Article and Interview with John Sumner
From "The Tucson Citizen" - Saturday, April 8,
1978
By Arline K. Anthony
Hey, man, what kinda ax ya blow? A what? A Helmholtz resonator?
Actually, it's a syrinx. It's like an ocarina...you know, a sweet potato.
By whatever name, it's a slick new design for a humble, old-fashioned musical
instrument, and it's the inventive handiwork of John Sumner, University of
Arizona professor of geophysics. Shaped like an inverted "Y" with a bobbed leg,
the syrinx is a slim, pleasingly proportioned version of the lumpy old ocarina
that earned its nickname from its potato-like shape.
"It looks like the pipes of Pan, so I named it after Syrinx, the nymph who
eluded Pan by being transformed into a reed...which he then picked to make a
musical pipe," explains Sumner.
But why a "Hemholtz resonator?" Sumner grins.
Most wind instruments, like clarinets or flutes, are open pipe resonators;
because they're open at the end, the sound travels the column in one
dimension--up and down-- and, incidentally, produces overtones. In a closed
pipe, or "Hemholtz resonator"-- he upends the syrinx to show its solid tips--
"the air travels in three dimensions; up and down the column, back and forth
across the width and from top to bottom through the depth. the air is squeezed
in all directions within the body by the pressure of the walls." The resultant
music has none of the rich tonal variety of an open pipe resonator, but that
doesn't detract from its appeal to an ocarina player.
The syrinx's unusual shape developed out of sheer curiosity; Sumner enjoys
applying the principles of mathematics and physics to technical problems, just
for the fun of it. "I can't take credit for an entirely new idea," he insists.
"There's a similar instrument of, I think Czechoslovakian origin called a 'frula,'
but it has two chambers, whereas the syrinx has only one."
Musically, the syrinx sounds just like its fat progenitor, with the same muted,
flat tone that gives the ocarina its rather haunting, primitive quality. Its
pitch depends solely upon size-the interior volume of the enclosed area
determining the natural frequency--with the smallest ones sounding as shrill as
a tin whistle and the largest as mellow as a recorder. Most of Sumner's
instruments are about 3 1/2 to 4 inches long and have a middle range pitch--
"it's the most whistle for the least amount of work"-- but he's made some as
long as seven inches and one less than two inches long which he wears on a bola
tie. The tone? Piercing, man. All are strung on leather thongs, convenient for
carrying around the neck.
In appearance, the slender syrinx bears no family resemblance to its stout
cousin. The angled pipes are elliptical in cross section, giving the instrument
an air of delicacy. It is made of lovingly matched woods, one variety on the
top, another on the underside. No two instruments are identical, but each has
contrasting tones of light and dark wood meticulously hand finished with oil and
wax to accentuate the natural graining.
Sumner has experimented with many varieties of wood, finally settling on an
assortment of exotic African types like zebra wood for its distinctive striping
and padouk, or vermillion, for its deep reddish hue.
"There's as much to woods as there is to rocks and minerals," he says, "and they
require study the same way, in thin sections under a microscope. Each wood has
it's characteristic tone. You can see how they modify the wave train, with the
softer woods producing lower harmonics and the harder ones giving a sharper
tone. It's all a function of the material's absorption of sound.
"I've tried them all. you should see my scrap pile out back. These rare African
woods give me just the degree of hardness I can work with best...and, besides,
they're beautiful."
Sumner doesn't always go so far afield for his wood. He made one syrinx entirely
from mesquite and found the native wood rewarding to work. It has a tight,
interlocking grain that takes well to whittling because it doesn't split easily,
has a slightly waxy feel and a rich ochre color.
"I'd like to do more with mesquite. It's not really a tree, you know, but a
bush, a member of the pea family-sort of an overgrown legume. Not too much is
known about it; the dendrochronologists can't use it because its rings are too
indistinct for accurate dating."
Although he uses standard woodworking tools like a jigsaw and a sander for
roughing out his instruments, Sumner does most of the detail work by hand,
carefully smoothing the outer surfaces, rounding out the finger holes, whittling
the narrow air passage at the mouth, matching the woods. Every operation is
critical for getting the tone just right. He makes just a few at a time,
producing on the average no more than one finished instrument per month.
