’s “symphonic banjo orchestra” scores, ostensibly with the goal of learning some tricks and techniques of scoring for a combo of more than twenty-five banjos. Bauer replied to say that he no longer distributed these scores, since the banjo orchestra genre had more or less ceased to exist in the United States.32 Eldon must have been disappointed, as he appears to have abandoned whatever compositional plans he may have had for a piece for banjo orchestra. However he soon formulated an alternative plan for engaging the banjo in a concert work. The result was the chamber Concertino for Banjo and String Quartet (1999), the first work ever written for this combination of instruments according to Julian Armour, who commissioned the work and is heard as cellist on the recording.33 The Concertino was written for Canadian guitarist Roddy Ellias, who recounts the story of the genesis of the piece:
I had played a few pieces by Eldon involving the banjo, and we had several chats about how he loved the instrument and wanted to write something a bit more extensive for me to play. That would turn out to be the Concertino. Eldon was at all times his usual quiet, understated gentlemanly self. A wonderful human being. He masterfully combines the jazzy feel in the first movement with some Bartókian post-tonal harmonic influences in the second and third movements, together with the blend of the banjo and quartet. I love this piece, which is a joy to play. It is extremely well written for the instrument.34
The Concertino begins with a lively and syncopated Allegro con brio, followed by a quietly mysterious and sonorously luxuriant Lento. A vigorous and contrapuntally elaborate neoclassical Moderato movement closes the piece. As critic David Lewis points out, the middle Lento movement shows that Rathburn’s compositional persona is “not all fun and gardes.”35 By using the banjo like a mandolin in his haunting slow movement, Rathburn is able to achieve a pensive atmosphere while somewhat suppressing the stereotypical folk character often associated with the instrument.36 Rathburn’s mandolin-like melodic banjo writing is evident in the solo passage at mm. 9–20, for example (see figure 7.5). Ellias’s recording of the Concertino is featured on Eldon Rathburn Works (ATMA Classique CD 2371), a widely acclaimed CD released by the Chamber Players of Canada in 2006 in celebration of Rathburn’s ninetieth birthday, and heralded by the Montreal Gazette as one of the top ten classical CDs of the year.37
Figure 7.5 • Mm. 9–20 (banjo solo) from the opening Lento movement of Rathburn’s Concertino for Banjo and String Quartet (1999).
Eldon knew the story of the Black Loyalists, and he must have been touched by stories he had read about the plight of the many thousands of slaves who had been protected and saved by both American and Canadian abolitionists. During the early and mid-nineteenth century a complex and clandestine grid of abolitionists and safe houses, known metaphorically as “the Underground Railroad,” helped African American slaves escape from southern plantations to reach freedom in the “Free States” to the north and in Canada.38 Rathburn pays tribute to their memory and struggle with a powerful piece for chamber octet, featuring the banjo, titled The Underground Railroad (2001).39 Although this important work merits a professional recording, it has not yet been preserved on disc.
