Gary Burton, the world’s foremost living vibraphonist, spent a recent day retracing a fateful piece of personal history. An NEA Jazz Master with seven Grammys to his name, Burton was, on this occasion, focused on an earlier accolade: first prize in a national marimba contest in 1951, which he won at age eight. A weathered photograph shows him beaming as he accepts a little brass trophy from the competition’s presiding eminence: a percussionist, conductor and inventor named Clair Omar Musser.
Burton, now 83, has been officially retired for almost a decade, living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His rare return to public circulation this month came at the invitation of the Wells-Rapp Center for Mallet Percussion Research at Kutztown University. Since opening in 2023, the center — a three-story, 13,250-square-foot modern facility purpose-built to the tune of $7 million — has gradually become a repository and site of pilgrimage for all manner of xylophonists, marimbists and vibraphonists. That it exists at all has a lot to do with the implausibly colorful life led by Musser, a son of Lancaster County whose contribution to the idiophonic legacy still resonates. (Pardon the pun.)
“This was a real idea guy,” says Burton, sitting in a small gallery on the center’s second floor. “Not only did he design and engineer a lot of the best quality instruments in the 1920s and ‘30s, but he was challenged by this idea of how to promote them. It was hard to get music stores to sell them: they were big and expensive, and people didn’t even know what they were. So he trained teachers from different cities around the country, and turned them into dealers.”
As Burton talks, the muffled, melodious sound of a marimba lesson carries over from the next room. “People ask me sometimes: ‘How did you come to choose the vibraphone?’” he continues. “And the answer is, ‘I didn’t, and neither did my parents.’ My parents wanted the three kids in the family to have music lessons, and my older sister already was taking piano lessons, so they had to find something different. They asked around and were told, ‘Well, there’s this lady in the neighborhood who gives lessons on the marimba, whatever that is, and the vibraphone.’ She was one of those teachers. So in a way, it all got started because of Musser’s tenacity and creativity.”
Manheim Steamroller
Clair Omar Musser was born in Manheim, Pennsylvania on Oct. 14, 1901, and brought up in the Mennonite faith. He was in fifth grade when he began playing xylophone, influenced by the popular recordings of the Green Brothers Novelty Marimba Band. (A first-floor gallery at the Wells-Rapp Center features materials donated by the musical Green family, whose most famous of three brothers was George Hamilton Green.) Musser soon earned a reputation for his proficiency, performing with symphony orchestras and appearing in a 1928 Warner Bros. Vitaphone short with his “Vitaphonic” marimba — the first amplified mallet percussion instrument, and the one he used to teach private lessons in Reading.
Musser had an artist’s soul but an engineer’s mind, and he was forever tinkering with instrument design. Another signature early invention was the hybrid “marimba celeste,” which mounted a two-octave vibraphone on top of a marimba, with amplification that ran through two sousaphone bells on the front. In 1929, this instrument was manufactured to his specifications by the Chicago-based J.C. Deagan Company, which hired him the following year as manager of its mallet instrument division.
Chicago in the early 1930s was a bustling nerve center of American culture and enterprise, and Musser arrived just as the city was ramping up for A Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. He secured approval for a 100-piece Marimba Symphony Orchestra to perform at the expo, and designed an art deco-inspired Century of Progress model marimba that Deagan made for the occasion. Each of these bore a plaque with the name of its player, whose purchase of the instrument doubled as a participation fee.
“Its membership is cosmopolitan to a high degree,” the Chicago Tribune noted, in a story from 1933. “One of the players, Kathryn Schmitz, comes from Berlin, Germany; another, Jimmy Namaro, is a native of London, England; George Hamilton Green comes from New York, Lorraine Adeline Krause from Washington, D.C.; Leona Hubbard from California. Some thirty other states are represented in the membership.”
The Chicago expo performance was a success, but rather than count it as a crowning achievement, Musser took it as proof of concept for an even bolder endeavor. In 1935 he created the International Marimba Symphony Orchestra — 50 young men and 50 young women between the ages of 17 and 25, bound for a tour of Europe.
Dr. Willis M. Rapp, a noted educator and the conductor of the Reading Pops Orchestra, has made a study of the IMSO. “For an investment of $500,” he writes in a 2009 collection of its scores, “each participant received their own marimba (custom-built to their height with their name engraved on a gold filled artistic shield on the front of each instrument), music, mallets, shipping trunks, and the entire travel and tour.” These four-octave King George Marimbas, named after the British monarch at the time, featured brass resonators and end posts. Just over 100 were made.
The logistics of rehearsing and coordinating 100 marimbists were obviously daunting, and Musser prepared the aggregate in sections. One such group convened at the Greenbriar Hotel in West Virginia, where a performance in April 1935 earned a notice in the society pages of The New York Times. (The article observed that “the program included Wagner, Elgar, Chopin, César Franck and Rubinstein.”)
The IMSO traveled to Europe by steamer, with its 100 King George marimbas packed in their crates. Due to an unfortunate dispute between the American and British musicians’ unions, the orchestra wasn’t allowed to disembark at Southampton, and had to cancel their centerpiece jubilee concert for King George V. So they sailed to France, where a concert on May 6, 1935, at the Salle Rameau in Paris, was captured on film. This clip originally had no sound; it has been outfitted with an earlier recording of Musser conducting 35 marimbists in “Bolero,” by the Colombian-American composer Eustasio Rosales, which was a piece in their repertoire.
