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to mountain dulcimer to her favorite, the deluxe pianolin. It’s a rectangular wooden box with 52 strings that is plucked or strummed with the left hand and bowed with the right. Invented in Ms. Schmidt’s native Michigan in the 1940s, it has a sound kind of like a Middle Eastern oud and kind of like a cello - like Ms. Schmidt’s style, kind of hard to classify. “There were only 700 of them ever made, and they were sold door-to-door. I had to teach myself how to play it,” Ms. Schmidt explained. "In fact, I’m still doing a lot of experimenting to see how many notes I can play with the instrument.”
She bristles a little at the music world’s need to fit styles in a definitive category like albums sorted in a record store. “My records have ended up in the folk bin, the country bin and the classical bin. What bin are you in today, honey?” she joked. "Our culture wants to categorize everything. Why do people have to do that? Why can’t they just sit and enjoy the music if they like it or not if they don’t? That’s the way I listen to music.”
But she did come up with a description of her own: “creative noisemaking ... struggling to balance the forces of whimsey and despair.”
“That’s as close as I want to get,” she added. “Let me put it this way. In New Baltimore, Michigan, where I grew up, my early influences were choir music and Motown. If that doesn’t breed eclecticism, I don’t know what will.”
An evening with Claudia Schmidt is more than ah evening of
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