My Bowed Psaltery

My bowed psaltery is an authentic "Gustavarius." It is inscribed as such inside its bottom board, along with the maker's more common name, Gus Hult; the date, Sept. 18, 2003; and the number, No. 17.

My bowed psaltery is made of wood and piano strings and horse hair. The triangular top and bottom boards are solid spruce cut from the sound board of an 80-or-so-year-old piano that was washed up, had seen better days. The tuning block, or pin block, is also from a piano and is hard maple. The sides of the psaltery are made from Filipino mahogany rescued from a dumpster behind a music shop in Green Bay, the mahogany having once served as a carton for a piano traveling from the Far East to Wisconsin. The bridge - a little elongated prism of wood near the tuning block that lifts and supports the strings - is also walnut, but from closer by, an Illinois farm, the farm where Hult's mother grew up. The bow is walnut (but not necessarily mother's walnut) and is strung with horse hair that comes from a shop in Escanaba, Michigan, that sells pow wow supplies. And a little black and white gizmo on the bow is made from two piano keys, one ebony and one ivory, taken from a piano made in 1889. (Hult told me that on a violin bow this little piece is called the "frog." Maybe on a psaltery it's a "phrog.")

The psaltery is strung with piano wire. Whole notes descend the right side of the triangle, each marked with its letter, and sharps and flats the left, similarly marked. I hold the psaltery in my lap and run the bow across the strings and it gives me a sweet sound.

I found my psaltery at the U.P. Made Artists Market, and the other day Hult stopped by while I was working there to tune it (although it turned out it didn't really need tuning), to answer my questions, and to restock the market with another psaltery, No. 66. Hult, a piano tuner by trade, lives up here in the U.P. He discovered psalteries while on vacation in Berea, Kentucky, a dozen or so years ago and figured he could make his own so got some blueprints from a place in Minnesota and did. He uses old piano parts and whatnot because that's what he has plenty of.

Which reminds me of a tune ...