Bird instruments.

Mechanical instruments that imitate birdsong. The earliest known references to automatic singing birds date from the 3rd century bce with the descriptions of Hero of Alexandria. In the second half of the 9th century two automatic musical instruments with artificial trees and singing birds are said to have been created for the Byzantine emperor Theophilus (see Organ, fig.24). About 1250 the poet Konrad von Würzburg wrote of an artificial tree on which synthetic birds were sitting, flapping their wings and singing. In his Musurgia Universalis, Kircher referred to ‘an automatic organ that produces the sound of animals and even the singing of birds’.

1. Bird organ.

A small Barrel organ designed to encourage caged birds to sing. It is also known as a canary organ but is more correctly called a serinette. These very small hand-cranked instruments first appeared in France early in the second quarter of the 17th century. Their manufacture centred on the border region of the Vosges. The flourishing period of the serinette lay in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, but the instrument remained virtually unaltered in design and appearance for over 200 years. The majority of serinettes had one rank of open metal pipes at 2' pitch with a compass of ten notes, tuned to the diatonic scale c'''– d'''' with an added b'''. Some had an additional 4' rank of stopped metal pipes on a slider chest (see Organ, §II, 2–4); these were called pionne or serinette-pionne. Larger instruments, sometimes called perroquette, serinette-merline (‘blackbird serinette’) or turlutaine (‘curlew’), had a 14-note scale and were provided with three registers by the addition of an 8' stop, operated manually and usually of stopped wooden pipes but occasionally of stopped metal. Songs, dances and airs d'oiseau (simple bird-like melodies) were composed or arranged to fit the compass; the melodies were often richly decorated with trills, mordents, slides and appoggiaturas. As on larger church and chamber barrel organs, tunes were changed by shifting the barrel sideways. Although contemporary illustrations show them in use with caged birds (fig.2), it seems unlikely that these instruments would have succeeded in their goal.

2. Mechanical bird whistle.

Early attempts to create instruments to imitate birdsong employed sets of small organ pipes. By their nature, such instruments precluded miniaturization and could not reproduce the microdivisions of reference pitch that is a feature of real birdsong. Around 1768–70 the Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet (1745–c1820) invented a mechanism with a single pipe and a sliding piston. This was the first use of the principle which, a century later, would be used in the ‘swanee whistle’. Here the movement of the piston was controlled by a multiple cam while air to the pipe (and thus articulation) was governed by another cam which opened and closed a single pallet (fig.3). Not only was the size of the mechanism reduced dramatically, but a high degree of realism could now be attained. Swiss makers such as Jaquet-Droz, Rochat, Leschot, Bruguier and Frisard excelled in the creation of miniature singing birds which demanded the highest watch-making craftsmanship. The mechanism was used in singing-bird snuffboxes (where a tiny bird would spring up under a hinged lid and appear to sing) and similar mechanisms in scent bottles, watches and jewellery. These reached the peak of their popularity in the 1780s when Swiss craftsmen (working both in Switzerland and in London) enjoyed a rich trade. Early in the 20th century, the Bontems family of Paris produced life-sized singing birds in cages. Blasé Bontems was responsible for the remarkably realistic song these produced and the best pieces very accurately simulate the songs of the blackbird, thrush, canary, nightingale and goldfinch. Similar technology was applied to other automata, specifically the ‘whistling man’ or ‘whistling boy’ pieces made in Triberg between 1920 and 1960 by Griesbaum, which in the mid-1990s was Europe's only remaining singing-bird maker. (See also Musical box.)

3. Bird whistle (orchestral).

Instruments used in the orchestra to imitate birdsong. Two distinct types are found: the bird warbler, which is also known as the Swanee whistle, and the bird whistle or ornithophone. The latter consists of a small metal canister into which water is placed with a mouthpipe leading to a semi-submerged whistle. Blowing into the mouthpipe displaces the water and creates a bubbling in the whistle which can imitate the warbling and trilling of birds. The popular name for this device is the nightingale. The sound of the cuckoo is produced by a two-note whistle on an air reservoir or by a small duct flute with one or two finger-holes.

Various bird-imitating toy stops have been used in organs. See under Organ stop (Vogelgesang).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. de Caus: Les raisons des forces mouvantes (Frankfurt, 1615, 2/1624)

A. Kircher: Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650/R)

A. Chapuis and E. Droz: Les automates figures artificielles d'hommes et d'animaux (Neuchâtel, 1950)

A. Buchner: Hudební automaty (Prague, 1959; Eng. trans., London, 1959)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Clockwork Music (London, 1973)

J.J.L. Haspels: Automatic Musical Instruments, their Mechanics and their Music, 1580–1820 (The Hague, 1987)

A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Musical Box (Atglen, PA, 1996)

ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME