"Perform Thy Task Untouch'd, Alone": Aeolian Harps as Home Entertainment
Roman Sympos
When discussing the decorative arts, we envision . . . well, the visible: elephant-foot umbrella stands and embroidered fire-screens, perhaps. We don't "enaudiate." We don't think sonically. But the acoustic environment can also be crafted. Living in an age of electronic "home integration" and wearable MP3 players , and more than half a century after the debut [1952] of John Cage's 4' 33", which uses silence to heighten our awareness of ambient sound (the sonic wallpaper, as it were, of our lives), we should by now be attuned to the "decorative" potential of the acoustic environment.
Until the advent of phonography and radio, that environment was festooned, barring one or two exceptions, with human-crafted ornaments: song and instrumental music, or recitations and readings of verse, usually performed by members of the household. In the interstices, or the "ground," as it were, of this acoustic embroidery, there reigned an auditory blankness that we today can scarcely imagine.
Non-human acoustic ornaments would occasionally bedeck this blankness. Birdsong, for instance--except, I suppose, at Felpham, in West Sussex, where "A robin redbreast in a cage" apparently put William Blake, at least, in a rage: not exactly the point of ornament. Caged birds were popular items of acoustic decor, appearing not only in poems by Blake and Wordsworth, but in much women's poetry (1), and in novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, Lawrence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, and John Moore's Zeluco (2). Of course, in mild weather you could enjoy birdsong by simply opening a window, supposing a bird was singing nearby, while later in the nineteenth-century you could listen to wind-chimes, if it was windy enough. But for a span of more than a hundred years, beginning roughly in the mid-eighteenth century, the only source of entirely mechanical, non-human-powered acoustic decor in middle-class British and American homes was the Aeolian harp.
Students of British and European Romanticism are familiar with the Aeolian harp as a figure for the power of the imagination, human and divine. But until recently I, at least, had never stopped to ask whether its ubiquity in Romantic poetry, famously remarked by Meyer Abrams (3), might have arisen not simply from its aptness as an icon of inspiration, but from its quotidian status as an item of household sonic decor. What were the chances that the first readers of "Effusion XXXV," later known as "The Eolian Harp," would have recognized and understood the workings of "that simplest Lute" and, by extension, the fundamental trope of Coleridge's poem, unless they were familiar with the eponymous instrument?
Invented in the seventeenth-century by a German Jesuit at Rome, Athanasius Kircher, the Aeolian harp became a subject of European-wide scientific study and middle-class marketing during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. However, it was most popular, and for the longest period of time, in England (Bonner, History 24). In his Physiological Disquistions of 1781, William Jones credited Alexander Pope, laboring at his translation of Homer, with having stumbled across a reference to wind-induced string vibrations in the writings of the Homeric commentator Eustathius (Grigson, 25-26). According to Jones, a "Mr. Oswald" of "North Britain," maker of violincellos, confirmed Pope's discovery by exposing a lute to the narrow current of air admitted by an uplifted window-sash (quoted in Bonner, History 31). Oswald began making and selling Aeolian harps at his London shop around 1750, part of what Geoffrey Grigson called a "Scottish conspiracy" incubating the manufacture and marketing of the earliest British wind-harps (28). However, it was not until Jones, a pupil of Oswald's, published his account in 1781 that, as Grigson puts it, the device "became a universal toy in the music shops and the window casements" of polite writers, readers, and listeners (28).
Thomas Hankins includes James Thomson, Christopher Smart, and Tobias Smollett, all of whom made literary references to the wind-harp, among the habitués of Oswald's shop, along with the musicologist Charles Burney. The Aeolian harp makes its poetic debut in 1748 with Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (a favorite of the Wordsworths and Coleridge) followed two years later by the poet's posthumous "To Aeolus's Harp" (1750), an obvious source for the "sweet upbraiding" of Coleridge's "coy maid half-yielding to her lover." Writes Thomson, "What tender notes, how kindly they upbraid!/ With what soft woe they thrill the lover's heart!/ Sure from the hand of some unhappy maid,/ Who dy'd of love, these sweet complainings part" (quoted in Brown, 17).
A slightly later hint for the seductive sub-text of Coleridge's poem appears in Smollett's The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), where the instrument's "wild irregular variety of harmonious sounds, that seem to be an effect of enchantment, [. . .] wonderfully dispose the mind for the most romantic situations" (quoted in Brown, 24; see Addendum, below). A dangerous plaything, one might conclude, to leave in a young lady's drawing-room window on a breezy afternoon! And yet the literature of the period, as well as the correspondence and catalogues of musical instrument retailers, tells us that the Aeolian harp was a popular source of entertainment for any householder, old or young, male or female, who could afford to buy one, and that a sizeable income was not required.