Just as saxophone enthusiasts have been known to scour the repertoire for noteworthy examples of orchestral scores engaging their beloved instrument – Bizet’s l’Arlésienne suites (1872), Ravel’s Bolero (1928), and the sixth scene from Vaughan-Williams’s Job: A Masque for Dancing (1931) come to mind – Rathburn conducted a thorough survey of the orchestral literature looking for model scores involving the banjo. He examined Ernst Krenek’s use of the banjo in his Kleine Symphonie (Little Symphony, op. 58, 1928), and in his Weimar period operas Jonny spielt auf (Johnny Plays On, Op. 45, 1927) and Leben des Orest (The Life of Orestes, op. 60, 1929).40 Eldon was also intrigued by Hindemith’s banjo part in Zeitoper Neues vom Tage (News of the Day, 1929), but he was “disappointed” with Kurt Weill’s use of the instrument in the Berlin Requiem (1928).41 When he heard that Francis Thorne was contemplating employing the banjo in his Sixth Symphony, he excitedly phoned the composer at his home in Long Island, New York, to inquire about the score. When Eldon asked whether he was indeed planning to include a banjo part, Thorne replied that he was undecided. “I am puzzled by this,” Eldon wrote in his journal, “a major disappointment.”42 He experienced further disappointment when he first heard a recording of Victor Ullman’s Piano Concerto, op. 25 (1939), another early twentieth-century score that incorporates a banjo part. “A facile work,” he wrote in his journal. “Nothing wrong, but I expected more.”43 “I still haven’t seen or heard of good use of banjo by ‘concert’ composers,” he complained to himself in his listening journal.44 Cautioning that it might “sound conceited,” he ultimately poses a rhetorical question for himself: could he possibly be the only orchestral composer to “really use the banjo in a creative way?”45
The “Unloveable” Jew’s Harp
Rathburn was also fascinated with the small and unique-sounding instrument known in North America as the Jew’s harp, another instrument that was commonplace in New Brunswick’s lumberjack camps,46 just as it had been in the folk music brought to Canada by the Black Loyalists.47 “I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the Jew’s harp,” he wrote in 1983.48 Held against the teeth or lips and plucked with the fingers, the Jew’s harp has been known by more than a thousand names internationally and historically, including the Jewes trump (Old English), gewgaw (Middle English), Maultrommel (German, “mouth drum”), guimbarde (French), crembalum (Latin), aura (Italian), and genggong (Bali).49 Oddly enough, the instrument bears no known historical relationship with Judaic culture or music. The adjective “Jew’s” is widely thought to have been a corruption of another adjective, possibly “jaw,” “jeu” (French: toy), or perhaps even “juice,” since even experienced performers have been known to drool when playing.50 In order to dispel possible anti-Semitic connotations, some players have recommended calling the instrument the “folk harp,” “jaw harp,” or “jaw’s harp,” but the practice has not been widely adopted.
The Viennese composer Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) was a historical figure who wrote for the Jew’s harp, and for whose music Rathburn had a special affection. With the encouragement of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II – who had reportedly heard an inspiring Jew’s harp performance in an Austrian monastery – Albrechstberger composed several concertos for Jew’s harp and the lute-like mandora between 1765 and 1771. Albrechtsberger is perhaps best known for having taught Beethoven harmony and counterpoint, and Eldon lamented the fact that such a notable composer should remain in the shadow of better-known composers such as his famous student.51 “Albrechtsberger should be singled out,” he wrote in his listening journal in the early 1990s, “because of his daring – the Jew’s harp concertos, for example.”52 Charles Ives, another composer Rathburn idolized, wrote parts for multiple Jew’s harps into the opening “Washington’s Birthday” movement of his New England Holiday Symphony (1913). Ives was a competent Jew’s harp player, but he expressed some uncertainty about how to write the instrument into his score: “[Since] the notes on the Jew’s harp are but some of the partials of a string, its ability to play a diatonic tune is more apparent than real,” Ives wrote.53 “In the old barn dances, all the men would carry Jew’s harps in their vest pockets or in the calf of their boots, and several would stand around on the side of the floor and play the harp, but more as a drum than as an instrument of tones.”54
