Starting with the appearance of a guitar on the first page of V., Pyn-chon’s novels display an interest in musical instruments that only appears to fade with a marked decrease in Bleeding Edge. In total, Pynchon references 130 different musical instruments 720 times throughout his work—excluding signal instruments played for sig-nal purposes (see Appendix). These 130 uniquely named instruments sometimes include members of instrument families such as the alto, the C-melody, the tenor, the baritone, and the contrabass saxophone and can be merged into roughly 70 instrument categories. By far the largest category is that of percussion instruments with a total of 115 references to 28 different instruments. Adding up the most frequently mentioned instruments, the following picture emerges:
Instrument family Different members1 References Books Percussion 28 115 10 Keyboard 8 81 8 Guitar 5 71 9 Saxophone 5 59 9 Accordion 3 36 6 Bass 3 35 6 Harmonica 1 34 3 Ukulele 2 31 6 Trumpet 2 23 7 Kazoo 1 20 6
Table 1: Most frequent instrument references.
1 The percussion family here excludes tuned percussive instruments mainly used to play melodies or chords: the xylophone, the glockenspiel, the marimba, and the carillon. All harmonicas and kazoos were included in one respective family since many of Pynchon’s different harmonicas and kazoos are fictional. The accordion category comprises the accordion, the ban-doneón, and the concertina. The keyboard category comprises the upright piano, the grand piano, the player piano, synthesizers, harmoniums, claviers, harpsichords, and keyboards (71 of those references are upright and grand pianos). The trumpet category includes the cornet. Uncollected writings that did not appear in book form were grouped as one hypothetical book.
The bulk of these instruments fits into two groups: the first group is the jazz combo (sax, trumpet, bass, piano, percussion) which overlaps with the rock band (guitar, bass, piano, percussion; sax in earlier rock’n’roll bands). This is in line with Pynchon’s pre-ferred styles of music as evidenced in the scattered biographical accounts. The other group encompasses instruments that seem dear to Pynchon but are not part of the Western canon of orches-tration: the ukulele, the kazoo, and the harmonica. While Pynchon stages all instruments of the second group with affection, insight, and a good deal of humor, in the first group only the saxophone and its players are developed with comparable care. The promi-nence of the accordion (whose sound-producing principle is the same as the harmonica’s) is more easily overlooked, the reason being that Pynchon, it appears, stages it only as an instrument that is played to make music and not as one that has a set of his-torical, political, or socioeconomic characteristics useful to com-ment on or further the plot. The trumpet may figure high on this list, but Pynchon, having come of age when the trumpet as the central jazz instrument was already being replaced by the saxo-phone (by 1949, it was bordering on the anachronistic to call a book Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz, as Rudi Blesh did), does not bestow any particular and consistent qualities on it. Pyn-chon does name or allude to a few trumpet players—Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown—but they belong to the era of bebop, hard bop, and cool jazz, and there is no indica-tion of a particular trumpet tradiindica-tion that he refers to, leaving out entirely some of their predecessors, such as Louis Armstrong or his mentor King Oliver.
Musical instruments are extensions of humans. They, too, are media, and Pynchon makes it clear that for them, too, the medium is the message if “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan 8). This becomes evident when Pynchon repeatedly refers to the Bösendorfer Imperial, one of the most expensive grand pianos, a full eight octave range, and brings the imperial quality of that instrument to our attention. This is not an instrument that is casually played or purchased, but its dimen-sions (almost three meters in length) and its sheer weight (552 kg) make it one of the most imposing musical instruments with the possible exception of the church organ, whose uses, however, are usually limited to sacred music.
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It would be a misconception to see musical instruments as mere tools, as bodily extensions that execute the will and intention of their users. Every innovation of consequence has come about because the user discovered what else the medium could do apart from its intended use. There is always an interplay of resistance and discovery between the user and the instrument.
As Aden Evens has theorized, music arises only from this mutual resistance of the player and her instrument: “There must be a friction between musician and instrument, specific points of contact where the hard surfaces of the instrument meet the soft flesh of the musician” (160). This mutual resistance can be under-stood as forming something like the core of an ontology of organ-ology. The mutuality also resonates with the notion that we shape the media and then the media shape us.
