Hohner Musikinstrumente

What they do

Hohner designs and builds harmonicas, accordions and melodicas, and sells a wider range of instruments under its name. The diatonic harmonicas that made the brand famous, above all the Marine Band, are still assembled and tuned in Trossingen, a town of around 17,000 people on the edge of the Black Forest. A 2022 report in the Schwäbische Zeitung described a workforce of about 125 producing roughly 750,000 harmonicas a year, with 192 production steps before a single instrument is finished and tuned.

Why it matters

Few companies have shaped popular music so quietly. Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker, started in 1857 with a few hundred instruments in his first year. By 1887 output had passed one million a year, most of it exported, and by 1913 around 3,000 employees were making about ten million harmonicas annually. Settlers, immigrants and later blues players in the American South carried the instruments into the soundtrack of the twentieth century. Smithsonian Magazine reports that Hohner has made more than a billion harmonicas in total.

The company also produced one small piece of space history: a Hohner Little Lady, a four-hole miniature, was played by astronaut Wally Schirra aboard Gemini 6 in December 1965, during an impromptu rendition of Jingle Bells. Both Hohner and the Smithsonian record the episode.

Products to know

• Marine Band: the ten-hole diatonic introduced in 1896 and named in a nod to John Philip Sousa's famous band.
• Little Lady: the miniature harmonica that flew on Gemini 6.
• Accordions: made since 1903; Hohner won a gold medal at the 1904 St Louis World's Fair for its first model.
• Electromechanical keyboards: the Clavinet and Pianet of the 1960s became studio staples.

The German angle

Hohner is the textbook case of a single firm turning a farming village into a music town. Historian Martin Haeffner told Smithsonian Magazine that Trossingen built its railway and its town hall with harmonica money. The company founded a harmonica school in 1931, now the Hohner Konservatorium, and co-sponsored the music institute that became today's State University of Music Trossingen. Ownership has changed: after a deep crisis in the late 1980s, a majority passed in 1997 to the Taiwanese KHS group. The Trossingen workshops and the German Harmonica Museum, with about 25,000 harmonicas, keep the story rooted in the Swabian town.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Hohner
• FundingUniverse: Matth. Hohner AG history
• Smithsonian Magazine: the rise of the humble harmonica
• Schwäbische Zeitung: how a Hohner harmonica is made