An Atlas of Lost Instruments

Plate I · 1619 · Wolfenbüttel

The keyed fiddle

Michael Praetorius spent the years around 1619 doing something nobody had done: cataloguing every instrument he could find, with measured woodcuts, in the second volume of his Syntagma Musicum. Most of the plates show the court instruments you would expect. Plate XXII does not. It is a page of folk instruments, and lying across the middle of it is a bowed fiddle whose strings are stopped not by fingers but by a row of wooden keys. Praetorius calls it a Schlüssel Fiedel. Sweden calls it the nyckelharpa and still plays it. This is among the earliest pictures of the instrument anywhere, and the first in a printed catalogue of instruments.

The same volume names the viola bastarda, the orpharion, the crumhorn, the rackett, and the scheitholt, a plank zither Praetorius bothered to measure. If you wanted a single book to rebuild the sound of 1619 from, this is it.

Plate II · 1650 · Rome

The cat organ

Athanasius Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650) is a thousand pages on everything sound can do, and buried in its chapter on keyboard mechanics is the most notorious instrument in the history of music. Kircher does not claim to have built it. He reports it, in the tone of a man passing on a good story.

It is not long ago that such an instrument was made in Rome by an ingenious performer for a prince to dispel his melancholy. He took all the living cats of different sizes, as many as he could obtain, and enclosed them in a box … in such a way that their tails stuck out through holes. … He arranged the cats according to their different size, tonally, so that exactly one key with a spike came down onto each tail. … It caused such a “cat-harmony” that it moved the listeners to loud laughter; indeed, it could have moved the mice themselves to dance.

Plate III · 1650 · Rome

A harp the wind plays

Two hundred pages later in the same Musurgia, after a long description of a mechanical organ whose cylinder drives statues of blacksmiths to swing their hammers in time, Kircher stops to describe something he seems genuinely astonished by. It is a box of gut strings, all tuned to the same note, hung in a window where the wind can cross it.

All the strings must be tuned to a unison or in octaves, so that a harmonious sound may follow. And it is truly marvelous and nearly a paradox how strings stretched in unison or in octaves can constitute various harmonies. Indeed, so that this musical phenomenon, which I do not know has been observed more deeply by anyone until now, may be explained … we shall begin from the egg.

This is the aeolian harp, and this page is generally taken to be its first description. The paradox Kircher could not explain, how one string sounds several notes at once, is the overtone series, which nobody would lay out properly for another century. He heard it before anyone could account for it, and he wrote down that he had.

Plate IV · 1650 · Rome

A box that composes

The Musurgia's Book VIII is titled “Miraculous Music-making,” and its miracle is a wooden chest full of slats. Each slat carries columns of numbers; you pick slats according to the metre of your Latin text, read the numbers off as scale degrees, and out comes four-part harmony that obeys the rules. Kircher called it the Arca Musarithmica and built several. It is the first machine for composing music, three centuries before the phrase “algorithmic composition” existed, and the book explains how to operate it.

Plate V · 1671 · London and Rome

The quarrel over the megaphone

In 1671 Sir Samuel Morland, the Restoration's most inventive courtier, published a small book in English and Latin announcing a new instrument: a conical trumpet, the biggest over sixteen feet long, through which a voice could be carried the better part of a mile. He had tested it on the Thames.

I carried this instrument down the river past the Bridge (accompanied by one or two gentlemen of my acquaintance) as far as a place called Cuckold's Point. Leaving it there in the hands of a Waterman, we rowed down very near Deptford. There, despite the noise of sailors …

Two years later Kircher published Phonurgia Nova, and it is, in large part, a rebuttal. He had, he says, built exactly such a tube of iron plates twenty-two palms long in a storeroom of the Roman College, run its mouth out through an oval window into the garden, and used it for years to hear his doorkeepers announce visitors from the far gate. It had been in print, he insists, in the Musurgia of 1650. The book opens with a section of “authentic testimonies” on the question of priority, and one of the witnesses is candid enough to record both sides.

It is a recent invention of the Academicians of the Royal Society of London, but the principal praise is attributed to the famous man, Sir Samuel Morland, Knight, as the first and only inventor. Although Athanasius Kircher cries out Eureka, and claims the honor and fame for himself.