One of the instruments where the topos of resistance is histori-cally evident is the ukulele. Sean Carswell has done a thorough reading of this little instrument in Pynchon’s work, inspecting every instance of its occurrence. Its history is fascinating enough:
In 1865, the Kingdom of Hawaii faced a shortage of laborers and commissioned one William Hillebrand, a German physi-cian, entrepreneur, and botanist, to find contract workers abroad (Tranquada & King 34). In 1876, he landed on Madeira, an island of similar climatic but devastating economic conditions, and recruited a great number of Madeirans. The second ship of labor-ers to arrive in Honolulu in 1879, the Ravenscrag, carried the cab-inet makers Manuel Nunes, Jose do Espirito Santo, and Augusto Dias, as well as a traditional small Madeiran guitar, the machete (38). After the expiration of their work contracts, they stayed on Hawaii and, although likely not trained instrument makers, began repairing and manufacturing stringed instruments, among them a small guitar which came to be called the ukulele. Before long, the ukulele was nearly ubiquitous and members of the royal family received music lessons on the instrument. Less than a decade after the Ravenscrag’s arrival, the ukulele was considered Hawaii’s national instrument (37). Carswell writes:
Hawaiians were faced with the violent overthrow of their islands by a network of corporate and government interests from within the United States. They could not combat this network’s overpowering military presence, so they sought resistance in other ways. Specifi-cally, they sought to maintain and validate their culture. The ‘uku-lele became the symbol for this Hawaiian culture. (“Uku‘uku-lele” 206)
By the beginning of the twentieth century, “the ‘ukulele began to make appearances up and down the West Coast in the hands of young ladies” (Tranquada & King 67). Through its presence in a number of expositions, most notably the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, it quickly gained wide popularity in the U. S. In 1949, Mario Maccaferri, an Italian instrument maker, introduced the first plastic ukulele at $5.95.
He soon had 50,000 orders for plastic ukes and then moved on to sell millions more (Beloff 106). Thanks to plastic, the instrument was now produced on a grand and mechanized scale.
Carswell writes that the ukulele “is born of colonialism, global markets, and militarization […], but it is also born of celebration, community, and cultural identity” (“Ukulele” 207). The same can be said of the harmonica, the kazoo, and the saxophone. While the saxophone was at all times an instrument for professionals, the ukulele, the harmonica, and the kazoo were persistently derided as toys and given attention mainly for their comical effect. Their worthiness of being labeled musical instruments was much dis-puted, or outright negated, throughout the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, due to their inexpensive manufacturing and com-pact size, they have enjoyed considerable success not only in musical education and home entertainment but also in boosting morale in various wars where the USA was involved. While only the kazoo is an all-American invention, all three of those Preter-ites of organology needed the creative soil and the mass market of the USA to really take off.
Carswell’s writing about the ukulele can be viewed as a blue-print of how I will develop the following sections on the harmon-ica, the kazoo, and the saxophone. I will briefly sketch the respec-tive histories and highlight resonances in the way Pynchon stages the instruments and their players before doing select readings of how this all plays out.
The Harmonica
Pynchon’s harmonica appears in a great variety of contexts. It is Tyrone Slothrop’s beloved instrument accidentally dropped into a toilet bowl to resurface later thousands of miles away, bringing sol-ace before the protagonist’s scattering. While its blues character-istics comfort the Preterite, both in Gravity’s Rainbow and in
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relationships in Against the Day but, in the same novel, appears in an extended episode with a darker and more twisted undercurrent, mirroring the various appropriations and reappropriations in the instrument’s often turbulent history.
The first European harmonica appeared in Vienna around 1820.
