MUSIC GOING HITHER AND ZITHER: Who was that man?

Every now and again a new instrument will appear in popular music.

Although some were aware of the Indian sitar, it wasn't until George Harrison introduced it on the Beatles' Norwegian Wood in 1965 that it penetrated mainstream pop music.

How far did it penetrate?

 

The sitar became synonymous with psychedelic music and there's actually an 11 CD box set (Electric Psychedelic Sitar Headswirlers) where every song features the instrument.

The year before Norwegian Wood, the film Zorba The Greek introduced the sound of the bouzouki played by Mikis Theodorakis.

Zorba's Dance

 

Two years later Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch has a hit with Bend It! which borrowed heavily from Zorba's Dance, although they used a mandolin to replicate the bouzouki.

Bend It!

 

In 1949 the Carol Reed film of Graham Greene's The Third Man – starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles – brought the sound of the zither into popular culture.

The Beatles used to play it in their Hamburg days, and you can see them revisit it in Get Back.

That film music – The Harry Lime Theme – was played by Austrian musician Anton Karas who found the instrument in his grandmother's attic when he was 12.

He was hooked and, after academic music study, played the zither in clubs and concerts.

It was sheer chance – director Reed hearing Karas playing in a wine cellar – that lead him to compose the music for The Third Man.

The Harry Lime Theme, by Anton Karas

 

The Harry Lime Theme became Karas' passport and filled his bank accounts.

Aside from when he performed classical music, the piece opens just about every compilation album of his.

It was an unusual piece of music for a post-war film where the incidental music and themes were almost invariably orchestrated. But here was a somewhat unnerving sound from a solo instrument which was unfamiliar.

It suited the oppressive and disturbing mystery of the movie. 

And it had a similar effect as that hearing of a sitar: suddenly band leaders and musicians were hunting down this string instrument which would not have been unfamiliar to the ancient Greeks.

The Karas album simply entitled Zither (with weird and strangely irrelevant collage cover art) was released through the World Record Club, perhaps some time in the Sixties.

Because it doesn't appear on any digital platforms the suspicion is that it was a compilation by WRC because it also includes the themes from the movies Limelight (by Charlie Chaplin, 1952) and the popular German film When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953).

There's also Hi Lili Hi Lo from the Fifties film Lili, the old German song Just a Gigolo and Zither March and Zither Waltz.

It's perhaps too much zither for most and, as distinctive as the instrument sounds, it didn't really get the same traction in pop music as the sitar or bouzouki.

That said, I only paid $1 for this in a hospice shop and I figure that was a good deal to find more zither music than I'd heard in my life. 

Still, the theme to The Third Man is a once-heard never-forgotten piece.

And the film is a cracker, even now.

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You can hear the complete Third Man soundtrack at Spotify here.