Music for "Musical clocks"

and other Mechanical instruments

Mechanical devices for playing music have quite a long history. Composers have written music especially for instruments such as musical boxes, clockwork organs, and pianolas. In this section we include compositions by Handel, Haydn and Mozart. The Mozart work in particular is a mature masterpiece.

Stongly encouraged by Prince Esterhazy, Haydn wrote more than 30 pieces for Musical Clocks.
Joseph Haydn'sFlötenuhrstücke für klavier (Nagel, 2nd edition 1954) provides transcriptions for piano of 32 of them; 30 of these were taken from three Musical Clocks (dating from 1772, 1792 and 1793) which still survive, the other two from a manuscript. There is also a very interesting commentary by the editor, Ernst Fritz Schmid; this includes details of which pieces were specially composed for this purpose and which were arranged from other sources. The Handel pieces come from a manuscript in the Royal Music Librry in which they are described as Tunes for Clay's Musical Clock. They were transcribed by Bridget Fry and Fritz Spiegl and published by Schott in 1955.

Of course one disadvantage of mechanical instruments is that the performance can sound mechanical! For example the simplest machines do not provide for any variation in the volume of sound; and similarly the rhythmic pulse is often completely invariable, giving a remorseless "sewing-machine" effect. Ingenious methods evolved for overcoming these shortcomings; for example by the beginning of the 20th Century Duo-Art piano rolls were able to reproduce quite subtle variations of rythm and volume, so that piano rolls made by pianists of the time such as Paderewski give a real improession of what their playing sounded like - certainly better than the flat scratchy sound recordings of the time.

Computers provide really good answers to the problems of mechanical music-making. One can create and control musical sounds by writing a MIDI file, but the process is complicated and too inhibiting for most musicians to create really musical performances. The SIBELIUS file is much more friendly since you can write directly in familiar musical notation, and use familar expression marks to humanise the performance.