We hold both books, so you can judge the dispute from the primary sources, which is more than the Royal Society managed. The honest verdict is probably that both men built one and neither invented it: the ear trumpet is older than either, and Morland's contribution was to measure it and publish the distances.

Plate VI · 1754 · Padua

The note nobody played

Giuseppe Tartini was the most famous violinist in Europe when, in 1754, he published a treatise claiming that two notes played loudly and perfectly in tune produce a third note, lower than either, that no one is playing. He gave the recipe.

The same result will occur if the stated intervals are played by two violin players standing five or six paces apart, each playing their note at the same time, and always with a strong, sustained bowing. A listener placed exactly in the middle between the two players will hear this third sound much more clearly than if they were standing close to either individual player.

Tartini's explanation, the collision of two volumes of moving air, was wrong. The observation was right. Difference tones are real, they are still called Tartini tones, and the physics took Helmholtz another century. You can hear one in Station V of the Sound Laboratory. The only English translation of the treatise is a doctoral dissertation from 1985 that was never published; ours is the first anyone can open.

Plate VII · 1787 · Wittenberg

Sand that draws a sound

In 1787 a young lawyer in Wittenberg named Ernst Chladni published a book of discoveries, and used the word without embarrassment. He had bowed the edge of a metal plate sprinkled with sand and watched the sand leap away from the vibrating regions to settle along the lines of stillness. Each pitch drew a different figure. The book's copperplates are the first pictures of the shape of a vibration.

All the acoustic figures where 4, 5, or more circles exist entirely on their own, I have never seen in a regular form, but always modified … The pitch does not change at all in this process; however, the nature of the vibrations is greatly altered.

This is the founding experiment of acoustics as a laboratory science, and this is the first edition of it. Napoleon, after watching the demonstration, paid for Chladni's larger Acoustics of 1802 to be put into French. As far as we can find, nobody ever put the Discoveries into English. Until now it has been a book you could look at but not read.

Plate VIII · 1577 · Salamanca

Thirty-one notes to the octave

In 1555 Nicola Vicentino built a harpsichord with six rows of keys and thirty-one notes in every octave, so that the chromatic and enharmonic scales of the ancient Greeks could be played rather than argued about. He called it the archicembalo and wrote a book to defend it. We hold that book, L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, though only its first pages have been read so far. What we hold in full is the argument it started. Zarlino, three years later, sketched his own instrument for the three Greek genera. And Francisco de Salinas, the blind organist of Salamanca, took the machine apart with arithmetic in 1577 and asked the only question that matters about a thirty-one-note keyboard: can anyone hear the difference?

These parts of a Comma, unless they exceed or equal half of a Comma, are perceived by the ears either not at all or only very slightly, as can be tested in consonances. … Indeed, the ear's sense is in no way able to judge the excesses by which one temperament exceeds another.

Salinas is describing, in 1577, a threshold of pitch discrimination, and getting it roughly right: a third of a comma, he says, offends the ear “very little.” Modern psychoacoustics puts the just-noticeable difference for a sustained tone at about five cents, which is a quarter of a comma. A blind man arguing from arithmetic about what ears can do landed within a few cents of the answer. This is a discovery about hearing, not about tuning, and it was made two hundred years before anyone had a name for the field.

Plate IX · 950 · Baghdad and Osuna

Before Europe, and beside it

Seven centuries before Praetorius, al-Farabi wrote the Grand Book of Music, the largest treatise on music of the medieval world, in Baghdad around 950. It measures the frets of the oud and the tunbur, describes how performers tune open strings “by the method of sensory perception through the smaller consonances,” and tables the rhythms “famous among the Arabs in ancient times.” Every one of its 195 pages is transcribed and translated here. It has had a French translation since the 1930s and modern Persian and Turkish ones. We can find no complete English one.

And in 1555, the same year as Vicentino, a Franciscan named Juan Bermudo printed the Declaración de Instrumentos Musicales in Osuna: the first detailed account of the vihuela, the Spanish guitar's ancestor, with fret positions calculated from the monochord and a defence of a new seven-course instrument of his own design. It is the closest thing to a recording we have of how sixteenth-century Spain tuned. One chapter, on playing the vihuela, has been translated into English by scholars. The other five books had not been, and now all 258 pages are.