Kim Field writes that by “1830 most Europeans knew the mouth organ as the mundharmonika […]” (25). Already in 1827, the mouth harmonica came to the German village of Trossingen where thirty years later, Matthias Hohner opened his own business and turned out 650 instruments that year (26). In 1862, Hohner began exporting instruments to the United States, which laid the foun-dation of a global musical instruments empire, overshadowing its early competitors with high-quality instruments, clever market-ing, industrial espionage, diversification, and by buying up rivals.2 Unexpectedly, it would be the USA where the harmonica enjoyed most success, starting in the regions with large German immigrant populations, such as Texas and the Carolinas (Wenzel and Häff-ner 58). The small and affordable instrument that allowed bend-ing notes for less rigidly defined tonal systems than the European one soon came into the hands of African-Americans as “even the poorest cotton picker could scrape together the few cents needed to acquire one” (58–59).
By 1911, the company—renamed Matth. Hohner AG—shipped out around eight million instruments annually and had branches in New York, Toronto, London, Warsaw, and Vienna (21). The harmonica was already widely distributed during World War I.
In 1930, musicologist Curt Sachs wrote: “Inexpensiveness and smallness have earned the harmonica the favor of the broad masses […]. The role it played in the World War will be a glorious chapter in its history; on never-ending marches, the undemand-ing harmonica […] replaced entire regimental bands” (Eickhoff 66; my translation). The harmonica in World War I was com-memorated with the exhibition Lebensretter und Seelentröster (“Lifesaver and Soul Comforter”) held at the Deutsches Harmon-ika Museum in Trossingen in 2014, where, among other things, harmonicas were on display that had caught bullets and saved
2 In the course of the company’s history, Hohner also manufactured saxo-phones, recorders, and a number of other instruments. While most other Hohner instruments were not as highly regarded as the harmonicas and accordions, some instruments such as the Melodica and Clavinet acquired outright cult status among musicians in the 1960s and later.
their owners’ lives. In order to be able to export to countries such as France and Great Britain during the war, Hohner opened a branch in neutral Switzerland (Wenzel and Häffner 24). By the 1930s, Matth. Hohner AG employed 4,000 workers and manufac-tured about 25 million harmonicas each year.3
During World War II, Hohner was faced with the draft of many of their skilled employees. The company was unable to export to the USA and had to dedicate two thirds of the factories to the war effort, producing armaments with the use of Russian and East-ern European forced labor. The remaining production was geared toward soldiers. A Hohner advertisement from the time of World War II shows two happy soldiers with harmonicas in their hands and reads: “Wer dem feldgrauen Mann eine wirkliche Freude bereiten will, schenke eine ‘Hohner’” (“If you want to bring real joy to the field-gray man, give him a Hohner,” reproduced in Häffner 43 and Eickhoff 62). More than any other musical instru-ments manufacturer, at least to my knowledge, Hohner was not only instrumentalized by a war-waging government but in turn also instrumentalized the war to achieve further sales. Hohner was quick to capitalize on the circumstances by producing a num-ber of war-themed harmonicas—ranging from sentimental to martial—by targeting families of soldiers as a new market, and by cooperating with the Nazi government. The main reason, how-ever, Hohner was able to capitalize on the war—within the limits afforded in times of crisis—was its well-oiled marketing machin-ery and the fact that the harmonica is a small, inexpensive, and easy-to-learn instrument which is well suited for distribution in great numbers.
Once established, the harmonica became a staple mainly in folk, blues, and country music. The miniature four-hole Little Lady (produced since 1924) was the first instrument in outer space when astronaut Walter Schirra sneaked it aboard his spacecraft and played “Jingle Bells” on Christmas 1965 (Wenzel and Häffner 24). To this day, Hohner is the world market leader in harmonicas and accordions.
Pynchon’s perhaps most famous harmonica scene takes place in Gravity’s Rainbow. During a hospital visit in 1944, when Tyrone
3 The sources differ slightly. Eickhoff writes that the first major shipment to the USA took place in 1868 (29) and that 25 million harmonicas were
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Slothrop receives an injection of the truth serum sodium amytal, he has a vision of visiting Boston’s Roseland State Ballroom where a young Malcolm X works as a shoeshine boy and Jack Kennedy is a regular, albeit absent that night. As Slothrop vomits in the men’s room, he accidentally drops his harmonica into the toilet bowl,
“the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain” (Grav-ity 64). While he is deciding whether he should go after it, the 1938 jazz standard “Cherokee” is resonating through the walls from downstairs. Slothrop recalls the sweet and sentimental lyr-ics of the song alternatively titled “Indian Love Song” and deems it “one more lie about white crimes” (Gravity 65). As he plunges into the toilet bowl in search of his beloved harmonica and dis-appears down the white ceramic rabbit hole into the collective unconscious of the shit-brown sewage system, he barely escapes being sodomized by Red Malcolm and his gang: “In Slothrop’s fantasies of sodomy, he anticipates the change in racial relations, when Blacks will not settle for being shoeshines and musicians, but will want power and revenge” (Hume and Knight, “Orches-tration” 376). Yet Slothrop escapes, and if his penis is not his own (Gravity 219), at least his anus is. His descent into the underworld in the hope of retrieving his instrument is a first intimation of his becoming Orpheus later on in the novel. Slothrop disappears, as will become his habit, but only when he is reunited with his har-monica will he be able to disappear for good.
As he is looking for the harmonica, that German-Austrian instrument which in its African-American idiom allows “tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies,” he vainly places his hopes in Kennedy to help him retrieve it: “If anybody could’ve saved that harp, betcha Jack could” (67). If anybody could have saved those lost, the Pret-erite—the African-Americans, the Native Americans, and anyone who would come under the scrutiny of Joseph McCarthy and later the Nixon administration—and acknowledged what is bent from the official frequencies of white Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Slothrop seems to say, John F. Kennedy could have. But before the story is finished or the novel is published, Kennedy—who ended up maneuvering the world closer to nuclear meltdown than anyone else before or since—will have gone the way of all flesh, and it is Richard M. Nixon/Zhlubb who survives until the very last page.
As Slothrop emerges from the sewer line into an eery under-world, he hears a “mouthsucking giant five-note chords” har-monica accompaniment to “Red River Valley” with altered lyrics
informing him that “the toilet it ain’t going nowhar” (69). “Red River Valley,” a sentimental song about a girl who must leave the valley, comments on the fate of both the harmonica and Eurydice.
While many other lyrics were set to this song during World War II, the original lyrics go: “From this valley they say you are going / We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile / For they say you are taking the sunshine / Which has brightened our pathways a while,” and in the sixth verse: “As you go to your home by the ocean / May you never forget those sweet hours.”
N. Katherine Hayles and Mary B. Eiser argue that White-Red-Black is the basic triad in Gravity’s Rainbow, and “red, the third term, is meant to open a space in which color can again appear.
[…] [R]ed is the mediating third term that comes between black and white to signify a potential for transformation, a germ of pas-sion […]” (7). It is the color associated with the Preterite. Red and its washed-down, pale companion pink/rose are very much present in this scene: Red Malcolm, Cherokee, the Roseland Ball-room, Roosevelt, to name a few. Still, Pynchon does not simply use the three colors white, red, and black (which were also the colors of the flag of Nazi Germany) as symbols for, say, white Ameri-cans, Native AmeriAmeri-cans, and African-Americans. This triad would exclude everything and everyone that does not match these colors, such as the West Indian bartender (Gravity 64). Instead, Pynchon complicates matters and undermines the notion of authenticity along ethnic lines: “Cherokee” is a song about an Indian maiden written by a British composer after his emigration to the USA.
Only by being performed by African-Americans, most notably Charlie Parker, was it able to lose its sentimental undertones and become something other than “one more lie about white crimes.”
Gerhard Westerath’s interpretation is that “Pynchon plays with the idea that preterite peoples, Indian subjects evoked by the title and black musicians, come together in the medium of jazz to coun-teract white structures” (110).
Some 600 pages later, during his meanderings through post-war Germany, Slothrop eventually finds the harmonica he lost in his flashback to or vision of the Roseland Ballroom—or the harmon-ica finds him. He immediately recognizes it as his, as it must be if there is only “[o]ne of each of everything” (Gravity 69) in the world. The rediscovered instrument comes up after the tail end of the bickering between Gustav the composer and Emil “Säure”
Bummer about whether tonality as exemplified by “Spohr,
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is of higher musical value.4 This is significant insofar as neither
is of higher musical value.4 This is significant insofar as neither