I'm trying an assembly line of sorts right now. I've got eleven in the works,
but I've been on them for a year already, so it'll still average out to one a
month. I don't think I'll ever do this again. I find I get bored doing the same
operation over and over again, rather than making one instrument from beginning
to end. It takes the same amount of time in the long run and, after all, this is
my hobby and if it isn't any fun there's no point in doing it at all.
Sumner has turned out more than two dozen syrinxes in the three years since he
first conceived the idea. Most of them have been bought by university students,
but the word is spreading and other musicians who like the feel and sound of his
pipes have placed orders. He prices them according to the amount of work
involved, which can vary from piece to piece, and the expense of the particular
woods.
"It's a bit difficult to play at first," Sumner admits. "Most wind instruments
place your fingers like this"--he aligns his hands flute-style--"but, with a
syrinx, even though the octave sequence is the same, you hold your hands at this
angle"--pivoting his hands to fan out at a fork--"and it's tricky to make your
fingers obey." The syrinx has four finger apertures along the top of each pipe,
ascending the scale from lower right, then from lower left, and two thumbholes
on the bottom. Sumner tootled a quick chorus of "Yankee Doodle" to demonstrate.
For Sumner, the syrinx is a new twist on a familiar old craft of his
youth-making ocarinas of wood. As a teenage ocarina player in Minneapolis, he
was constantly frustrated by the high attrition rate of the clay instruments.
"The darn things were always breaking...they never survived even the gentlest
fall, and I was always dropping them." So he made one of wood and ended up at
the age of 16 as one of the youngest patent holders ever registered at the U.S.
Patent Office at that time. He still owns several of those first wooden sweet
potatoes, fashioned of laminated woods--the only way he could achieve the hollow
interior--and still sounding "okay, I guess." Even then he liked to test
extremes of sizes, his biggest extant sweet potato from those years looks like
the Goodyear blimp, sounds like the Queen Mary in distress and demands a
considerable stretch of the fingers to play. Those early ocarinas were made of
mahogany and North American woods like maple and walnut.
Out of that patent grew a corporation, the Superino Manufacturing Company,
headed by Sumner and two high school friends. The company's businesslike
letterhead listed its president as "J. Stewart Sumner," a youthful affectation
that John S. Sumner dropped promptly and permanently on entering the service
some years later.
The company had four or five friends in its employ and made hundreds of wooden
ocarinas to order. They made matched sets for musical groups like "The Escorts
and Betty," who played on Don McNeill's famous Breakfast Club on WGN in Chicago,
and once got a nibble from the august Baldwin piano company. For a time their
ocarina was listed in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, but they were so swamped
with orders they fell behind and Sears dropped them in disgust.
"We were so naive, we didn't know the difference between wholesale and retail,"
Sumner recalls.
Mass production eventually squeezed out craftsmanship and today ocarinas are
still made of clay, or plastic. And they still break or crack.
But the three youthful partners were too occupied with a more glamorous
profession to fight the trend. They were increasingly in demand as performers
who, as a sweet potato trio called "The Potato Bugs," played together in
brilliant company throughout their high school years.
"We were a well-balanced group," Sumner remembers. "I was the introvert
inventor, Ingebretson was the born promoter and Fjellman was a musical genius
and composer."
During the late '30s the Potato Bugs toured the vaudeville circuit, appearing on
stage with such luminaries of the Big Band ear as Ted Lewis, Glenn Miller, the
Dorsey brothers, Paul Whiteman, Les Brown and Gene Krupa. Glenn Miller's "Sweet
Potato Piper" was written expressly for their featured appearance with the band.
They had their own agents, who booked them in Chicago, throughout the Midwest
and as far as New York, Boston, and Florida.
"We traveled during school vacations...and sometimes during school." Sumner
ruefully admits. "We appeared several times on Major Bowes' Amateur Hour radio
programs from New York, winning first and second prizes. But even then I thought
it no big deal to be on an amateur hour. After all, we were professionals!"
