The next time you see something shiny on the ground, perhaps you should bend over and pick it up. To hear Deirdre Morgan tell it, that simple impulse has led the 麻豆传媒映画musician deep into communities in remote cultures of the world, on a fervent quest to catalogue one of the planets most prolific instruments.
But the surprise isnt that Morgan, a classically trained pianist, has spent almost her entire 20s immersed in one very unique facet of world folk music its how it all came about.
This rusty one, she starts, affectionately picking up a twisted, phallic piece of metal from among dozens on her coffee table, I found it lying on the floor of a friends house seven years ago. Something about the shape caught my eye.
Mistaking it for a bike key, she eventually determined its the instrument that makes that high-pitched, sproingy sound in the background of American jug band music. But she didnt know what it was called.
Curiousity piqued, the young UBC ethnomusicology student brought the mystery home with her, starting where we all would with a Google search for twangy mouth instrument.
Seated on a cream-coloured couch in her whimsical SoMa apartment, nestled in the sky-lit upper floor of an art-filled sharehouse dubbed The Main Artery, Morgan is at ease, joyous even, as she recalls all the twists her life took after seeing the millions of search results that popped up on her screen.
While she rearranges the piles of musical equipment in front of her, her long-haired cat Chili makes the rounds, investigating the interview before plopping down on a choice bit of armrest. Morgans piano squats, gently-used, in the corner next to her bed while just above her, and decidedly hard to miss upon arrival, is the galactic star of her tumbleweed collection which she found (for free) on Craigslist at the peak of an eight-year enthusiasm for the desert drifters.
I have a bit of an obsessive mind about certain things, she concedes, somewhat bashfully, as she methodically disinfects her entire 75-plus piece Jews harp collection.
The Jews harp or jaw harp or mouth harp, (or any one of a plethora of other names for it), was the strange metallic instrument she found that day. And she is cleaning her collection all these years later because, having become Vancouvers foremost expert and player of the instrument, she often demonstrates them at music festivals, and she naively told the public at a recent event that they could try hers... only to watch in horror as every person who passed by put one in their mouth.
The collection is as expansive as it is nuanced. Lined up on the table, the harps range in millimetres by length and curve, with the largest spanning a persons palm, and the smallest no more substantial in size than a flash drive. Subtle differences, from ethnic engravings, to rich metallic tones and the shape of the frames, allow Morgan to list off each country of origin effortlessly.
She calls her assortment modest, citing a 3,000-piece museum in Siberia (where children are taught to play the harps in school and carry them on strings around their necks) and the inimitable collection of an aficionado in Japan. But for a 28-year-old girls bedroom in Vancouver, its a delight.
The fact that she even discovered this exotic instrument on our rather culturally isolated shores is a strange twist of luck befitting the mysterious history of the harp.
Bamboo harps from South East Asia, so different in sound and construction, likely predate their steel European counterparts, but wooden artifacts decay and quickly disappear from archeological recovery. So while metal versions have appeared in dig sites as far back as the 1300s, very little is known about the evolution of the wooden harps a continent away.
Theories abound, though, as to how the steel harp spread so widely throughout the world, and it is largely accepted that it originated in Siberia and travelled through trade down the Silk Road, into India, Afghanistan, Eastern and then Western Europe, and, with the colonial era of conquest, South American and South Africa.
She stops mid-explanation, her striking Welsh beauty splitting into a grin, to add that she thinks there is simply something so universal about the instrument, primordial even, that people just figured it out independently of each other.
And then she picks one up and starts to play. Held with the lips against the teeth, she strikes up an Indian rhythm high and plucky, a quick little percussive melody.
Im not doing anything to the instrument itself and thats whats really cool about it. On its own, this instrument doesnt really make a sound; it needs to have a resonator and with the human body, the size and shape is totally variable.
Rich tones, from human voices to the thunder of galloping horses, are created by simply by flicking the flexible metal tongue in the middle, and changing the shape of the mouth, throat, or stomach.
She turns to one of her more artisan Siberian pieces and elicits a drone eerily reminiscent of an old man chanting, with words and wintery imagery floating throughout.
The vibrations go through your skull, she squints when shes finished. Ive been doing it for so long that I like it, it can be very meditative, but, she adds with a laugh, it totally freaks some people out. And then a horrified look crosses her face. For the longest time, my mom thought it was called a juice harp, because you drool when you play....
The Jews harp, is it stands, is only called so in English-speaking circles, and academically has never actually been linked to Israel or the Jewish community at all.
The evocative name, which may have originated from the French jouer (to play), is a harmless misnomer that persists in North America even today. Morgan, in fact, presides over the as the executive director, organizing the North American Jews Harp Festival in Bay City, Oregon, each year, and is on the board of the both volunteer positions that stem from her community involvement, not only as a musician, but as a researcher (she did her on the subject) and amateur filmmaker (shes making a documentary). Its super geeky. I just travel around and go to all these crazy festivals.
Once the marketing coordinator for 麻豆传媒映画vocal ensemble , Morgan has had to put that job (the one that has helped her pay for her explorations), to bed while she embarks on her next adventure a Ph.D dissertation on the Jews harp at the School of Oriental and African studies at the University of London.
Some might say it was luck that put the harp at Morgans feet that day, but when horoscopes and self-help gurus start bandying guidance about how to make the most of your new year, perhaps the best advice is to just look around you, and allow yourself to get a little obsessed.
