Re: [Harp-L] history



Jon,

I'm sitting here wondering what on earth you are going off about. I couldn't write much more earlier, cause I was at work. But OK, you got me. I'm home now. I will, as a gesture of brotherly love, give you until the Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode II comes on. Fair? 


>Good for you.  I don't accept arguments from authority and I also  
>have formal training in history.  All of which is completely besides  
>the point--you still haven't given any response to the issues I raised.

 We ought to get our degrees together and have a big hug of booklearnin' Yes, I will respond to these issues.. 

>You made two claims in your original post.  First, that there was  
>someone named "Joseph Richter" who "invented Richter" and second that  
>the Anton Richter who had a harmonica company was his brother.  You  
>stated these as facts. 
 
O.K. I didn't consider it a claim. I was thinking more along the lines of Richter being the Abner Doubleday guy of harmonicas and I meant Joseph is who people were probably actually talking about. I didn't go into detail because it wasn't my point. My point was Anton Richter was a plumber. He didn't make any harmonicas. Thus you can scratch Anton off the Richter scale.
On Joseph, personally, I think there is no evidence. It's doubleday commission all over again, only this time with the only non-religous thing as sacred as baseball - the harp. 
You appear to have missed a really big point in that e-mail I just put it out there. Despite the fact they probably operated Anton Richter and CO., Seydel employes of old never called it Richter, they called it "HAIDER" I thought that was significant. That makes me suspicious of any Richter claims and I've thought about calling it "Haider" for the hell of it to see if it would catch on. So, a possibilitiy would be this Richter style comes from the town formerly known as Haida in Bohemia and it got associated by default. Or it actually did come from Richter... BUT, if it did, I doubt it was the tuning. Richter was a term used to define that 10-hole style harp, regardless of how it was tuned. 
The Seydel designation is significant because it is so close to Haida relatively. Outside Klingenthal, it gets lumped in with Richter, kind of like people think Solingen Germany is a knifemaker, but folks around Solingen know there's a bunch of knife factories in Solingen that use the name. 
 
You were saying that Pat Missin says nobody knows the relationship between Joseph and Anton. The German Harmonica museum says they were brothers. How do they know these things? They went to Bohemia and looked at records, so at the moment, I'm going to have to go with their theory on that one until something trumps it or I doubt it.  
 
> Moreover, contemporary histories from the late 19th and particularly
> early 20th centuries are not exactly impartial.

I'm not exactly reading ANY contemporary histories on anything. I'm looking at the stuff you're supposed to look at, patents, advertising, etc. 
 
>  So, while we see an
> outpouring of similar free-reed invention across Europe and even the
> US in the early 19th century, much of this is ignored in favor of the
> trends which led to the status quo when people were writing,
> particularly the status quo of German's writing in the early 20th
> century when Germans dominated the market and nationalism was the
> dominant political force.

I did get a kick out of this one. Sure, OK, they dominated and the Richter legend is legend. BUT, tell me this, considering what you said above, when  Kaiser Wilhelm II and the writers were following suit in all this nationlism stuff, why would they, when they have the two biggest centers of harmonica making in the world, Klingenthal and Trossingen, why o' why would they say this: 
 
"The harmonica? Our beloved German national instrument? You wanna know who invented it? By God I'll tell you who it was: 
SOME DUDE IN BOHEMIA in the Austro-Hungarian Empire." 
 
 
Dave, having shown his affection for Ross by missing nine minutes of Robot Chicken.
________________________
Dave Payne Sr. 
Elk River Harmonicas
www.elkriverharmonicas.com 




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