– 1 – – 1 –

VOLUME 44, NUMBER 1 • Spring 2020 NMM WEBSITE • NMMUSD.ORG

National Music Museum

NewsletterVERMILLION, SOUTH DAKOTA

University of South Dakota

SmithsonianA�liate

Good Vibes:Lionel Hampton’s vibraphone and drum set at the NMM! Dr. Margaret Downie BanksAssociate Director/Senior Curator

By reputation, he is known as the “King of the Vibes,” the “Vibe Pres-ident,” and “Boss of the Backbeat.” But to his fans, among whom are musical instrument collectors Lynn and Steve Dillon, the late Lionel Hampton is affectionately known simply as “Hamp.”

“We need to talk about the Hamp vibes,” was the short, but intrigu-ing message received from Steve Dillon one day last summer. Subse-quent conversations revealed that Steve and his wife, Lynn, wanted to designate their 1993 Musser vibra-phone and Remo drum set, both made specifically for the jazz legend Lionel Hampton (1908-2002), as promised gifts to the museum, along with a collection of associated mal-lets, drumsticks, and related Hamp-ton memorabilia. Accordingly, the Dillon’s entered into an irrevocable agreement to gift these items to the NMM at a future date. In the mean-time, they generously agreed to send them to Vermillion so the NMM can share the jazz great’s legacy with the public in its new, reimagined exhibits, soon to be mounted in the recently expanded and renovated Carnegie building.

Lionel Hampton’s distinguished musical career began unpretentious-

boys. I was playing the timpani, xylophone and orchestra bells in the school’s concert orchestra...and also playing the snare drum in the march-ing band. Then I would go home, play records by Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, and learn the trumpet and saxophone solos note for note on the xylophone and orchestra bells” (cited in Hampton’s obituary, New York Times, 9/1/2002).

The turning point in Hamp’s life came in 1930 when he was intro-duced to the vibraphone during a recording session with Louis Arm-strong. “There was a set of vibes in

ly while attending the Holy Rosary Academy in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, according to Hampton, Sister Petra taught the future jazz artist the twenty-six standard drum rudiments.

At the age of eight, Hamp moved to Chicago with his family where he added several more instruments to the tools of his trade. “I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920’s,” Hampton once recalled. “I spent hours every day at a mu-sic school for boys that had been started by The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, for their news-

Above: A vibraphone made by Musser (Chicago, 1993) specifically for Lionel Hampton. Promised gift of Lynn and Steve Dillon. NMM 15085. Photo by Byron Pillow.

Right: Lionel Hampton playing a vibraphone, New York City, ca. June 1946. Public domain photo. William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress.

– 2 – – 3 –

the corner,” Hampton later recalled. “Louis said, ‘Do you know how to play it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play it.’ It had the same keyboard as the xylo-phone, and I was familiar with that. I had never played the vibes before in my life, but I picked it and played Louis’ solo from his record Chinese Chop Suey note for note.” Recog-nizing the twenty-two-year-old’s talent, Armstrong invited Hampton to play vibes on a recording of Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You.” Hamp-ton’s impromptu performance made musical history--it was the first time that an improvised vibraphone solo was played for a jazz recording.

Clarinetist Benny Goodman invited Hamp to join his newly formed quartet in 1936. “Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general,” Hampton said. “Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G. I feel honored to have been a part of that dramatic change.”

In 1940, Hamp formed his own ensemble--the Lionel Hampton Or-chestra. This exuberant, freewheel-ing jazz ensemble, credited with helping to usher in the rock ‘n roll era, continued to perform and make

recordings for several decades.

Steve and Lynn Dillon acquired their Hampton vibraphone, drum set, and related items from Bill Bergacs (1923-2008), who worked with Hampton for some fifty years, the last fifteen as Hamp’s personal road/band manager. Living nearby, Bergacs was a frequent visitor to the Dillon Music Store in Woodbridge, New Jersey. With the help of Tony Barrero, Hamp’s lead trumpet player, Bergacs eventually brought all of his Hampton items to Steve’s shop where the astute businessman and musical instrument collector per-sonally acquired them in order to preserve them for posterity.

