The great twentieth-century composer Pierre Boulez noted that the history of music is "littered with corpses: superfluous or over-complicated inventions, incapable of being integrated into the context demanded by the musical ideas of the age which produced them. " With the rise of the modern, scientific age came the rise of the machine. As in the earliest ages, people used new technology to create music, particularly devices to mechanically produce music with little or no human participation. The definition of mechanical musical instrument is arbitrary at best since most musical instruments use some kind of levers (e.g., woodwind instruments) or pistons (e.g., brass instruments). However, many instruments that in some way employ mechanisms, from the marvelous to the bizarre, survive to this day.
Some of the first examples of or self-playing instruments date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of mechanical birds, automatic flute players, and dancing musical dolls. It was not until the 1700s that music boxes became commonplace in Europe. These devices consisted of a finely tuned comb of metal tines activated by pins that were punched onto a metal cylinder in a precise sequence designed to produce a musical phrase.
A refinement of the cylinder music box was introduced in Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century. Instead of a rotating cylinder, the German invention featured a revolving disc that contained the properly sequenced pin arrangements. The real innovation, however, was the fact that the discs could be removed and replaced with other discs, each of which produced a different tune.
Music boxes represented the application of clock-building technology to the creation of automatic musical instruments. Completely different kinds of mechanized instruments were also designed using similar clock-based technology. A document dating from 1130 describes the construction of a barrel organ in Reims, France, and by 1350, pinned barrel organ systems were used in conjunction with clock mechanisms in churches throughout much of Europe. Huge, weight driven "super organs " were in use by European royalty by the early seventeenth century. At this point, a change in conception and scale occurred which saw the appearance, around 1700, of the hand-cranked barrel organ, or hurdy-gurdy. Empress Maria Theresa granted barrel organ licenses to disabled soldiers, a trend that continued after the Napoleonic Wars, when licensed barrel organ players on the streets of France became a common sight.
As music boxes and barrel organs became widely available, inventors of automatic musical instruments set their sights on creating an instrument capable of mechanizing the action of several instruments simultaneously, a veritable orchestra on wheels. One of the earliest, and most famous, of these "orchestrions," as they were called, was the Panharmonicon built by Johann Maelzel shortly after 1800. This noisy contraption featured automatic trumpets among its many innovations. The device is known in music history for having inspired no less a composer than Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) to accept a commission to write a piece of music for it called " Wellington's Victory." Smaller versions of orchestrions, such as the coin-operated nickelodeon, fared more successfully than the gargantuan attempts of Maelzel and others.
Forcing air through pipes to create musical sounds, which is the method employed in devices such as the hurdy-gurdy or orchestrion, essentially describes the mechanics of an organ. The mechanization of piano performance, defined as a hammer striking a string, was achieved in 1842 by Claude-Felix Seytre of Lyons, France. His patented invention utilized a flat music sheet that had encoded upon it the information necessary to activate the proper mechanism to strike hammers upon the appropriate piano strings. The innovation of the perforated player-piano "roll" was made by Alexander Bain in 1848. Many of these early devices were not, themselves, complete musical instruments but mechanisms that were designed to be added to an already existing piano. Completely self-contained, fully automated player-pianos were developed later in the 1800s.
In 1855 Joshua Stoddard, a Vermont native then living in Worcester, Massachusetts, received a patent for his calliope--an organ powered by a steam boiler. When the player pressed one of the brass keys of the keyboard, it opened a valve, which sent steam through a pitch pipe. Although Stoddard envisioned an instrument suitable for church use, the loud harsh tones of the calliope found their niche in the circus, where they can still be heard today.
By the end of the nineteenth century, automatic musical instruments were becoming one of the primary sources of music in the lives of the masses. An advertisement for a player-piano at the beginning of the twentieth century claimed that the player piano "solves the problem of music in the home.... More could not be asked of mortal ingenuity...the greatest and most widely popular of musical inventions... the Royal Road to Music in the Home!" The zenith of the player-piano's popularity was reached in the years between 1900 and 1930 when over 2 million player-pianos were produced in America.
The demise of automatic musical instruments was foreshadowed with the invention of the gramophone in 1887. Technically, the earliest phonographs met the definition of an automatic musical instrument, as they reproduced sounds using a mechanical process. The storage of sound information by scratching a needle into a cylinder or disk was, in principle, the same as storing the musical information in the form of perforations on a player-piano roll. The electrification of the recording process removed phonographs from the official list of "mechanical" musical instruments but did not remove them from the hearts of the listening public, who turned to high quality, professional disk recordings as their primary source of musical enjoyment.
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