After returning from Europe, the IMSO managed another feat: performing at Carnegie Hall, whose stage had to be extended in order to accommodate all the instruments. The program included the César Franck Symphony in D Minor, the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and various other arrangements of pieces by Elgar, Dvořák and Chopin.
“The perfection of intonation of the ensemble, its rich sonority and the uniqueness of its effects gave last night’s concert exceptional distinction,” noted a review in The New York Times. “There was the impression of one of the most ancient of musical instruments, capable of awakening atavistic emotions, developed and subtilized to a point when it made an intimate appeal to the intelligence and emotions of the man of today.”
In another sense, the great legacy of the IMSO is how it bolstered the intelligence and emotions of the young men and women in its ranks, whether or not they went on to careers in music or music education.
“What we noticed amongst his former players that came back to play with him,” Dr. Rapp tells WRTI, “is that wherever he walked, they would follow. They felt so connected with him, and so motivated by what he provided for them. Just think of it: you’re between the ages of 17 and 25, and you’re going to Europe for two weeks with a hundred-piece marimba group playing orchestral music. You’re going to play in the Salle Rameau in Paris, and in Carnegie Hall when you come home. What an opportunity for a young person.”
The House that Mallets Built
Musser’s own King George Marimba is on display at the Wells-Rapp Center for Mallet Percussion Research, along with dozens of other historic instruments. There are more than 150 idiophones in the collection, which also houses manuscripts, recordings and other historical materials. Among its galleries is one devoted to Dave Samuels, the vibraphonist best known for his work with Spyro Gyra and the Caribbean Jazz Project, who died in 2019; his ashes were recently scattered in the center’s garden.
“Does any other instrument have something like this?” marvels the prominent Philadelphia vibraphonist and educator Tony Miceli, a faculty member at the Boyer College of Music and Dance. “I don’t know of anything else. So we’re lucky.”
The Wells-Rapp Center might not exist if not for the regional imprint of Musser’s marimba orchestras, whose instruments went home with their owners. Kutztown University began acquiring some of them years ago, including a rare King George bass marimba, now on display. Well before there was a dedicated building for the center, the university could boast the largest collection of rare marimbas, xylophones and vibraphones in the nation.
“We had percussion instruments all over the campus,” recalls Richard G. Wells, who came to Kutztown University in 1968, and directed the marching, concert and jazz bands. “Will Rapp and I got together and said, ‘We need a building to put everything together.” There was an unused house on campus, and they secured permission to remove it. “I said that if we’re going to do this, it has to be first class,” Wells explains. “So we got our heads together and we got a designer and an architect.”
Last year, the center also got a new managing director: Dr. Andrew Veit, who’d previously served as director of percussion studies at the University of Texas Permian Basin. During a recent tour of the center, Dr. Veit proudly pointed out various highlights, including a handsomely restored Canterbury Marimba created by Musser for his own namesake company, after he left Deagan in 1946. There was also Musser’s Vitaphonic Marimba on display — and some news about his Marimba Celeste. “For a long time people thought that instrument was scrapped for metal during World War II, or lost in a fire,” Dr. Veit explained. “Turns out it was in an attic in Schnecksville. We’ve been in contact with the family. They’re donating it to us, and we’re going to fully restore it.”
Dr. Veit is an active member of the present-day mallet percussion community — his doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa was all about vibesworkshop.com, the online resource started by Tony Miceli — and he has activated the Wells-Rapp Center not only as a research hub but also a space for public programming. This month’s visit by Gary Burton followed the dedication of a headstone for Clair Omar Musser, at his family plot in a Mennonite cemetery in Manheim. (Musser’s late-career pivot toward engineering for Hughes Aircraft and NASA, and his asteroid-sourced celestaphone, will have to be another story for another time.)
In a public program, Burton reflected on the way that Musser’s legacy shaped his own — through the enterprising system of teachers and mallet evangelists that he trained across the country, including in Anderson, Indiana, where young Gary took up his first pair of mallets. He also reflected on the towering influence of Lionel Hampton, the vibraphonist and bandleader who rose to prominence in the 1920s, and spent most of his career as a Musser artist.
”Hampton needed quality instruments,” Burton explained, “and Musser needed a star to go out there and play in front of the public and introduce this instrument, so that people knew what it was.” Eventually Burton would become a Musser artist himself, appearing in promotions alongside Hampton.
During his talk, which also included a concert by the Escape Ten Percussion Duo, Burton announced his intention to donate his childhood trophy to the Wells-Rapp Center, along with the related photograph, and one of his Grammy awards, for a performance with his longtime collaborator, the late pianist Chick Corea.
“When these instruments were starting out, it was a question of whether they were actually still going to be here a hundred years later,” Burton mused in a Wells-Rapp gallery, a few hours before the event. “Were mallet instruments just a passing thing, like the xylophone soloists that were popular in the 1920s? Seeing that there’s this wonderful collection of not only the historic instruments but also the memories of all the players that contributed over the years, and how it’s become firmly part of the array of musical instruments that we have — to me it’s a real confirmation that my career was indeed not a waste of time.”
For more about the Wells-Rapp Center for Mallet Percussion Research, visit its website.
