A piano played automatically by a pinned barrel or cylinder. In the form made in London by William Rolfe (from 1829) and others, an ordinary piano was augmented by a pinned wooden cylinder placed inside the case under the keyboard. This barrel was provided with a mechanical keyframe and a series of linkages or stickers which extend behind the soundboard to the top of the piano and operate an additional set of hammers which strike the strings through a gap in the soundboard. The barrel is turned by a clockwork motor driven by a heavy weight which is wound up to the top of the case. (For an illustration see Mechanical instrument, fig.4.)
About 1804 John Longman introduced a drawing-room barrel piano with no keyboard which was also weight-driven and included effects such as drum, triangle and buff stop. Around 1860 the Black Forest makers Imhof & Mukle introduced spring-driven clockwork barrel pianos, also for drawing-room use and without manual keyboard. In other types of barrel piano, the mechanism is operated by turning a hand crank. The domestic automatic piano dispensed with the cumbersome barrel in favour, first, of Debain's Antiphonel studded wooden strip piano player, then the perforated roll of the piano player and later the Player piano.
The keyboardless hand-turned barrel piano enjoyed one and a half centuries of popularity as a street instrument. The street barrel piano is thought to have emanated from Italy around 1800. By 1805 the Hicks family of Bristol was making small portable barrel pianos, sometimes inaccurately called ‘portable dulcimers’, which could be carried by itinerant musicians. Joseph Hicks excelled in making these, and George Hicks, who worked for a time in London, took the craft to New York. The large street piano mounted on a handcart was also developed in Italy, and migrant craftsmen took their skills all over Europe and North America. These open-air instruments underwent a variety of improvements; some models, known as ‘mandolin’ pianos, were made with mechanically driven repeating actions, while others included percussion in the form of drum, triangle and xylophone or wood-block. Some were augmented by a mechanism designed to show advertisements in a travelling picture display built into the vertical fall. Early in the 20th century an instrument with a coin-operated, spring-driven clockwork motor was introduced; these were widely used in public places, particularly public bars. In France and Belgium such instruments developed into large and decorative barrel-playing café pianos, often with elaborately carved cases embellished with mirrors. In the 1950s both Portugal and Spain produced a large number of small novelty barrel pianos on miniature handcarts for performing popular dance music and variety songs. An unusual barrel piano built in the form of a shallow living-room table, the Swedish pianoharpa, was invented in 1889 by I.F. Nilsson of Österkorsberga, near Lemnhult, patented and developed by the brothers Anders Gustaf and Jones Wilhelm Andersson of Näshult, near Vetlanda.
R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Player Piano (London, 1970)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music (London, 1973)
B. Lindwall: ‘The Andersson Pianoharpa’, Music Box, viii (1977–8), 330–34
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano (London, 1984)
ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME