The celestaphone was a

musical instrument A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...

of the

zither Zithers (; , from the Greek word ''cithara'') are a class of stringed instruments. Historically, the name has been applied to any instrument of the psaltery family, or to an instrument consisting of many strings stretched across a thin, flat bo ...

family, which was played by pressing spring-levers to cause small hammers to strike the strings of the instrument. The term ''celestaphone'' was also used for a glass-plate

xylophone The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the ...

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

around the 1930s. Yet another ''celestaphone'' was an instrument created by Clair Omar Musser, a

glockenspiel The glockenspiel ( or , : bells and : set) or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the vibraphone. The glo ...

-like instrument he constructed over the mid-20th century from meteorites.

Players

The gospel musician

Washington Phillips George Washington "Wash" Phillips (January 11, 1880 – September 20, 1954) was an American gospel music, gospel and gospel blues singer and instrumentalist. The exact nature of the instrument or instruments he played is uncertain, being identi ...

was thought to have played the dolceola on several of his recordings, but he actually played a compound instrument he fashioned out of two East Boston

Phonoharp Company The Phonoharp Company (1892–1928) was an American manufacturer of musical instruments based in Boston, Massachusetts. Among the instruments the company was known for was the autoharp, whose design they acquired from Alfred Dolge in 1910; they ...

celestaphones, but with the hammer-keyboard removed. It consisted of two chord zithers, attached side by side, one of which had four chords, the other of which had five. He played them with his fingers, as other zither players do. Having nine chords to choose from, he also had fifteen courses of melody strings, which he contrived to tune in octaves rather than in unisons, thus giving him the "angelic" sound he was famous for. His sixteen extant sides (available on the Yazoo, Document, Agram and P-Vine labels) were cut between 1927 and 1929 in Dallas, Texas.

References

{{reflist Box zithers Keyboard instruments

Players

See also

References