The Rebirth of the Javanese angklung

bout 1935 the Supervisor of Music for the Pasadena, California Public Schools, Lillian Mohr Fox, came across an old-fashioned autoharp. This psaltery-for-everyone was a late Nineteenth Century German invention which became popular in the United States as a musical toy. Mrs. Fox recalled playing an as a girl. It immediately struck her that the autoharp, with its chord selector-buttons, was an instrument which her music classes could learn to play quickly. Mrs. Fox set about encouraging manufacturers to produce the neglected instrument.2 The use of the autoharp, as manufactured by Oscar Schmidt International and other firms, is so common in American school music instruction today that no music textbook series would be published lacking autoharp chords. The rebirth of this popular instrument in the 1930's appeared as a parallel when Daeng Sutigna of Bandung, Indonesia recounted his 1 e ff o rt sefforts to resurrect the angklung of West Java during the same decade.3 He it, 1: ~also remembered a childhood instrus? 3 3 ment which he reasoned would be effective for classroom teaching. ? P^ ~ The angklung of West Java is a pair of mounted bamboo tubes sounding an octave when shaken. The tubes v2 are supported in a square frame, also of bamboo. Each tube is split open about two-thirds of its length. (See Fig. 1.) The bottom of the tube is closed by a node, with two tongues .^... -' below it shaped when the bottom is LY cut. The tongues sit in a small trough Figure 1. The West Javanese angklung. in the base of the frame, and move