Like the Dillon’s, perhaps you too, can help refine the NMM’s world-class collections. If you are inter-ested in discussing the possibility of making an irrevocable promised gift of a musical instrument(s) to the NMM, please contact Margaret (“Peggy”) Downie Banks, Associate Director/Senior Curator at Margaret.Banks@usd.edu. And…wait for it…even more promised gifts from the amazing collection of Lynn and Steve Dillon will be featured in future issues of the NMM newsletter. Stay tuned!

“Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating,” Hampton noted in a 1988 interview. “I’ve always been crazy about playing. Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things. Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid. I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.”

Hampton’s intensely personal need for musical expression was remembered in his obituary, written for the New York Times by Peter Watrous (1 September 2002): “Mr. Hampton’s frenetic stage persona -- mouth agape, mallets flying, sweat pouring from his brow -- earned him his following, and he was legendary for not wanting to leave the stage. He truly lived to play.”

Above: Drum set made for Lionel Hampton’s use by Remo, Inc. (Valen-cia, California, ca. 1993). Promised gift of Lynn and Steve Dillon. NMM 15086. Left: Lionel Hampton, well-known for his drumstick calisthenics, plays the drum set made for his use by Remo, Inc. Hamp’s lead trumpet player, Tony Barrero, poses next to him in an undated photo.

Lionel Hampton, 1997 John

Math

ew S

mith

, pho

togr

aphe

r. CC

-BY-

SA-2

.0 li

cens

e.

NMM’s Trumpets: Weird and Wonderful travels to Carolina Music MuseumThe exhibit, Trumpets: Weird and Wonderful—Treasures from the Na-tional Music Museum, made its first stop last year at the Morris Museum, in Morristown, New Jersey. Now vis-itors to the Carolina Music Museum (CMM), in Greenville, South Carolina, can enjoy the more than 40 historic instruments from the NMM’s Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection of brass instruments. The exhibit, which runs through April 18, 2020, lets museumgoers listen and learn about the vast variety of the best-known member of the brasswind family.

Trumpets: Weird and Wonderful includes Western and non-Western instruments dating from the 17th through the 20th centuries, showing how brasswind instruments function in varying contexts, religions, and national identities. Dr. Sabine Klaus, the Joe & Joella Utley Curator of Brass Instruments at the National Music Museum and Professor of Music at the University of South Dakota, serves as Guest Cura-tor for the CMM exhibition. “From Swiss alphorns and Israeli shofars to German hunting horns and jazz trumpets— this fascinating exhibition is an exploration of the aesthetics of the trumpet across a wide spectrum

of cultures and technological prac-tices,” said Klaus.

This Carolina Music Museum show is especially meaningful given its proximity to the Utley’s family home. The late Joe and Joella Utley, brass collectors and connoisseurs extraor-dinaire, were both Spartanburg-ar-ea physicians. They were deeply involved in their state’s music culture and served graciously on several boards, including the Spartanburg Symphony Orchestra and the Green-ville Symphony Orchestra. The NMM exhibit of their beloved instruments is helping to keep their legacy alive.

Nine Cremonese instruments from the collections of the National Music Museum are currently on dispaly in Italy for a very special Reunion in Cremona, a year-long exhibit at the famed Museo del Violino.

Phot

o by

Byr

on P

illow

.

Trumpets: Weird and Wonderful—Treasures from the National Music Museum is currently on display at the Carolina Music Museum.

Soprano Normaphone in B-flat attributed to Richard Oskar Heber, Markneukirchen, Saxony, Germany, ca. 1925. NMM 7350.

Phot

o by

Mar

k Olen

cki.