Eldon subscribed to a Jew’s harp periodical with the lengthy and tongue-in-cheek German title Vierundzwanzigsteljahrsschrift der Internationalen Maultrommelvirtuosengenossenschaft (“Semi-monthly Journal of the International Society of Jew’s Harp Virtuosi”), or “VIM” for short.55 Edited by Frederick Crane of Iowa City (1927–2011), the journal included the world’s leading Jew’s harp players and composers on its list of contributors – Crane, Leonard Fox,56 Mike Seeger,57 Phons Bakx,58 Larry Hanks, John Wright, and Trân Quang Hai,59 among others – and covered topics “ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous.”60 On 30 December 1982 Rathburn wrote to Crane expressing his appreciation for VIM Volume 1, published earlier that year. “I am in no way an expert in matters related to the Jew’s harp,” he wrote in his initial letter of introduction to Crane. “In my film scores it is used in an elementary way. I like its twang and I associate it with music of a rural nature.”61 Crane replied to Rathburn on 29 January 1983: “For a while I used to have the notion that I knew everything worth knowing about the Jew’s harp, but my experiences with VIM have dispelled it for good. For instance, a reader put me onto four references to the Jew’s harp in Elizabethan plays, all new to me. And out of the blue, I hear from you, a composer who has written numerous scores that use the instrument!”62
Crane had been musing about the possibility of convening an international gathering of Jew’s harp enthusiasts at some point in the near future, and he asked Eldon for his input. Two years after their initial exchange of letters, and with Eldon’s eager support and encouragement, Crane hosted the first International Jew’s Harp Congress in Iowa City, Iowa, from 14 to 16 September 1984. During the week prior to the gathering, a headline in the Iowa City Press-Citizen described the trump as “the unloveable Jew’s harp.”63 Indeed both Eldon and Fred Crane were accustomed to receiving puzzled and even disapproving glances when they discussed their fondness for the instrument. “I am fully aware of that condescending look I get from my colleagues at the NFB when I mention the instrument!”64 Rathburn wrote to Fred Crane. Perhaps, he suggests somewhat dismissively, “they are too ‘dignified’ [for such things]!”65
Rathburn attended the Congress together with twenty-six other Jew’s harp devotees from fifteen US states, Canada, France, Norway, and West Germany. The weekend of events included presentations on a range of topics including Jew’s harp technique, new Jew’s harp recordings, the Jew’s harp in music therapy, the Jew’s harp in Norway, Jew’s harp scenes in cinema, and new instruments in production. Complementing the presentations were performances featuring many of the most renowned international Jew’s harpists, and a concert introducing two new works for the trump.66 Michael Schell’s Trump Trope, a work that had been commissioned for the Congress, was given a premiere performance, and Eldon opted to give a public presentation of his newly released recording of The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad – made in New York just six months prior to the Congress – on which he had played the trump parts.67 “I think The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railway is a truly marvelous work,” Fred Crane wrote to Eldon during the days following the meeting, “as did everyone who heard it at the Congress, as you know!”68 Jew’s harp virtuoso John Wright sent a similarly congratulatory letter to Eldon from his home in Paris.69 Figure 7.6 shows a cartoon by Jeffrey Wright-Sedam caricaturing one of the concerts hosted at the first International Jew’s Harp Congress. It was published above an article in the Daily Iowan titled “For One Brief Shining Weekend, Jew’s Harpsters Become a Family.”70
On the train home from Iowa and apparently buoyed by the events of the weekend, Eldon wrote a letter to Fred Crane in which he enclosed a limerick referencing an unspecified incident that took place at the Congress involving Tom Bilyeu, a well-known Jew’s harp historian and retailer from Portland, Oregon:71
Figure 7.6 • Cartoon by Jeffrey Wright-Sedam caricaturing a concert at the first International Jew’s Harp Congress. This cartoon was first published above an Iowa City newspaper article by John Voland, titled “For One, Brief, Shining Weekend, Jew’s Harpsters Become a Family” (Daily Iowan, 19 September 1984, 6B).
King guimbardist John Wright long may he reign
Magic sounds emanate from his mane.
