The history
More than 3,000 years from a Chinese mouth organ with tiny bamboo reeds, through the parlours and churches of Europe, to the hand-pumped box that sings with India's temples, gurdwaras, qawwalis and film songs.
A harmonium makes sound with free reeds: thin metal tongues that swing back and forth through a slot when air pushes past them. The idea began in China and Southeast Asia, reached Europe in the 1700s, and became a keyboard instrument with bellows in France. Then Indian makers shrank it, put the bellows on the back, and made it an instrument you play sitting on the floor, where it became so loved that some people tried to ban it.
c. 14th to 12th century BCE
Earliest mention of free-reed mouth organs
Oracle bones, China
c. 433 BCE
Oldest surviving free-reed instruments
Six sheng, tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, China
1780
Free-reed talking machine
Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, St Petersburg
1840 (some say 1842)
Patent for the harmonium
Alexandre Debain, Paris
1846
Suction bellows patent
Jeremiah Carhart, USA
by 1875
Indian hand-pumped harmonium
Dwarkanath Ghose, Calcutta
1911
Harmonium tuned for the 22 shrutis
Ernest Clements and K. B. Deval
2006
Harmonium player given the Padma Shri
Mehmood Dhaulpuri (widely described as the first)
1500 BCE – 1780
In China and Southeast Asia people play mouth organs like the sheng and the khaen, where breath makes little free reeds sing inside bamboo pipes.
1300 BCE
c. 14th to 12th century BCE
Mouth organs called sheng and yu are mentioned on oracle bones from about 3,000 years ago. A sheng has bamboo pipes standing in a wind chest, and each pipe hides a tiny reed that swings freely through a slot. Cousins such as the khaen of Laos use the same trick.
Why it mattered. Every harmonium, accordion and harmonica still uses this free reed idea.
433 BCE
c. 433 BCE
When the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng was dug up in 1978, it held a whole orchestra, including six sheng made from gourds and pipes. Water had filled the tomb and kept the instruments safe for about 2,400 years. Their reeds were made of bamboo.
Why it mattered. They are some of the oldest free-reed instruments that survive.
1780 – 1955
European inventors put free reeds inside boxes with keyboards and bellows. The French pressure harmonium and the American suction organ fill churches and homes, and scientists use harmoniums to study tuning.
1780
The Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg offered a prize for explaining how we make vowel sounds. Kratzenstein won in 1780 with pipes shaped like mouths, each sounded by a free reed, that could say A, E, I, O and U. It is one of the first talking machines.
Why it mattered. It showed Europe how useful the free reed could be.
1790
from 1790
In 1788 the travelling musician Abbé Vogler met Kirsnik, an organ builder who put free reeds in organ pipes, in St Petersburg. From 1790 Vogler added free-reed stops to about 30 organs around Europe. He also built his own touring organ, the orchestrion.
Why it mattered. It carried the free reed from a curiosity into real instruments.
1810
c. 1810
Grenié built the orgue expressif, a small organ with free reeds. He showed it in 1810, though the 1911 Britannica says his first one was finished in 1812. When the player pushed more air, the reeds sounded louder, which a normal organ pipe cannot do without going out of tune.
Why it mattered. Control over the air pressure became the harmonium's special power.
1840
9 August 1840 (some sources say 1842)
Debain patented a keyboard instrument with free reeds and foot-pumped bellows and called it the harmonium. He put several sets of reeds with different tone colours on one keyboard, chosen with stops. The 1911 Britannica and most sources give 1840 for the patent, though a few say 1842.
Why it mattered. Almost every reed organ made afterwards follows his basic plan.
1846
28 December 1846
Carhart patented a bellows that pulls air in through the reeds instead of pushing it out through them. Melodeons with suction bellows soon spread through American homes. After 1885 Mason & Hamlin also adopted suction, and it became the American standard, while the French harmonium kept pushing air.
Why it mattered. It split reed organs into two families: pressure harmoniums and suction organs.
1854
1854 to 1855
Mustel, a carpenter from Le Havre, patented his double expression in 1854. Knee levers let the player make the bass and the treble louder or softer on their own. His harmonium won a first-class medal at the Paris Exposition of 1855, and Mustel harmoniums became among the most admired in Europe.
Why it mattered. It let players shape the sound almost like a singer.
1861
Mason & Hamlin, founded in Boston in 1854, launched its American organ in 1861 and showed it in Paris in 1867. Between the 1850s and 1920s, several million reed organs and melodeons were made in the United States and Canada. Estey alone made about half a million.
Why it mattered. The reed organ became the ordinary family's keyboard, long before pianos were cheap.