– 4 – – 5 –

Sept. 7, Chris Gage

“The clarinet of the future?” The McIntyre’s 1962 plastic clarinetDr. Deborah Check ReevesCurator of Education and Woodwinds

How well did the new McIntyre fingering system work? James Collis, clarinetist and editor of Woodwind World reviewed the clarinet after a one-month trial. He announced, “This new model instrument may well be the clarinet of the future.” While acknowledging that profes-sionals with years of training on the traditional clarinet might find switch-ing to the new fingering challenging, Collis saw it as a boon to beginners: “Teachers will most certainly be sur-prised at the results among students reared on the new fingering.” Collis cited an experiment in which two first-year clarinet students who had not been able to slur A or B-flat to C were able to make the crossing eas-ily, after only five minutes of practice on the McIntyre clarinet!

The McIntyre’s ran a small business in Thomaston, Connecticut, where Tom taught clarinet lessons and both brothers worked in instrument repair. At first, their clarinet was manufac-tured by the Prueffer Company of Providence, Rhode Island, and was formally introduced to the music world at the annual Music Trades Show in New York City, in 1959. Later that year, however, disagree-ments between the McIntyres and Prueffer led to manufacturing of the clarinet in France—“by the finest craftsmen”—instead. A 1961 news-paper article confirms that the maker of the McIntyre clarinet was, in fact, Thibouville Frères.

Success seemed to be on the hori-zon when a five-year contract was signed for distribution of the clarinet by the Longines Symphonette So-ciety. As a division of the Longines Wittnauer Watch Company, the Sym-

phonette Society specialized in the mail-order operation of multiple-re-cord boxed sets. At the time McIn-tyre signed the distribution contract, the Longines Symphonette Society was the third-largest recording dis-tributor in the U.S. The contract was renewable, but there is no evidence that another contract was signed.

By 1962, four models of the McIntyre clarinet were available. The Nation-al Music Museum preserves three professional-level McIntyre clarinets made of wood (NMM 11709, 5844, and 5791). Most examples of the clarinet found on the internet, as well as the one reviewed by James McGlinchey in The Clarinet of March 2001 (Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 64-65), appear to be professional models as well.

It was with great excitement then, that the NMM recently welcomed a new acquisition: a plastic McIntyre clarinet (NMM 15081). This donation is hard evidence that different mod-els were indeed manufactured. Al-though this instrument possesses all the characteristics of the pro mod-els, a less expensive, plastic version would have been more accessible to students and easier to care for.

The McIntyre did not, of course, turn out to be the “clarinet of the future.” Professional clarinetists, who had devoted lifetimes of study to one kind of fingering, were hard pressed to abandon the traditional system and adopt a new one. Young learners had trouble with the added weight of the new mechanism at the instrument’s top joint. And having to regulate the mechanism with six new adjustment screws was just too much complexity. McIntyre acknowl-edged those difficulties and sought out engineering and design staffs of major manufacturers to overcome the problems. But contracts were never signed. Around 1965 the small McIntyre Clarinet Company went bankrupt. The McIntyre brothers’ ideas became a muted note in clari-net history.

Front, back and left-hand side views of a plastic clarinet in B-flat by Thibouville frères, Ivry-la-Bataille, France, ca. 1960. Distributed by McIntyre Music Mart, Thomaston, Connecticut. Gift of James C. Randall, 2019. NMM 15081.

The year was 1962. Kennedy had averted the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Beatles released their first single “Love Me Do.” John Glenn orbited the earth. And Brothers Thomas F. and Robert J. McIntyre were granted a patent for an innovative clarinet system.

With U.S. patent number 3015981, the McIntyre’s announced “a new and useful key mechanism for clarinets, that simplifies the playing of the instrument, by eliminating many of the difficulties in fingering, which are inherent in the present system.” McIntyre advertising touted the McIntyre System as the “first major improvement to the finger-ing of the clarinet since the Boehm system,” eliminating “the difficulty of the ‘throat tones’ characteristic of the regular Boehm system clarinet” that had “plagued clarinetists since Christopher Denner invented the instrument in 1690.”

