The Original Make and PlayTM program
is the most successful music therapy
program ever implemented by the U.S. Government.

Harold B. Rhodes is one of the most influential figures in American Music History. Well known as the inventor of the electric piano that bears his name, his primary lifelong focus has been on music education. In 1940, he was operating a successful chain of piano teaching studios in most major cities across the United States.

Rhodes was summoned by the Army Air Surgeon General to develop a music therapy program for convalescing GIs. Originally Rhodes didn’t know where he would get enough pianos for such an ambitious undertaking. When walking through the air field one day, he was seized with an idea; using scrap aluminum tubing from the hydraulic systems of wrecked B-17 airplanes and the plywood from abandoned engine crates he developed the first Make and PlayTM piano called the “Xylette.” Each Xylette was in essence a 15-pound, miniature piano of two and one-third octaves. Instead of strings, he filed tubes in different lengths that when hit with a piano key made tinkling, bell-like tones of a celesta. GIs would make the little pianos and learn to play them right from their hospital beds.

The program was so successful that by the end of the war, Rhodes taught over a quarter of a million GI’s how to make and play their own piano. He was a- warded a citation by General George Patton, Secretary of War, and his works are still on display in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

The main goals of The Harold B. Rhodes Foundation is to reintroduce the Make and PlayTM program to help teach music to children in school and provide music therapy to our veterans.