The Congress was a first,
Even Bilyeu’s outbursts
Couldn’t ruffle the feathers of Fred Crane!72
Crane replied to say that although he would happily defer to Eldon’s judgment concerning the quality of his limerick, “the reason I will regrettably not print it in VIM is the possibility of a suit for libel!”73 In 2002, twenty years after the first Jew’s Harp Congress, Crane remained enthusiastic about Eldon’s music. In a handwritten postscript to a typed generic Christmas letter, he wrote: “Eldon, your ‘Rise and Fall’ remains the best piece ever written for the trump!”74
Like the banjo, the Jew’s harp figures prominently in Rathburn’s compositional output, in both his film scores and the concert music. Five of Rathburn’s film scores incorporate the Jew’s harp. In all of them, the trump is used to reflect a variety of rural or nostalgic contexts and the film’s era, theme, or geographical setting. In City of Gold (1957), the trump is heard when the gold seekers are shown rushing by boat on the Yukon River, destined for the Klondike. In Gerald Potterton’s The Railrodder (1965), the trump and banjo often accompany Buster Keaton’s slapstick antics. In Death of a Legend (1971), a documentary film about the plight of the endangered wolf, a sequence on the beaver fur trade features the trump as obbligato to the instrumental continuation of an original folk song written by Rathburn and Stanley Jackson. In Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), the trump is used both to animate a barnyard chase and to add poignancy to a scene where the film’s anti-hero is sentenced to serve time in prison.75 In the 3D IMAX film Transitions (1986), haunting and evocative isolated trump tones recorded by John Wright are heard in the quiet opening scene.76 Later in the film, the trump and a country-style combo are engaged during film sequences involving the progress of the early steam locomotive and other historical themes.77
Figure 7.7 • Mm. 302–6 (score pg. 79) from the Jew’s harp part of Rathburn’s The Metamorphic Ten (1971).
As with the banjo, the first concert score in which Eldon engages the Jew’s harp is The Metamorphic Ten (1971), his ambitious and abstract chamber dectet (discussed in chapter 8). Figure 7.7 shows four measures from the score’s Jew’s harp part, the unchanging single pitch of which indicates the use of a single harp from the complete set (visible in the photo of Rathburn’s personal collection of rare instruments, shown in figure 7.8). The instrument’s twanging is steadily monorhythmic, and Rathburn’s explicit notation indicates the performer’s oral vowel-production shape for each tone. In 1982, Eldon again makes extensive use of the Jew’s harp in The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railway, discussed above.
Rathburn’s most elaborate work for Jew’s harp is a piece titled Junction (1983). Scored for six Jew’s harps, Junction was written as a musical depiction of Clapham Junction, London, England, one of the busiest rail stations in Europe (150 trains/hour during the daytime) and a bottleneck where routes from the city’s south and southwest termini converge.78 Eldon describes the “bewildering” auditory experience he had at the junction in 1959 as “an array of trains coming and going from all directions, difference speeds, overlapping sounds.”79 Junction is definitely the most abstract and electronically processed work ever composed by Rathburn. He describes it as an “experimental piece … a mix of different Jew’s harps at different speeds”80 and “in different tonalities,”81 “modified through electronic pitch shifting.”82 When Eldon sent a preliminary recording to Norman McLaren, he received the following enthusiastic reply:
Figure 7.8 • Eldon Rathburn’s personal collection of unusual instruments, including Jew’s harps, musical saws, penny whistles, finger chimes, flexatones, a didgeridoo, and a variety of train whistles.
My dear Eldon: I’m sorry I’ve been such a long time in sending back your tape. It arrived just as I was starting a two month shooting for my present film Narcissus (with 3 ballet dancers) … On first hearing “Junction” I was fascinated; it was like a strange new language, which I only partially understood, and so I also found it monotonous. On subsequent playings I got to know it more and more, until now I have played it so often that it seems as familiar as, say, Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody!!! And with every hearing I find more and more in it. I love its metamorphosing multiple rhythms, its polyphony of timbres that keep changing and creeping in and out. The nearest thing like it that I have ever heard is a certain type of African drumming, but “Junction” has an iridescence of tone-colouring to boot … I’ve come to love it!83
