We think of recorded (or synthesized) music as a 20^th century innovation, accompanying the nostalgic idea that “in the old days” music was always live and a social interaction. But only the electronic part is new, self-playing music machines have actually been around for a long time. More than 200 years ago, people even went to concerts given by music machines (hopefully the attraction was the mechanical novelty and people didn’t really go for music). After visiting the music room in the Nethercutt Museum, which has a collection of surprisingly complex self-playing machines, I tried to dig a bit more into the history.

Most of the machines at the Nethercutt are from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina was a self-playing violin invented in 1907. The instrument is a combination of a player piano and three violins, which are mounted vertically and played with a rotating circular bow and mechanical “fingers”. Those “fingers” have a bit of cork underneath, probably to imitate finger tips. Each violin is pressed against the bow, rather than the bow pressed against the violins. I saw that each violin had a black tuner and three whites, so probably the black one would be the one you have to get in tune, but each violin had four strings. Here is a nice sounding example:

At that time, the German companies seem to have been well ahead of their US counterparts. The Wurlitzer Company, an American firm, produced a wide range of self-playing musical machines, including orchestrions, player pianos, and jukeboxes and they got better over time. This banjo performance by a 1910 Wurlitzer is not particularly impressive, but probably was not a cheap machine in its time. Who would have preferred listening to this rather than spending a bit of time learning to play banjo?

It is unknown when the first mechanical, self-playing instruments appeared. Music boxes are the most familiar mechanical instruments and those have been around for many centuries. They still exist, largely as novelty toys, with a technology that hasn’t changed in centuries: A rotating cylinder with pins that pluck the tuned teeth of a metal comb. The tinny “music” may now just be ancillary to another purpose, like a jewelry box. By the end of the 19^th century, music box makers developed a flat and exchangeable disc that almost looked like phonograph records, but with an different mechanical system. The Nethercutt museum has a number of those and when I first saw one, I thought it was broken because the disk was bent. But that is the feature: the sound is created where the rotating disk is pressed down. The attractiveness of the sound is very limited, essentially those were no different than music boxes. But from there it was only a small step to record players.

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772- 1838) invented a machine that combined winds and strings. Maelzel remains known for patenting the metronome and the MM markings for tempos still seen on sheet music stand for “Maelzel’s Metronome.” His Panharmonicon could imitate many orchestral instruments as well as sounds like gunfire and cannon shots and he talked his friend Beethoven to compose for it. Maelzel toured with his machine to great success. Maybe the gunfire and cannon shots won the music lovers over, just like a rock concert. Haydn composed 30 pieces for a flute-playing clock and several of those cylinders made in 1792 exist. Mozart also wrote for the pinned-cylinder instruments of the period.

Possibly the most comprehensive collection is at the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht. If I find myself in the Netherlands, I’ll visit it.

Here is a clip from one of the most impressive Hupfeld machines at the Nethercutt museum. This is one monstrous machine, the full sized accordions on each side seem small.