Zither by Dipano, Paris, France, c.1975. Labelled on the back ‘Dipano/99, Rue Oberkampf/ Paris 11e’. The body of varnished wood with 15 double courses of wire strings giving a diatonic scale of 2 octaves. The soundtable is decorated with a transfer of a man and a woman in 18th century costume, in front of a tree, with flowers at their feet. Donated along wiith 9 pieces of music written in the form of a diagrammatic chart, to be placed on top of the soundboard and aligned with the strings. The notation in which the songs are written can be grasped intuitively, and requires no knowledge of musical notation. It is a simplified form of notation known as “Unterlegblätter” (“underlying sheets”), invented in 1891 by Theodor Meinhold of Klingenthal.