The McIntyre’s inventions applied to the upper section of the clarinet and were to be fingered with the left hand. The clarinet’s lower section was unchanged. On the upper section, the regular tone holes for low register D, E, and F were cov-ered with ring keys. There was no left-hand side key for G-sharp and no throat A key. Instead, those notes were fingered by the left-hand ring keys. Open G was fingered as usual, followed by G-sharp, by covering the left-hand third tone hole—which pressed the ring key that activated a G-sharp key. A was produced by pressing the second tone-hole ring, and B-flat was obtained by pressing the first tone-hole ring. Variations were also possible.

Phot

os b

y by B

yron

Pill

ow.

Fingering chart from McIntyre System Clarinet pamphlet, 1959. NMM Archives.

– 6 – – 7 –

In memoriam...Patricia Ann “Patty” Schwinn, Sioux City, Iowa

Join us for these upcoming concerts!

NMM Staff profile: Meet Rebekah “Becky” L. Stofer

A rockin’ reveal: The NMM receives a Tommy Bolin guitar “The early 1970s was a great time for guitar heroes. Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and their peers were at the top of their game but most adhered to a style rooted in the blues. Moreover, in the wake of Jimi Hendrix’s death, almost all the six-string gods came from England. American Tommy Bolin, a native of Sioux City, Iowa, was a notable excep-tion. Best described as the David Bowie of the guitar, Bolin jumped from one playing style to the next – making each one his own, before quickly discarding it for the next.” – Greg Prato, Classic Rock, November 11, 2017

The electricity was high on Friday, July 19, 2019, when Vangarde Arts in Sioux City, Iowa, hosted a press conference and reveal ceremony for one of the National Music Museum’s latest acquisitions: a guitar commemorating late famed rocker Tommy Bolin. The Museum was presented the USA Tommy Bolin Tribute Teaser Model electric guitar by Sioux City businessman Scott Wilcox who had purchased the guitar previously owned by Johnny Bolin, Tommy’s brother. Wilcox’s gift of the Bolin guitar to the NMM was the brainchild and project of longtime Museum friend and champion, T. Wilson King, himself a guitar virtuoso and Siouxland music favorite. Not his first time championing the NMM, King had been instrumental years earlier in helping the museum acquire its B.B.-King-signed “Lucille” guitar.

NMM Director, Matt Collinsworth, and Deputy Director of Cura-torial Services, Michael Suing, installed the guitar in a ‘Pop-Up Museum’ exhibit in a special public ceremony held at the Da-kota Brickhouse in Vermillion, SD, on December 4, 2019. The installation was timed to coincide with the 43th anniversary of the rocker’s death. Bolin, who died at the height of his acclaim, on December 4, 1976, was lead guitarist for iconic British band Deep Purple and had also played with rock groups Zephyr, America Standard, Energy, and the James Gang, in addition to his own Tommy Bolin Band.

This temporary exhibit is the eighth ‘Pop-Up Museum’ installed by NMM in South Dakota, designed to showcase the museum’s wide-ranging instrument collection while the museum building itself is closed for expansion and renova-tion. NMM Pop-Ups in Vermillion, SD, can be seen at City Hall, McVicker Plaza/VCDC, the Edith Siegrist Public Library, Sanford Medical Center, USD’s Wagner Alumni Center, RED Steakhouse and the Coffee Cup Travel Plaza.

Becky Stofer is a natural to the mu-sic museum element, having grown up in her father’s repair business, Lee Stofer Music Service, Inc., in DeWitt, Iowa-- doing everything from cleaning to polishing and packing musical instruments for shipment. Little did she know that by coming to the University of South Dakota to complete a master’s degree in horn performance, she would end up on the staff of one of the world’s pre-miere museums of musical instru-ments.