Sumner also did many solo stints on radio in Minneapolis and Chicago and still
has the low, low Social Security number from his early working days.
How much money did they make from their joint manufacturing and performing
labors? "Not much, but we did manage to pay for our tuition for the first two
years at the University of Minnesota."
It was after starting college in 1939 that Sumner began drifting away from the
trio. Although the others stayed in show biz long enough to appear in a
specialty number in "Call Me Madame" with Ethel Merman, Sumner found himself
becoming more interested in rocks than in music. He was committed to a major in
geology when he left college in 1941 to enlist in the Marines, taking his
favorite ocarina with him. He became a Marine pilot and flew combat over the
Pacific until the end of the war, earning more medals than he will talk about
now.
In 1945 he returned to the University of Minnesota and graduated in 1948 with
two bachelor of science degrees, one in geology and one in engineering physics.
After two years with a mining company in northern Michigan, he was recalled for
the Korean conflict, finding himself in combat in land and carrier based
fighters exactly ten days after reporting for duty. He flew his first jets soon
after, later training others in jets before leaving the service in 1952 as a
major. He received his Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Wisconsin in
1955, taught for a year, then worked as a geophysicist in Canada and for Phelps
Dodge in Douglas before joining the UA faculty in 1963.
A friendly, casual man whose easygoing manner gives no hint of his crowded,
active life, Sumner has also been wrestling over the past five years with
another challenge, as far removed from the syrinx as geophysics is from music.
The culmination of that "hobby" is his geodome, a structure similar to
Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic dome, but with certain fundamental
improvements that make it simpler...and stronger.
"I didn't start from scratch on this problem," he says. "I'm standing on Bucky
Fuller's shoulders." His admiration for the renowned
engineer-philosopher-futurist is unrestrained. "But, thanks to the hand
calculator, I've been able to bring Fuller's work to a degree of refinement that
I'm sure he envisioned but that was impossible, for all practical purposes,
thirty years ago when he first designed his dome. The long, complex mathematical
processes involved just in formulating the calculations to feed into a computer
were too time-consuming before we had this handy gadget." Sumner's "handy
gadget" is a programmable calculator capable of many more functions than the
typical $9.99 Saturday special.
The basic difference in the two domes is that Fuller's is composed of flat
triangular planes which merely approximate a spherical surface, while Sumner’s
uses a sequence of right-angle triangles which curve, in one smooth, unbroken
ark, to form a true spherical surface. There are no points or straight
edges-hubs and struts-jutting out of the geodome.
The mathematics behind this breakthrough sound formidable as Sumner lists them:
spherical trigonometry--"a beautiful, elegant mathematical field"--differential
geometry, topology and "a blending of some fringy, flaky mathematical fields."
A single-family house using the dome will soon be built near Benson.
Geodomes and syrinxes are strictly spare time enthusiasms for Sumner. In
addition to his teachings at the University, he is a consultant on geophysical
exploration and has done studies of Arizona groundwater, regional geophysics and
geothermal problems. He flies his own Cessna 180, which he used in his
aeromagnetic mapping of Arizona some years ago. He has also consulted during the
summer for the Palo Verde nuclear site in the Four Corners and for the Mexico
Consecu de Recorsas Minerales.
He has published nearly seventy professional papers and two books, one of which,
Induced Polarization for Geophysical Exploration, is used as a supplementary
text for undergraduates in geophysics, physics, and mathematics.
Evidences of the Sumner interests strew the family's comfortable home near
Himmel Park. A small and surprisingly strong paper model of the geodome sits on
the living room floor, next to a rug hooked by Nancy Sumner which she designed
from her husband's aeromagnetic map of Arizona, the topographic patters of the
magnetic intensities worked in brilliant colors.
What looks like basket weavery hanging from the ceiling is an actual sectional
model of the dome, an airy open-work illustration of the structure made from
plywood strips. Out in the patio, looming above the garage-workshop, is the huge
framework of a much larger geodome, a black skeleton of steel tubing that breaks
the view of the horizon like a mullioned window.
Nancy is a speech therapist with the Tucson school system who likes to remind
her husband that a bird's Y-shaped voice box is called a syrinx.