McLaren retired from the NFB in 1984. Long in poor health, he died in Montreal on 26 January 1987 of a heart attack, at the age of seventy-three. Had he lived longer, it is tempting to speculate on how McLaren might have been inspired to work with this idiosyncratic and minimalist electronic music. Junction was recorded, with Eldon playing all six Jew’s harp tracks and controlling the electronic signal processing, on Mostly Railroad Music (Crystal Records, CD520, 1994). Describing Rathburn as “one of wittiest and eclectic of composers,” one of the CD’s reviewers marvels at how this “six minute piece for an ensemble of Jew’s harps actually holds your attention,” noting further that “[Rathburn’s] instrumental combinations sometimes rival those of Henry Brant.”84 Reviewing the recording for VIM, Frederick Crane describes The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982) and Junction (1983) as “two of the best works ever composed that feature the trump.”85
Rathburn’s Ode to Eulenstein (1984) is another work that appears to have been lost to posterity, as no trace of the score has been found. Karl Eulenstein (1802–1890) is an almost legendary figure in the history of the Jew’s harp. In 1820, he met Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), the Swabian poet, physician, occultist, and trump player. Kerner dedicated a poetic ode to the Jew’s harp to Eulenstein86 and inspired him to pursue a career as a virtuoso performer on the instrument. In his writings, Kerner frequently rhapsodized about the musical and spiritual virtues of the trump: “Fortissimo and piano dolce can be expressed on the Jew’s harp most magnificently, and it is excellently suited for playing fantasies of one’s own. It is suited to conveying outpourings of pure feeling in tones from better worlds, as the Aeolian harp conveys the feeling of Spring or a starry night.”87 From 1821 to 1833, Eulenstein gained renown through out Europe as the foremost Jew’s harp virtuoso of the day. His career was cut short when playing the instrument affected his dental health so greatly that it became impossible for him to perform. He broke his last intact upper tooth during a concert tour in 1833. From that time forward he was able to perform and work only as a guitarist and music teacher.88 Rathburn had read Eulenstein’s biography in the early 1980s and was inspired to write a piece in honour of this important figure in the history of the trump. In April of 1984, he wrote to Fred Crane about the preparation of his Ode to Eulenstein for multiple jew’s harps. “I have a rough mix of my piece Ode to Eulenstein,” he wrote, “but I am not yet prepared to play it [at the upcoming Iowa Congress].”89 In September of that year, after the Congress and still inspired by its events and participants, he again wrote to Crane to say that he was “going to get back to work on my piece, Ode to Eulenstein, with renewed vigor.”90 Unfortunately, neither the music nor the “rough-mix” recording of the Ode have been located among Rathburn’s archived scores and other materials.
In April of 1995 Eldon wrote to Peter Christ at Crystal Records to pitch the prospect of recording a new piece he was planning to write for harp and Jew’s harp. Christ replied a few months later: “Could you really come up with sixty minutes of music that would retain interest for just this combination?”91 Eldon must have decided that he could not – or at least that he would not try to persuade Peter Christ that he could – as there is no evidence that he ever completed this work.
The Flexatone
The flexatone – a percussion instrument consisting of a flexible resonating metal sheet suspended within a wire frame – was another of Rathburn’s favourite unconventional instruments. The instrument’s metal sheet is straddled on both sides by wooden beaters mounted on strips of spring steel, which are visible in the photo of Rathburn’s personal collection of rare instruments shown in figure 7.8 (two flexatones are placed near the top-centre of the photo). The player holds the flexatone in one hand and shakes it such that the beaters strike the sides of the metal sheet repeatedly, in alternation. With the thumb of the hand in which the instrument is held, the player changes the pitch by controlling the degree of curvature of the flexatone’s metal sheet. The instrument’s unique sound is most commonly associated with classic American cartoon