Re: [Harp-L] Johnston, Bahnson

[The Iceman <icemanle@xxxxxxx>]

Most fun story about Dr. Bahnson and his pursuit of harmonica reed exploration...


He was one of the original group of heart surgeons that was involved in the first successful heart transplant operation, so over the years was a real force of nature in the medical world. He was eventually named head of the Pittsburgh Hospital's Heart Department. 


Well, one night he snuck Howard Levy into his department and used very expensive medical equipment to examine what went on in Howard's throat/tongue while playing harmonica.


Apparently, he got busted by the administration for doing this...receiving a small slap on the wrist. What else could they do? Dr. Bahnson was a legend.



-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Baker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Harp-L <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, May 1, 2014 9:27 am
Subject: [Harp-L] Johnston, Bahnson


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