Interlude. Three Tuning Forks

In 1887, in the Japanese city of Hamamatsu, a school organ broke down. The instrument was imported, a reed organ, and cost a fortune for the time, so the man called in to repair it was the one who understood fine mechanics best in the area, Torakusu Yamaha, a repairer of medical equipment. He found the fault quickly: two springs in the organ had snapped. Yamaha spent much longer looking over everything else and left the school with the thought that he could make an organ like that himself, and cheaper.

Two months later he and a friend built the first Japanese reed organ. It had to be shown in Tokyo, at the Music Institute, which later grew into the country’s main conservatory, and the two craftsmen hung the organ on a pole and carried it on their shoulders along the old Tokaido road over the Hakone mountains. They covered about a hundred and fifty kilometres on foot in three days and only rode the rest of the way by train. At the institute the organ was criticised for poor tuning. Yamaha didn’t argue: he stayed in Tokyo and sat down to study music theory until he had learned to tune so well that his next organ no longer lost its pitch. The firm still counts that year as its founding, although it received the name Nippon Gakki, “Japanese Musical Instrument Manufacturing,” only ten years later. Its emblem now bears three crossed tuning forks, which, as the firm itself explains, stand for melody, harmony and rhythm.