What's a psaltery? Find out here.

WANT TO GO?

The Psaltery Symphony

WHEN: 2 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Tamarack

TICKETS: Free but must be reserved at front desk after 10 a.m. or through web address below.

INFO: westmaninstruments.com or 88-TAMARACK

"Last year, we had 22 players, and this year we're having 44, I think," said Tish Westman, who with husband Greg makes up Westman Instruments, one of the country's leading bowed psaltery makers.

This year's show is a tribute to Turlough O'Carolan, a blind harper from 17th-century Ireland whose haunting Celtic tunes have been adapted for the psaltery, with its evocative violin and harp-flavored overtones and harmonies.

The handheld wooden bowed psaltery is played with a wooden horsehair bow, drawn across anywhere from 9 to 37 strings.

Inspiration for the free Tamarack event resulted from students complaining that when they returned home from their psaltery lessons they had no one to bow around with, said Tish.

"We decided to have a gathering," she said. "It's been very successful, with people coming from all walks of life. We have an oceanographer coming from Cape Cod. We have a business manager coming from Chicago. We have teachers coming from South Carolina, Ohio -- all over."

The Westmans have evangelized psaltery playing far and wide. They've long made a living from teaching, making and selling hundreds of the instruments at Tamarack, on the road and through westmaninstruments.com.

"We consider ourselves in the top 10 psaltery builders in the United States," said Greg. "We build a lot of psalteries. When we traveled full-time, we took a full woodshop on the road with us -- we took surface sanders, drill presses, routers, and built them on the road."

They've taught and sold the psaltery to many tourists and travelers who stop by Tamarack, where the two have been resident artists since 2001. In their crowded Tamarack woodshop, they fabricate differently sized and shaped 9-note, 25-note, 32-note and 37-note psalteries and hand-make and string horsehair bows.

Where does the distinctive instrument hail from?

"There's a bit of controversy," Tish said. "There are some etchings and drawing of the bowed psalteries in the 10 and 12th centuries, and the Gregorian monks in the 10th century put the bow to the plucked psaltery that's in biblical times."

In the 1940s, she said, a German fellow, his violin sales waning, brought back the bowed psaltery in its current form to get children interested in music again.

"It worked. It brought a lot of people back to the violin. Even today, Southern Illinois University uses our bowed psaltery as a starting instrument for their teachers as well as 'to-be-teachers' that are going to go on to the violin. They have a much higher success rate of children actually staying in music, rather than being thrown on a violin and run screaming."

Tish first took up the psaltery after arthritis in her hands made guitar playing difficult. Part of the instrument's wide audience includes people who want to finally learn an instrument without a daunting learning curve to start, music therapy classes, children and musicians hunting for another instrument.

"I won't call it a simple instrument to play," she said, "but it's rather easy to get started with, so people that maybe have arthritis or have had a stroke and were a musician in a previous life can now get music back.

"We also have a market of people that will make a statement -- 'I want to play something before I die!' -- and the bowed psaltery fits that. Or they just want a different sound in their repertoire."

On the other hand, anyone who has played the psaltery knows that poorly bowed notes can sound like alley cats screeching in the night.

 "A psaltery is easy to learn to play and get music out of and make it enjoyable for the family and everybody," Greg said, "but to master it does takes some time and some finesse. And that's the catch."

The Westmans performed in a bowed psaltery quartet on "Mountain Stage" a few years ago. Afterward, many remarked that it was the first time the instrument had been heard on the show, which was incorrect, according to Greg.

"I can guarantee that it maybe it was the first time that four were played on stage," he said.

While the instrument is unfamiliar to many, some people might have one of its precursors collecting dust in their attic or as part of their collective family history.

"On 'Antique Road Show' they'll talk about the pre-1940s psaltery," said Greg. "Back in the 1910s and '20s, Sears and Roebucks sold, in essence, bowed psalteries. They didn't call them bowed psalteries, they called them ukelins, pianolins -- a cross between the piano and the violin, depending on how it was tuned. They sold that bowed psaltery in the 1910s and '20s door to door by the hundreds."

Don't expect to cash in, though, he cautioned.

"People will call us up today and say, 'Oh, my grandfather passed away. I found this in the attic. It's brand new in the box. What's it worth?'

"I always say, 'Well, they made three different versions. What does it say inside?' And they say, 'Oh, it's the $48.95 one.' 'Well, that's what it's worth.'

"And they'll go, 'Yeah, that's what it's worth -- but what's it worth today?!' And I say: '$48.95.' Because they had made so many of them."

Reach Douglas Imbrogno at doug...@cnpapers.com or 304-348-3017.