Aeolian harps could be manufactured quickly out of inexpensive materials. Typically, they were outsourced by music publishers, who advertised them for sale in their catalogues.
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The modern instrument pictured here consists of an oblong maple box with strings running lengthwise across the top, stretched over bridges at each end and attached to tuning pegs. It is fitted with a slanted top to compress and accelerate the current of air blowing through a sash window from outside--an innovation credited by David and Nina Groves to the Suffolk plowman poet, Robert Bloomfield (Goodrich, 7), who in addition to writing about Aeolian harps built and sold them to support himself.
A common misconception about the wind-harp is that its strings are tuned to different pitches. In fact, they are all tuned to the same pitch, but because they have different thicknesses, they vibrate in response to a common wind velocity at different frequencies. These correspond to the Pythagorean overtone series of an octave, perfect fifth, major third, seventh, and so on. The result is, typically, a recognizable major triad, with higher untempered intervals--discordant "frictional tones"--often emerging at more rapid wind velocities (Hankins, 96-99).
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As otherworldly as such music must have sounded to its listeners, the wind harp could not "[p]erform [its] task untouch'd, alone," to paraphrase Bloomfield ("Aeolus," c. 1800), at least not entirely. It needed a good deal of "touching" by its owner both beforehand and afterwards, to keep it in tune. In this respect, it was more like a dog in need of grooming and an occasional stroll than a device you could set up and ignore, like a sun-dial.
To judge from Bloomfield's correspondence with clients like his patron, Capell Lofft, the Aeolian harp was notoriously fickle. Changes in temperature or humidity could easily sour it, requiring laborious and delicate attention to the tuning pegs. Tighten the strings too much or too little, or place the harp at the wrong angle, and it could refuse to perform altogether. Nor could it be used in wet or cold weather, unless its owner was indifferent to frigid drafts and drizzle blowing in, not to mention the long-term effects of bad weather on the harp's wooden sound-box. In England, at any rate, your Aeolian harp could be sitting quietly on a shelf or in a drawer for weeks or months at a time.
Thus, it is unlikely that Coleridge made a permanent window fixture of the "Aeolian lute" featured in "Dejection: an Ode," either at Clevedon or at Greta Hall. Rather, we should imagine him, in the throes of his despair over Sara Hutchinson's perturbation at his professions of love, deliberately and with poetry aforethought reaching for his instrument on first sighting "the new Moon/ With the old Moon in her arms," and placing the device in his study window in confident expectation that a "squally blast" would, in the next moment or two, not only "raise" and "awe" and send his "soul abroad," but also give a "wonted impulse" to his wind-harp, providing the metaphorical peg on which to hang his famous lines.
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Susan Bernstein has noted the blatant fiction of passive sublation conveyed by the image of the Aeolian harp when poets like Coleridge, immersing the human techne of the instrument in the "One Life" of natura, ignore the quiddity of the framing device by which this spurious fusion is represented. When Shelley, in "Ode to the West Wind," apostrophizes the wind and implores it to make him its "lyre," writes Bernstein, he "names the Eolian harp" as his chosen vehicle, and for that reason "cannot become an Eolian harp; for then the 'I' would simply resonate, like a string, and lose itself" (79), unconscious of the sound it makes and helpless to shape it. In short, to name the instrument is, necessarily, to instrumentalize it, if that is not a tautology, and thus, to set oneself apart from it.
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I think Shelley himself was aware of this tension between self-absorption and agency, which is what lends poignancy to his "Ode." In any case, the care and feeding demanded by real Aeolian harps helps to sharpen Bernstein's point. But the instrument's very need for fine tuning offered Shelley a perfect opportunity for representing the poet's active self-insinuation into an otherwise passively conceived poetic process. In his Defense of Poetry, Shelley compares the human mind to "an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. But," he adds,
there is a principle within the human being and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.
Shelley here conceives of the human mind as a self-tuning lyre in which the poet maintains both awareness of his separateness from the stream of "impressions" that excite the diachronic "melody" of his train of thought, and conscious agency in transforming these sequential "motions" into chordal "harmonies." Of course, as we've just heard, Aeolian harps typically produce harmonies as well as melodies. But Shelley is ignoring acoustical science in order to make a figurative point. The sentient mind can imaginatively select and combine, from the unremitting but varying stream of perception's melody, a harmonious simultaneity giving rise to a "pleasure" he characterizes, later in the Defense, as "durable, universal, and permanent." Artists capture that harmonious simultaneity in the work of art.
