[Harp-L] Johnston, Bahnson

[Steve Baker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I met Robert Johnston in Melbourne when he came to a harp workshop I gave there at the beginning of 1990. I had just published The Harp Handbook, which included the first account in harmonica literature of what reeds actually do when notes are bent or overblown. Johno, who was a physicist at Monash University, came up afterwards to chat and told me that his paper "Pitch Control in Harmonica Playing" (published a short while before in a learned journal called "Acoustics Australia") provided scientific confirmation of my description based on his experimental results. He is the originator of the terms "closing reed" and "opening reed" and when the Harp Handbook went into its 2nd edition I adopted this terminology and referred readers to his work.

This led to Hank Bahnson contacting me. Dr Bahnson was an eminent physician and pioneer of open heart surgery who taught at the University of Pittsburgh. An amateur harmonica player, he had attended a workshop with Howard Levy and was inspired to come up with an idea for a harmonica design which would make overbends easier to execute. He asked me to facilitate contact with Hohner in Trossingen and we had a number of meetings with the company which resulted in a joint project to build an Overblow Harp using a mechanical device developed by Dr. Bahnson to block the closing reed, thus permitting the opposing reed to open and create the overbend. Only about 100 of these instruments (based on a Golden Melody) were ever made and the high price meant they were not really commercially viable, though they certainly worked. Subsequent developments in harmonica customizing and manufacture have led to better instruments which are more suited to overbends, so this idea was never pursued any further.

In 1997 Dr. Bahsoon published a paper with James Antaki which further explored some of the territory experimentally verified by Johnston and documented in the Harp Handbook, entitled "Acoustical and physical dynamics of the diatonic harmonica". I have paper copies of both studies and can scan them if anyone is interested.

Steve Baker
www.stevebaker.de
www.european-music-workshops.com
www.harmonica-masters.de