Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, my father gave me a set of chimes that, I believe, came from a clock. It was comprised of a piece of dark wood attached to a cast iron bridge/mount that, in turn, had a set of eight metal rod-gongs screwed into it. If the assembly was attached to a resonator (such as the side of a grandfather clock) the rod-gongs, when struck, could chime with a bell-like tone; they were tuned to be able to play the Westminster chimes. Dad said he had planned to make a doorbell with them, but had decided to scrap the idea and so passed them on to me, knowing my interest in bells.
I hung onto the chimes through several moves, knowing I wanted to do something with them, but unsure what. They sat loose in closets or stuffed into boxes, took up space on my desk, and, at one point just for fun, I bolted them to a bookcase and whacked them whenever I went by to hear the lovely chord they sounded. Finally, last year sometime, I had the inspiration that they would probably sound cool if I bowed them, but they needed a resonator more portable than a bookcase.
One night last November on my way home from the office, I went by a craft store and picked up one of those wooden project boxes that people paint or decoupage (I wonder what the other customers thought as I sorted through the shelf tapping on and listening to each box one by one). At home on my family room floor, I spent quite a while experimenting with how to position the chime unit to get the best tone and resonance from the box. I also expended some effort rehabilitating it, as the bridge was dusty and oily with age; in that process, one of the rod-gongs broke, but, fortunately, it was one of two at that pitch. All that done, I finally screwed the reassembled unit to its new soundbox and began experimenting with playing it, using an old violin bow I had. Unfortunately, the rods were nested in such a way that one could only access two at a time with the bow, so I couldn't play any melodies, however simple, but it made a really interesting drone with lots of overtones -- I was pleased. Trying to mic it for recording tended to interfere with the bowing, so I experimented further with two piezo pads, eventually gluing them in place and attaching their 1/4" sockets to the walls of the soundbox. I liked the amplified sound and recorded a piece with the instrument, but it seemed musically incomplete and I didn't know where to go with it, so I left it alone.
Fast forward to this past week, when I found myself with a workshop in which I could actually build and experiment with musical instruments. One of the explorations I was engaged in was figuring out what kind of finish I wanted to use for the instruments I was going to build. I'd had quite a bit of experience working with lacquer, some with varnish, and a little with oils and they all had advantages and disadvantages; after much research (read: Internet surfing), I concluded that shellac was a good place to start, but I really hadn't done anything with it before. I had already started building the kalimba kit, but wanted something to practice on before committing to that, so, after doing some tests on scrap wood, I decided the clock chime needed a finish. In the end, I was pleased with how it came out, especially the dark wood to which the bridge is mounted, although it's difficult to see in these images the depth it added. I now consider the instrument -- at least this iteration of it -- complete. Thus:
Top and front, with two rod-gongs attached to the bridge and the rest in a simple holder I made. (I'm not showing the bow here.)
From the back; you can see the brass screws attached to the top of the rods as they are inserted into the bridge.
Close up of the bridge from the front…
...and from the back.
Placement of the piezo mics and their output; notice they are asymmetrical. You can also see the screws and washers attaching the wood block to the soundbox.
As I say, I was pleased with the result, and with myself; I had had an idea for an instrument and had built it, at least a prototype. Although I didn't think I was the first person to have the idea to bow a rod-gong, I did have the thought that maybe I might have done something fairly original.
I've since learned that, well, it's unlikely.
Of course, anyone with an education in twentieth century music can list a handful of pioneering instrument makers -- Harry Partch, the Baschet Brothers, Luigi Russolo, Lou Harrison, among others -- whose inventiveness pushed the boundaries of music, sculpture, and even art. Unsurprisingly, their work inspired generations of others even more fascinated than me by how sound is created and propagated. Too, Western musicologists have traveled the world exploring sound arts from folk to classical traditions of non-Western cultures, discovering the inventiveness of millennia of instrument making; the Sachs–Hornbostel system of instrument classification has over 300 basic categories and still doesn't capture everything.
So, while it's possible -- only possible, I say -- that no one else has bolted a clock chime to a crafts box from Michael's, electrified it with piezos, and played it with a bow, it turns out my instrument fits neatly into a well-established class of sound-making devices. It's a kind of idiophone, that is, instruments the body of which creates the initial vibrations (as opposed to a string, membrane, column of air, etc.), and of the subclass lamellaphone, where the vibrating body is anchored at one end (it turns out that the kalimba is in the same subclass). There are examples of bowed lamellaphones, too, such as the nail violin and the daxophone.
All of this I learned through a recent reading of Bart Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design, a fabulous book on principles of sound making that takes an impressively detailed overview of pretty much any kind of instrument you can imagine -- and a whole bunch you never did. Mr. Hopkin has been designing and building instruments since the 1980s and knows of what he speaks; you can hear and see some of his work on YouTube. I didn't know it when I was in high school, but I think what I really wanted then was to be Bart Hopkin.
At this point in my life and my career(s), I know that's not gonna happen (I mean, it already did, right? -- he's Bart Hopkin!), but, to paraphrase what I said in my previous post, it doesn't matter whether I change the world, just that what I'm doing is meaningful. I had a blast building and experimenting with my bowed clock chime and it has given me ideas for other sounds and music I want to make. I plan on exploring those ideas when and as the chance takes me.
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