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Musical clock (“flute clock”), c. 1815 Anton Bayer, Vienna
Case: wooden case with giltbrass mounts, four alabaster pillars Height: 51 cm, width: 56 cm, depth: 33 cm Dial and indicators: enamel chapter ring, gilt-brass engineturned centre disc, hands for hour, minute and month. Movement: brass movement with Viennese grande sonnerie on bells, recoil anchor movement, thread-suspended pendulum, signed: “Anton Bayer in Wien”, duration 30 hours Spring-driven musical mechanism with 22 pipes and bellows, three tunes Inv. no. U 3066 Purchased from private owner, 1967
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Joseph Haydn composed no fewer than 32 pieces of music for this strange instrument: the so-called flute clock, a combination of timepiece and miniature organ, plays music at a preset time, the melody controlled by a tune barrel fitted with pins. The history of the musical clock began long before Haydn’s time, though. As early as the 16th century, bell chimes were a widely known and popular way of making music “by the clock”. In 1738, the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson presented an automatic flute player with a repertoire of twelve tunes in Paris. His invention was based on a mechanical barrel that could move laterally in addition to the normal rotation. Thirty years later, Frederick the Great of Prussia founded a workshop for flute and harpsichord clocks in Berlin, and the great era of the flute clock began. Joseph Haydn was joined by other leading composers, such as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in supplying works for the musical automata. While Mozart, writing to his wife Constanze, disparaged the sound of the small flute clock pipes as “too childish”, this did not prevent him from writing three compositions for “organ works” or “organ barrel”. They were probably commissioned by one Count Joseph Deym von Střitez, who used them for musical entertainment in his cabinet of curiosities, which delighted visitors with copies of classical statues as well as wax images of famous contemporary figures. Today, the tune barrels of antique flute clocks provide some insight into how sheet music was interpreted in times long past – especially what tempo to imagine when the composer called for andante or allegretto.