She is now the NMM’s Museum Services Associate and Curatorial Assistant, with us since December 2016. She’s worked with almost ev-eryone on staff: from front desk and gift shop coordination to giving tours of the NMM; to playing in the NMM’s Javanese gamelan ensemble; to preserving and creating finding aids for ephemeral materials in the NMM’s unique Musical Instrument

Manufacturers’ Archive; to using her expertise in preparing and packag-ing many NMM instruments for the move from the Carnegie building to the NMM’s new Center for Pres-ervation and Research. Becky was instrumental in this hands-on work, as well as in kindly mentoring the NMM’s several volunteers. She has also helped the museum move fur-ther into the digital commerce age, learning and maintaining our new online commerce platform, Shopify.

As a lifelong student of musical performance, Becky has taken part in many musical ensembles and orchestras, some while doing under-grad work at Iowa’s Northwestern College. Becky also has another big activity in her life-- as the principal horn for the 147th Army Band of the South Dakota National Guard, play-ing for everything from gubernatorial inaugurals to holiday concerts and international shows.

Becky Stofer adds new barcoding tags to the gongs of the Kyai Rengga Manis Everist gamelan made by Ud Soepoyo, Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, 1999.

USA Tommy Bolin Tribute Teaser Model electric guitar. Gift from the families of Scott and Sue Wilcox, 2019. NMM 15079

City, Iowa: a gracious bequest of $52,048.00.

Patty was a graduate of the Univer-sity of South Dakota with a degree in Spanish, where she was also a member of the Kappa Alpha The-ta Sorority. After graduation, she worked in her family’s business, Ralph C. Schwinn Co., for many years. In her leisure time, Patty

All NMM Live! concerts will take place at 7:00 p.m. in Farber Hall in the Old Main Building on the University of South Dakota cam-pus. $7 general admission. Free to NMM Members, USD students and staff.

March 27: Luehrman, Shaffer & Check – Old-time jazz, swing, country and blues

April 16: T. Wilson King, 3 Guitars – Features vintage American acoustic guitars from the NMM’s John R. Barmeyer Collection.

May 1: Maggie in the Meantime – Celtic folk, offering a blend of traditional and modern music.

May 21: Brian Kay In Nottamun town… – Ancient songs from the British Isles, including ballads, storytelling and virtuosic instrumental solos. Co-sponsored by SD Shakespeare Festival.

Luehrman, Shaffer & Check T. Wilson King Maggie in the Meantime Brian Kay

enjoyed dancing and playing the pi-ano. The NMM is grateful that Patty thoughtfully planned this estate gift, leaving behind a legacy of financial support for the arts and cultural organizations in Siouxland.

The NMM honors Patricia and thanks her entire family with heartfelt gratitude.

The National Music Museum recently received a generous gift from the estate of Patricia Ann “Patty” Schwinn, 89, a life-long resident of Sioux

– 8 –

414 E. Clark St Vermillion, South Dakota 57069-2390

Name

Address

City State Zip Country

Phone Email address

Membership category (see list at right) Date

Payment method:

__ Check (payable to NMM)

__ Credit Card

VISA/MC/Discover card number

Expires / CV2 code (3-digit on back of card)

Signature

Please indicate:

__ New Membership __ Renewal

Membership application Return to: National Music Museum, 414 E. Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069-2390

Or become a member via our website:

nmmusd.org

The NMM Newsletter is published by the National Music Museum, ©National Music Museum, 2020. Contact: (605)658-3452 or NMM@usd.edu

Support the National Music Museum’s expansion and renovation!

Give online at nmmusd.org/support

The future NMM

Progress!Construction on the museum’s new addition is well underway. The walls are up, and work on the inside is progressing!

Choose your NMM membership category

Individual ..........................$60/year ($5/month)Family ........................... $120/year ($10/month)Smithsonian ................. $180/year ($15/month)Sustaining .................... $240/year ($20/month)Supporting ........................................ $500/yearFounding ..........................................$1000/year