The Professor Who Unknowingly Started
the Free Reed Revolution

Abstract: Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein (1723– 1795) was a German professor, physician and polymath who spent most of his academic life in Copenhagen. His competence spanned widely, and one of his achievements was a small organ that could play the five vowels a, e, i, o and u, for which, in 1780, he won the gold medal at a prize competition proposed by The Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. He erroneously thought that the human sound generator was a vibrating epiglottis and discovered a new type of pipe with freely vibrating reeds. Nicolai Kirsnik (1741–1802), an organ maker in St Petersburg and runner-up in the same competition, was the first to use free reeds in musical instruments, and when Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler (1749–1814) visited Kirsnik in St Petersburg in 1788 he was so impressed that he engaged Kirsnik’s assistant, Georg Christoffer Rackwitz (1760–1844), to accompany him on his many Europe-wide concert tours to install free reed stops in existing organs, thus disseminating the new knowledge. Within the next three decades free reed instruments of all sizes and shapes popped up everywhere. Now there is probably no inhabited place in the world where you cannot find a mouth harmonica or an accordion.

Article published in the Galpin Society Journal 78, 2025
(Illustrated PDF)