scores in which it is generally heard producing a saw-like glissando, either for comic effect or to suggest the haunting presence of otherworldly paranormal phenomena.92 Although it has been employed less frequently by classical composers, numerous examples can be found in the repertoire. Ernst Krenek engaged the flexatone in his score for the opera Jonny Spielt Auf (1926), about which Eldon wrote a glowing review in his listening journal.93 However, in a letter to Eldon dated 4 February 1968 Krenek wrote that he would never use it again, as he felt that it had become “more or less obsolete.”94 Arnold Schoenberg may have first heard the instrument in a performance of Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf, as he uses it a few years later in the Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 (1928), in his one-act opera Von Heute auf Morgen, op. 32 (1928) and his incomplete opera Moses and Aron (1932). Shostakovich used the instrument in his opera The Nose (1928), where it is used to caricaturize the schoolteacher. He also employs the flexatone in his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) and in the concert suite Hypothetically Murdered (1931). Edgard Varèse uses the instrument in his Nocturnal (1961), a phonetic vocal setting of phrases excerpted from Anaïs Nin’s The House of Incest. (Since Rathburn’s fascination with the flexatone dates from the early 1950s, he may have discussed the unusual instrument with Varèse when they met in New York in 1952.) Hans Werner Henze used the flexatone in his Elegy for Young Lovers (1961),95 and Peter Maxwell Davies uses a trio of flexatones at the climax of his opera The Lighthouse (1980). György Ligeti employs it in his opera Le grand macabre (1977) and in his Piano Concerto (1988). Schnittke writes the flexatone into the “tuba mirum” section of his Requiem (1975) and employs it elsewhere in his Faust Cantata (1983), his Viola Concerto (1985), and the ballet score for Peer Gynt (1986), where its wailing sound represents the howling of the wind. Brian Ferneyhough has used the instrument in his recent orchestral work Plötzlichkeit (2006). Apart from the Ferneyhough, Eldon knew all of these scores well, and he wrote about them in his listening journal, commenting in particular on their employment of the flexatone. In the 1980s, Eldon drafted the beginning of what appears to have been planned as a short article on the instrument. In his opening paragraph he comments on the flexatone’s appearance in scores by Schoenberg and Khachaturian:
What is a flexatone? Ask anyone except a musician. He doesn’t know. Avoid the dictionary. It’s not there. The prefix flex suggests bending. Yes, you are getting close. The truth is that it is a bending instrument something like the saw. Don’t try to buy one in New York. They don’t carry them. In the 20’s they were fashionable but it is now an obsolete instrument. Listen to a recording of the Khachaturian piano concerto (not all recordings, sadly), where its sweet sound will be heard doubling the winds solo line in the slow movement. Why it is not used in all recordings is beyond me. Maybe they were unavailable – scarce as hen’s teeth. And look at Arnold Schoenberg’s forbidding Variations Op. 31, or glance at the score of Moses and Aron, or Von Heute auf Morgen. There it is taking its place amongst its superior fellows (celli, etc.).96
Historical Keyboards: Honky-Tonk Piano, Harpsichord, Pianola, and Calliope
In his score for City of Gold (1957), Rathburn employs honky-tonk piano to impressive effect for its capacity to invoke historical time, place, and culture. The “honky-tonks” (or “honk-a-tonks”) were the dancing girls and prostitutes who worked in the western saloons of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America. “Honky-tonk” came to denote a style of music often heard in these saloons, and was usually played on jarringly out-of-tune pianos.97 City of Gold begins and ends with Eldon playing a honky-tonk piano that transports viewers back to the Klondike of 1898. In a somewhat similar way, Rathburn tends to use the harpsichord to denote the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, when he wishes to signify the genteel tastes, etiquette, and aristocratic manners of the upper social classes. The harpsichord is employed in this way in Gerald Potterton’s The Railrodder (1965) when Buster Keaton’s speeder passes a white table-clothed tea room, and in Wolf Koenig’s animated short It’s a Crime (1957), to accompany various antics involving the film’s central character, the “gentleman thief.”