The Aeolian harp of the artist's imagination tunes itself, then, not from without, like Squire Lofft applying a peg-wrench to Bloomfield's cantankerous device with one hand while holding a tuning fork in the other, but from within, as the creator seeks to elicit the "determined proportion" of harmony itself, the soul's desideratum. Think of focusing your eye on a page of print: do you attend to your eye, or to the page in front of you? Long before the optometrist's instruments give you the prescriptive digits to "re-tune" your eye, you know it's "out of tune" because you cannot bring the world into focus. Shelley understood that we cannot help but make sense of the "universe of things" flowing through our minds, as he puts the case in "Mont Blanc," and that the most perfect sense we can make is also the most beautiful. We actively tune these "organic harps, diversely framed" (as Coleridge passively conceived them) the way we tune a radio to a particular frequency (or used to!): we turn the knob until we can hear the signal clear and free of static. The numbers on the dial, like those on the optometrist's rotating lenses, are there to orient, not to constrain us. We aim not at a numeral, but at clarity, and we know we've arrived at the right frequency when a beautifully "determined proportion of sound"--Frederic Chopin's or Eric Clapton's or Billie Holiday's--comes pouring out.
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Is it a mere (though near) coincidence that the last known music publisher's catalogue entry for "Aeolian Harps" dates from 1884 (Bonner, History 36), just three years before Emile Berliner patented the flat-disk gramophone? In 1904, the British composer, Edward Elgar, commissioned a wind-harp as a gift for his wife (Bonner, History 37-38), but by then, as Grigson points out, Notes and Queries was receiving letters asking what a wind-harp was (46). Grigson himself, writing in 1938, saw "a prosaic, practical descendant" of the Aeolian harp in the "wireless set" (24).
Some eight decades after Shelley set it humming in reader's minds, the Aeolian harp went out of fashion and out of mind, a victim to new, more sophisticated technologies of home audio decor. Those decades comprised what Andrew Brown calls the instrument's "earnest descent to vulgarity" (69). Emerson and Thoreau owned Aeolian harps, but derived only pedestrian verse from them. Tennyson and Melville fared little better. By the 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson was parodying "the Tyrolean harp," as he called it (Brown 89), even as American parlor-poets like J. William Lloyd and Anne Throop were parodying themselves. A new age had dawned, an age of virtually endless auditory distraction. Grigson, who owned a septuagenarian wind-harp, ended his essay by observing a curious effect of Aeolian melodies, an effect anticipating Cage's 4' 33". They "make [ ] one's ear sensitive," he wrote, to the "sounds around the house and out-of-doors" (46)--not Coleridge's "stilly murmur of the distant Sea," unfortunately, but the "music" of "aeroplane [and] motor-bicycle."
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Endnotes:
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1. See, e.g., Anne and Jane Taylor's "The Little Bird's Complaint to His Mistress" and "The Mistress's Reply to Her Little Bird," Helen Leigh's "The Linnet," Ann Yearsley's "The Captive Linnet," and Mary Hays's "Ode to Her Bullfinch." Many thanks to Paula Feldman, Tobias Menely, Tom Mole, Judith Thompson, Sheila Spector, and Amy Garnai for these references.
2. My thanks to James D. Jenkins and Inger S. B. Brody.
3. In "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor," The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. Pp. 25-43.
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Works Cited:
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Bernstein, Susan. “On Music Framed: the Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing.” In The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 70-84.
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Bonner, Stephen, and M. G. Davies. The Acoustics of the Aeolian Harp: Supplement to Volumes 1-3. Vol. 4 of Aeolian Harp, ed. Stephen Bonner. Cambridge: Bois de Boulogne, 1970-1974.
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Bonner, Stephen. The History and Organology of the Aeolian Harp, Part 1: Text. Vol. 2 of Aeolian Harp, ed. Stephen Bonner. Cambridge: Bois de Boulogne, 1970-1974.
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Brown, Andrew M. C., The Aeolian Harp in European Literature, 1591-1892. Vol. 3 of of Aeolian Harp, ed. Stephen Bonner. Cambridge: Bois de Boulogne, 1970-1974.
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Goodridge, John. “Bloomfield & the Aeolian Harp: A Conversation with Alan & Nina Grove,” The Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter No. 3 (March 2002): 6-11.
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Grigson, Geoffrey, “The Aeolian Harp Reconsidered: Music of Unfulfilled Longing in Tjuchev, Morike, Thoreau, and Others,” Comparative Literature Studies 22.3 (1985): 329-43.
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Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1999.
