Music without speakers: in the SpeelKlok Museum
When I arrived in Utrecht, it was raining. I sought shelter in the Speelklok museum, the city’s museum of automatic, mechanical instruments. Their collection ranges from clocks that play songs on the hour, through self-playing pianos for the living rooms, to the incredble orchestrion, which plays violins and piano accompaniment. The collection is crowned by a number of enormous automatic organs from dance-halls and carnivals.
There is something very whimsical about the mechanical instruments, and it is a joy to watch them play. During the tour, included in the price of admission, the guide played several of the instruments for us. One table clock, from the 18th century, contained an organ, and the painting on its front moved: the figures in the scene were minutely actuated, so that the cows wandered across the scene and the carpenter sharpened his tools as the organ played. Another, made by a taxedermist, featured birds that moved and sang; their voices were played sweetly by pipes hidden in the clocks base. There was a rabbit, hidden in a cabbage, that would pop out as a music box played, and an acrobat on a ladder who did a handstand to musical accompaniment.
The orchestrion was a delight, and called the “eighth wonder of the world” at the Brussels world fair: three violins were harnessed to mechanical fingers, and a ring bow spun around them. When it was time for the violin to sound, it was tilted forward into the spinning bow, and the mechanism pressed the string on the neck. All the while, a piano was played, also by machine. It was a truly unbelievable spectacle. The dance-hall organs, enormous and gaudy, played drums and pipes for a party: the carnival organ had been programmed to play “Happy”, by Pharell Williams.
I do not know what this means, but I cannot help saying it: what is the difference between these programmed musical automata and an audio recording? Even before the electric loudspeaker was invented, music recorded on cylinders and disks supplanted these mechanical monstrosities. While the goal of the pianola was the imitate a human player, a recording simply reproduces the sound made by the huamn musician. Interestingly, the recording process is not one way: some of these mechanical instruments were so beloved that they were recorded on records and the records were distributed. Perhaps the advantage of a recording is this: a recording can imitate any sound, but the musical automata can only play the physical instruments that they contain.
The Speelklok museum, all in all, is a terrific place to spend an afternoon, if you’re into that kind of thing. It is absolutely essential to take the guided tour: the instruments on their own are hauntingly inert; when they are activated, however, the whimsy and fun of centuries of human ingenuity springs to life before you.