Although Rathburn never employed the player pianola in any of his scores, perhaps due to the impracticalities involved, he had a lifelong nostalgic interest in the instrument. It is worth noting that Sorabji and Honegger, two composers with whom Eldon felt an affinity, shared this fascination. For his part, Sorabji hoped that the pianola would put an end to the cult of the virtuoso, since it could do things that no live musician could do (or perhaps would want to do).98 Eldon was especially fascinated by George Antheil’s score for the early Dadaist art film Ballet mécanique (1924), made by French artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with Man Ray and the American filmmaker Dudley Murphy.99 One of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking, Ballet méchanique features moving drawn images, abruptly juxtaposed still photos and film segments, and moving mechanical instruments in the place of human dancers. The original orchestration called for sixteen pianolas, two pianos, three xylophones, an array of electric bells and gongs, three propellers, a siren, four bass drums, and tam-tam.100 On 27 August 1973 Eldon wrote a letter to Antheil’s widow, Elizabeth Böske Antheil, in West Hollywood, to express his interest in the original score, the piano rolls of which were presumed lost. He informed her that in 1972 he had “been to Paris and while there visited a shop specializing in old instruments (A. Vian, 8 rue Grégoire de Tours), where I was told by Mr. Vian that the original piano rolls of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique were in the possession of an America club in Paris.”101 Rathburn asked Mme Antheil whether she might be able to provide him with further information on the whereabouts of the rolls. Unfortunately there is no evidence that Elizabeth Antheil replied to Eldon’s letter of inquiry. She died in West Hollywood a few years later, in 1978, at the age of seventy-six. Eldon appears to have pursued the question no further, and he did not write the pianola into any of his scores.
In 1855, Joshua C. Stoddard of Massachusetts patented his design for an “apparatus for producing music by steam or compressed air.”102 The earliest steam pipe organs built from Stoddard’s design became known as “calliopes,” after the eldest of the Greek muses, Calliope (“beautiful voice”), who unleashed her mellifluous vocal cords to defeat the daughters of the King of Thessaly in a singing match, only to add insult to injury by turning her competitors into magpies for their arrogance.103 Calliopes were ubiquitous on the southern American paddlewheel steam cruisers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since the propulsion boilers on the Mississippi riverboats – the famous Delta Queen and Louisville Belle for example – provided ready access to steam. The calliope also became a trademark sonic feature of the travelling circuses, with the steam-driven carousels providing the instrument with the pressurized steam required to sound its whistles. The instrument’s keys were often made of brass in order to withstand the moisture and heat produced by the boiler. Its sound was uniformly bombastic and loud, and no expressive control by the player was possible. Since it could be heard for miles, the calliope was well suited to the goals of both the circuses and riverboats. In the mid-1990s Rathburn received a letter from Leroy Sweetman, an eighty-six-year-old Floridian calliope enthusiast. Although Sweetman does not cite his source, he gave Rathburn an alternative account of the early history of the calliope:
The calliope was used in the early days of the Civil War, as a musical instrument designed to bring the townspeople down to the depot for recruitment for the Federal armies. I understand that they carried the boiler and instrument aboard a flat car. On entering the city on the railroad they would start playing the calliope. Never having heard the likes of this, the curious people would gather at the depot. Being entertained and allowing the recruitment sergeants to get busy, it wasn’t long afterward that the circus people saw its advantage for attracting people to parades and the big show. The riverboats soon saw the advantage of its use as well.104
In the summer of 1967, when Eldon had just completed the massive Labyrinth project, he must have been charmed by the Beatles’ use of the steam calliope on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, to evoke the atmosphere of the Pablo Fanque circus in the song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” According to producer George Martin, when John Lennon said he wanted to taste the atmosphere of the circus in the song, to “smell the sawdust on the floor,” it was decided that calliope music would fit the bill perfectly.105 Eldon had fond childhood memories of the steam calliopes that visited Saint John with touring circuses in the 1920s. The instrument’s boiler-generated steam air supply also evoked in him a strong association with the era of the steam railroad. As early as 1973, with his retirement from the NFB on the horizon, Rathburn began to formulate plans to write a novel concerto for steam calliope and orchestra, a programmatic work with the working title of Steam Music, a piece he hoped might “evoke memories of the old steam days.”106 Rathburn explained his inspiration to fellow railroad enthusiast Stanley Dean in the UK. “There is in Canada one of the last remaining steam calliopes [in Stratford, Ontario],” he wrote, “and it is important that it be recorded.”107 At some point during the later 1970s his plan to give the steam calliope a leading solo role in the piece appears to have been abandoned, undoubtedly due to practical considerations. Instead, this project appears to have morphed into The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982), a work we have discussed above. In 1985, in a letter to Jack Hardman, editor of Horn and Whistle Magazine, Rathburn explained that when he retired from the NFB in 1976, he “initiated the making of a documentary film about the steam calliope, titled The Mighty Steam Calliope.”108 The film, directed by Tony Ianzelo, was released in 1978, and Ianzelo created a second, shorter film a few years later for the Canada Vignettes series: Calliope (1980).