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Addendum showing the dangers to virtue posed by the Aeolian harp, from Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753):
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Fathom, who was really a virtuoso in music, had brought one
of those new-fashioned guitars into the country, and as the effect of it
was still unknown in the family, he that night converted it to the
purposes of his amour, by fixing it in the casement of a window belonging
to the gallery, exposed to the west wind, which then blew in a gentle
breeze. The strings no sooner felt the impression of the balmy zephyr,
than they began to pour forth a stream of melody more ravishingly
delightful than the song of Philomel, the warbling brook, and all the
concert of the wood. The soft and tender notes of peace and love were
swelled up with the most delicate and insensible transition into a loud
hymn of triumph and exultation, joined by the deep-toned organ, and a
full choir of voices, which gradually decayed upon the ear, until it died
away in distant sound, as if a flight of angels had raised the song in
their ascent to heaven. Yet the chords hardly ceased to vibrate after
the expiration of this overture, which ushered in a composition in the
same pathetic style; and this again was succeeded by a third, almost
without pause or intermission, as if the artist's hand had been
indefatigable, and the theme never to be exhausted.
His heart must be quite callous, and his ear lost to all distinction, who
could hear such harmony without emotion; how deeply, then, must it have
affected the delicate Celinda, whose sensations, naturally acute, were
whetted to a most painful keenness by her apprehension; who could have no
previous idea of such entertainment, and was credulous enough to believe
the most improbable tale of superstition! She was overwhelmed with awful
terror, and, never doubting that the sounds were more than mortal,
recommended herself to the care of Providence in a succession of pious
ejaculations.
Our adventurer, having allowed some time for the effect of this
contrivance, repaired to her chamber door, and, in a whisper, conveyed
through the keyhole, asked if she was awake, begged pardon for such an
unseasonable visit, and desired to know her opinion of the strange music
which he then heard. In spite of her notions of decency, she was glad of
his intrusion, and, being in no condition to observe punctilios, slipped
on a wrapper, opened the door, and, with a faltering voice, owned herself
frightened almost to distraction. He pretended to console her with
reflections, importing, that she was in the hands of a benevolent Being,
who would not impose upon his creatures any task which they could not
bear; he insisted upon her returning to bed, and assured her he would not
stir from her chamber till day. Thus comforted, she betook herself again
to rest, while he sat down in an elbow-chair at some distance from the
bedside, and, in a soft voice, began the conversation with her on the
subject of those visitations from above, which, though undertaken on
pretence of dissipating her fear and anxiety, was, in reality, calculated
for the purpose of augmenting both.
"That sweet air," said he, "seems designed for soothing the bodily
anguish of some saint in his last moments. Hark! how it rises into a
more sprightly and elevated strain, as if it were an inspiriting
invitation to the realms of bliss! Sure, he is now absolved from all the
misery of this life! That full and glorious concert of voices and
celestial harps betoken his reception among the heavenly choir, who now
waft his soul to paradisian joys! This is altogether great, solemn, and
amazing! The clock strikes one, the symphony hath ceased!"
This was actually the case; for he had ordered Maurice to remove the
instrument at that hour, lest the sound of it should become too familiar,
and excite the curiosity of some undaunted domestic, who might frustrate
his scheme by discovering the apparatus. As for poor Celinda, her fancy
was, by his music and discourse, worked up to the highest pitch of
enthusiastic terrors; the whole bed shook with her trepidation, the awful
silence that succeeded the supernatural music threw an additional damp
upon her spirits, and the artful Fathom affecting to snore at the same
time, she could no longer contain her horror, but called upon his name
with a fearful accent, and, having owned her present situation
insupportable, entreated him to draw near her bedside, that he might be
within touch on any emergency.
This was a welcome request to our adventurer, who, asking pardon for his
drowsiness, and taking his station on the side of her bed, exhorted her
to compose herself; then locking her hand fast in his own, was again
seized with such an inclination to sleep, that he gradually sunk down by
her side, and seemed to enjoy his repose in that attitude. Meanwhile,
his tender-hearted mistress, that he might not suffer in his health by
his humanity and complaisance, covered him with the counterpane as he
slept, and suffered him to take his rest without interruption, till he
thought proper to start up suddenly with an exclamation of, "Heaven watch
over us!" and then asked, with symptoms of astonishment, if she had heard
nothing. Such an abrupt address upon such an occasion, did not fail to
amaze and affright the gentle Celinda, who, unable to speak, sprung
towards her treacherous protector; and he, catching her in his arms, bade
her fear nothing, for he would, at the expense of his life, defend her
from all danger.
Having thus, by tampering with her weakness, conquered the first and
chief obstacles to his design, he, with great art and perseverance,
improved the intercourse to such a degree of intimacy, as could not but
be productive of all the consequences which he had foreseen. The groans
and music were occasionally repeated, so as to alarm the whole family,
and inspire a thousand various conjectures. He failed not to continue
his nocturnal visits and ghastly discourse, until his attendance became
so necessary to this unhappy maiden, that she durst not stay in her own
chamber without his company, nor even sleep, except in contact with her
betrayer.