1863
1863 to 1873
In his 1863 book On the Sensations of Tone, Helmholtz used a harmonium with 24 notes to the octave, tuned so its chords were perfectly pure. In 1872 to 1873 Bosanquet had a harmonium built with 53 notes to the octave. Steady reeds made harmoniums perfect for hearing tiny differences in tuning.
Why it mattered. It showed that the usual 12 equal notes are a compromise, the same worry later raised in India.
1878
Dvořák wrote his Bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium. His friend's flat had no piano, only a harmonium, so he wrote for that. It was first played there in February 1879.
Why it mattered. It shows how common the harmonium was in European homes.
1955
mid-1950s
Electronic organs appeared in the 1930s, and reed organs started to fade in Europe and America. Estey, the last big North American maker, stopped making reed organs in the mid-1950s. By then India had become the harmonium's real home.
Why it mattered. The instrument almost vanished in the West just as it thrived in South Asia.
1860 – 1940
The harmonium arrives with missionaries and traders. A Calcutta maker turns it into a small, hand-pumped box for floor playing, and it spreads to theatre, temples, gurdwaras and music schools.
1860
mid-19th century; 1860
Portable reed organs came to India in the mid-1800s, carried by missionaries, chaplains and traders to accompany hymns. In 1860 Dwijendranath Tagore used an imported one in his private theatre in Calcutta. Nobody knows exactly where in India the first one arrived.
Why it mattered. It planted a European church instrument in a land with a very different music.
1874
S. M. Tagore, a music scholar who ran a music school, published Harmonium Sutra, a guide to playing the harmonium with an Indian notation. Early music schools across North India taught the harmonium to large numbers of students.
Why it mattered. Students wanted harmoniums, which gave makers a reason to build one for Indian music.
1875
by 1875
Dwarkanath Ghose started a music business in Calcutta in 1875, the firm later called Dwarkin. He is widely credited with the Indian harmonium: a small box you pump by hand from the back, played sitting on the floor with singers and drummers. He made it simpler and tougher, and added drone stops for Indian music.
Why it mattered. This is the design almost every Indian harmonium still follows.
1902
Parsi theatre companies used the harmonium to accompany songs on stage all over India. For the coronation of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV in 1902, a troupe brought harmoniums to Mysore. Two harmonium players kept by the king were among the first to teach it in Carnatic music.
Why it mattered. Travelling theatre spread the harmonium faster than any school could.
1906
c. 1905–1908
The harmonium is thought to have entered kirtan at the Golden Temple in the early 1900s, probably between 1905 and 1908. Over the next century it replaced most of the older string instruments in Sikh devotional singing. Today ragi groups sing there for about 20 hours a day.
Why it mattered. It became the sound of Sikh worship for millions of people.
1910
Govindrao Tembe, a largely self-taught harmonium player, composed the music for the play Manapman in 1910. Natya sangeet, the song-filled Marathi stage, used the harmonium as its main instrument, following pioneers like Bhaiyya Ganpatrao. Tembe later wrote music for the first Marathi talkie film in 1932.
Why it mattered. Theatre and then film songs made the harmonium part of everyday Indian music.
1911
1911; shown in 1916
Deval measured the notes of the singer Abdul Karim Khan and argued they matched the ancient Indian idea of 22 shrutis, or microtones. With Ernest Clements he designed a shruti harmonium tuned to pure ratios, which was patented in London in 1911. It was shown at the All India Music Conference in Baroda in 1916 but did not catch on.
Why it mattered. It was the first attempt to make the harmonium fit Indian tuning instead of banning it.
1912
c. 1912 (widely quoted)
Tagore had played the harmonium in his youth, as his own memoirs describe. Later he wrote the famous line calling it that bane of Indian music, and said he practised with a tanpura so as not to be a slave to the keyboard. The harmonium was kept out of his school at Santiniketan for a long time.
Why it mattered. His words made the harmonium a symbol in the fight over what Indian music should sound like.
1914
In his book The Music of Hindostan, Fox Strangways called the harmonium a serious menace to Indian music. He said it was out of tune with itself and would spoil singers' ears. He also noted it had already reached the remotest parts of India.
Why it mattered. His book spread the idea that the harmonium's fixed notes did not belong in ragas.
1938 – 1971
Critics say its fixed notes do not suit Indian music. All India Radio bans it for about 30 years, while musicians go on playing it everywhere else.
1940
1 March 1940
The composer John Foulds, who ran Western music at All India Radio, wrote in 1938 that the harmonium's tuning did not fit Indian music. Soon after, the radio banned it from its Indian music programmes, and the ban took effect on 1 March 1940. Protesting musicians staged a mock funeral and buried eleven harmoniums.
