Katzenklavier

written on Sunday, March 27, 2011

A millennium before the time of Christ the Egyptians decorated their sistra [*] with figures of cats. Reports from as early as the 16th-century in Europe tell of instruments not decorated with images cats and not even with cats as willing vocalists but as parts of the instrument.

From Gaspar Schott, Magia Naturalis (1657).

The French writer Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (1821–1910) in his book Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre (1877) writes that:

“When the King of Spain, Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his brother the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin rode on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the arch-angel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand.

“The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvete, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave.

“This abominable orchestra arranged itself inside a theatre where monkeys, wolves, deer and other animals danced to the sounds of this infernal music”.

From Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Musiciana (1877)

It seems that Calvete might be lacking in critical judgement as cats do not limit themselves to one note only. Champfleury, pen name of Jules Husson (1821–89), counted as many as sixty-three notes in the mewing of cats that one with acute hearing and much practice might be able to distinguish.

As displeasing as an instrument that pulls cat’s tails to elicit tones may be, the instrument described by German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) was far less humane.

Father Kircher first described a cat piano in his work Musurgia Universalis (1650):

“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat's tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”

From Father Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (1650)

If there had been any extant Katzenklavier they were not limited to the 16th and 17th-centuries. Weckerlin says that records had been found indicating the existence of the instrument at Saint-Germain in 1753 and at Prague in 1773.

The German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813) supposed the use of a Cat Piano to aid in the treatment of patients who could no longer maintain their attention on external objects being in a state of constant reverie. He believed that a cure be effected by forcing patients to see and listen to the instrument.

He writes in Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychishen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803) that a “fugue played on this instrument—when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.”

Thankfully a Katzenklavier, as far as can be determined, was only a hypothetical musical instrument—although various 17th-century posters imply that charlatans gave concerts of cats at fairs.

It is interesting to note that the proposal of these Katzenklavier happened during the development of the “Age of Reason”. Had scholars instead concentrated on the welfare of the cats then perhaps the S.P.C.A. might have been founded before 1824.

If the urge to hear ‘cat music’ is too much, one can always listen to Lubano and Lubanara’s duet “Nun, liebes Weibchen, ziehst mit mir” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756–91) Philosopher’s Stone (Der Stein der Weisen, 1790) or “Duetto buffo di due gatti” often attributed to Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868).

This entry was tagged animals, instruments and music