When most musicians play a concert, they usually stick to one instrument, maybe two or three if they’re multi-instrumentalists. When Cätlin Mägi takes to the stage, she brings no fewer than 50: all different versions of the Estonian parmupill.
The parmupill is a jaw harp: a metal tongue held in a steel frame that is plucked using the mouth as a soundbox. The instrument has existed in Estonia since at least the 13th century, and was once a staple accompaniment to folk dance parties. Over time, it was replaced by louder and more fashionable instruments such as the fiddle and accordion, and the traditional style of playing – where the player creates an overtone melody by changing the shape of their mouth and throat – was lost. Its death knell came during Soviet rule. “In Russian times, we couldn’t have our own traditional music,” Mägi explains. “They took it to the stages and they only played a small amount of tunes, so it changed. The village people didn’t play it because it just was not familiar to them anymore.” As the folk music and dances became standardised, so did the instrumentation, and the parmupill survived only as a novelty.
It was in Norway, during her time as an exchange student, that Mägi discovered a thriving jaw harp tradition. “The old players there knew how to get the clear melody from the jaw harp, so I studied with them. When I came back to Estonia I thought, maybe we had the same technique in our history? I went to the archives and suddenly there were 20 old recordings that had the same clarity of melody!” The most recent of those recordings was from 1938; that style of playing had not been heard in Estonia for more than half a century. Now, through her research as a scholar, her performances as a musician and her teaching as the head of folk music at the famous Viljandi Culture Academy, Mägi has pioneered the resurrection of this once lost technique. When it comes to the parmupill, she literally wrote the book: Eesti Parmupill / Estonian Jew’s Harp was published in 2011.
But why do her gigs involve 50 parmupills? Well, she doesn’t play them all individually. Using specialised clamps, she stacks several instruments together to create ‘courses.’ Each parmupill in a course twangs a different note, and she can easily swap between them as she plays. That way, she changes the pitch of the drone as well as the overtone harmonics, meaning that she can play a bassline and a melody simultaneously. “When I make my music, I have to have exactly the right pitches ready for every tune. I can’t make a course during a concert, it takes too much time, so I can’t just have one harp for each note. I have 20 ‘A’ harps at home because I have to spread them out – that’s why I have so many!”
When she performs, Mägi’s 50 parmupills are transformed into more than just metallic twangs and whistling overtones. Their traditional West Estonian repertoire is glitched and warped through electronics: distortions, echoes, delays and loops turn their sound into a vast monster machine – and it helps that jaw harps already sound inherently electronic. Most impressive is the octave pedal, which turns the reediness of the parmupill into a rumbling, powerful bass over which folk songs and melodies can play.
Mägi is not content with reviving the techniques of playing the instrument, she’s making new methods and contexts for the parmupill to flourish in modern musical spheres. EDM, contemporary jazz and traditional folk music; state-of-the-art gadgetry and 50 ancient instruments coming together as one. A wondrous collaboration of old and new made from just two pieces of twisted metal.
Photo: Cätlin Mägi live at WOMEX 19, by Jacob Crawfurd.