The 1994 Mostly Railroad Music CD features two pieces by Rathburn involving the calliope. The first calliope piece heard on the recording is a short collection titled Three Calliope Pieces (1994). The first movement of Three Calliope Pieces, “St Lawrence Tubular Bridge (Mazurka-Polka),” is Rathburn’s arrangement of an original polka written in 1854 to commemorate the construction of Montreal’s Victoria Bridge, by a composer known only as “WH.”109 The second movement, “Stravinsky on the Delta Queen,” quotes Petrouchka, and must surely qualify as the only piece of bitonal music ever recorded on calliope. The third movement, “Honky-Tonks,” is adapted from the City of Gold Suite (1967). The calliope is heard again in The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982), the fifth track on Mostly Railroad Music. Eldon plays the calliope part himself on this recording, using a keyboard-activated “sampled calliope” (then a newly available technology). In a letter to a listener who had written to express admiration for the nostalgic quality of the calliope music recorded on Mostly Railroad Music, he gave the following account of his sampled calliope:
A few years ago I rented the calliope [in Stratford, Ontario]. I recorded different effects, clusters, long tones, etc., which I planned to use in a composition. Since that time I learned that there was a way to play more intricate pieces than the ones usually performed on the calliope. I like the old pieces very much, however I wanted to use the calliope for a more intricate kind of music. I worked with a friend in Toronto who has all kinds of recording equipment. There is a technique known as “sampling” which enables one to sample the calliope sound and transfer it to a keyboard. This was the devise I used in the calliope pieces on the CD. I also added another voice (overdubbing) to the first track which made the music more interesting, almost like a calliope duet.110
We have discussed Eldon’s affection for the circus elsewhere, in connection with his score for the IMAX film Circus World (1974, chapter 4), and “In Memoriam Jumbo,” the fourth of his Six Railroad Preludes (1988, chapter 6). Further evidence of Eldon’s nostalgia for the circus and its calliope is found in a fan letter received in 1994 by the popular CBC radio host Clyde Gilmour, after he had played Rathburn’s Three Calliope Pieces on Gilmour’s Albums, one of CBC Radio’s longest-running shows (1957–97). James O’Neill of Fredericton, New Brunswick, wrote with enthusiasm about this music, which had clearly transported him back to another era. In his letter to Gilmour, O’Neill reminisced about the circus and recalled a personal telephone conversation with Eldon:
There is something about the steam calliope that will stir up the blood of a circus fan or manager. Famous circus owner Floyd King [1888–1976, King Bros. Circus] would walk along the strut during the parade just to listen to his old steamer. I’m sure he would have loved Eldon Rathburn’s tunes on your show. When we had our Circus [O’Neill Bros. Model Circus] at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax in 1988, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from Mr. Rathburn, and to learn from him that he was a great circus fan. We had a great chat about some of the circuses that came this way in the old days.111
Eldon received “fan mail” of this kind from far and wide in connection with his determined efforts to “preserve the sounds of almost extinct instruments.”112 In January of 1984 he received a long letter from circus historian Fred Dahlinger of Baraboo, Wisconsin.113 The Ringling Brothers founded their famous circus in Baraboo in 1884, and the renowned Circus World Museum is located there. (The Baraboo Circus World Museum should not be confused with the Circus World amusement park in Orlando, Florida, that closed in 1986, as discussed in chapter 4.) For many years Dahlinger oversaw its archives and artifact collections. Dahlinger expressed profound appreciation and admiration for Eldon’s work: “I can safely say that you are the first person to treat steam calliope music in a serious manner.”114