Why it mattered. For three decades, India's national radio refused to play its most popular accompanying instrument.
1971
After a 1970 meeting of music experts, All India Radio allowed top grade singers and qawwali groups to use the harmonium as an accompaniment. Solo harmonium recitals stayed off its main music programmes for many years after. One critic argued the harmonium should not be treated as an untouchable.
Why it mattered. The harmonium was back on air, but still not trusted as a solo instrument.
1971 – today
The ban eases, qawwali carries the harmonium around the world, Indian masters win national honours for it, and inventors build harmoniums that can play India's finer notes.
1972
Manohar Chimote worked for years to play full classical ragas as harmonium solos, with slow openings and fast strokes like a sitar. He retuned and revoiced his instrument and in 1972 gave it a new name: samvadini, the one that creates harmony.
Why it mattered. It was a bold claim that the harmonium could be a classical solo voice.
1975
Ghulam Farid Sabri and Maqbool Ahmed Sabri from Karachi sang and played harmonium in their qawwali group. In 1975 they performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, said to be the first qawwali performance in the West. Their harmonium drones and rolling rhythms amazed new audiences.
Why it mattered. It carried the harmonium's sound far beyond South Asia.
1985
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwali group sang for hours at the WOMAD festival in 1985, and it launched his world career. His brother Farrukh played lead harmonium in the group for more than 25 years. Fans in England called him the King of the Harmonium.
Why it mattered. Millions of people around the world first heard the Indian harmonium through qawwali.
2006
Mehmood Dhaulpuri accompanied great singers such as Bhimsen Joshi, Kishori Amonkar and Girija Devi. In 2006 he received the Padma Shri, and he is widely described as the first harmonium player to get it. Appa Jalgaonkar had won a Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2000, and Tulsidas Borkar received the Padma Shri in 2016.
Why it mattered. India's government was now honouring the instrument its radio had once banned.
2006
December 2006 or 2007
Doctor and musicologist Vidyadhar Oke built a harmonium with small knobs under the keys that let each note be nudged to the right shruti. Singer Rahul Deshpande used it on stage at the Sawai Gandharva festival in Pune, in December 2006 or 2007 depending on the source. Oke later received an Indian patent for it.
Why it mattered. It tries to fix the very tuning problem that got the harmonium banned.
2022
3 May 2022
The Akal Takht asked the SGPC, which runs the Golden Temple, to bring back traditional string instruments in kirtan within three years, calling the harmonium colonial. The SGPC said it would revive the strings step by step at the Golden Temple, but had no plans to throw out the harmonium. The debate about this imported instrument is still alive.
Why it mattered. More than 140 years after Dwarkin, people still argue about whether the harmonium truly belongs.
Did you know?
A harmonium reed never hits anything: the thin brass tongue swings through its slot, chopping the air into puffs.
The French harmonium pushes air through its reeds, while the American reed organ sucks air through them.
When All India Radio banned the harmonium in 1940, protesting musicians held a mock funeral and buried eleven harmoniums.
Estey, just one American maker, built about half a million reed organs between 1846 and 1955.
Rabindranath Tagore called the harmonium the bane of Indian music, yet his own memoirs describe him singing to one.
The people
1809 – 1877 · Instrument maker · France
Patented the harmonium in Paris and gave it its name.
1815 – 1890 · Harmonium maker · France
Invented the double expression and built some of Europe's most admired harmoniums.
19th century · Instrument maker, founder of Dwarkin · India
Widely credited with the hand-pumped Indian harmonium, made by 1875.
1852 – 1920 · Harmonium player and thumri composer · India
The biggest name on the harmonium around 1900, who helped bring it into Hindustani music.
1881 – 1955 · Harmonium player, actor and composer · India
Made the harmonium the heart of Marathi musical theatre and early film songs.
1861 – 1941 · Poet and composer · India
Played the harmonium when young, then called it that bane of Indian music.
1929 – 2012 · Harmonium soloist · India
Recast the harmonium as a classical solo instrument and named it the samvadini.
1922 – 2009 · Harmonium accompanist · India
Accompanied Bhimsen Joshi and Kumar Gandharva and won a Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2000.
1952 – 2003 · Qawwali harmonium player · Pakistan
Played lead harmonium for his brother Nusrat for more than 25 years.
1934 – 2018 · Harmonium soloist, teacher and designer · India (Goa)
Worked to improve the instrument's tone and tuning and received the Padma Shri in 2016.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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