(b Nédonchel, Artois, 24 March 1727; d Paris, 9 Feb 1805). French builder of mechanical instruments. Like his younger brother, the amateur entomologist Jacques Louis Florentin, with whom he is still occasionally confused, he was a monk, serving for a time as prior of the convent of the Petits-Augustins, Paris, and suffering persecution during the years after the Revolution.
After hearing an Italian musician performing keyboard sonatas at Nancy, Engramelle envisaged a machine which would preserve such performances and repeat them at will on the keyboard. His subsequent experiments resulted in two important developments: a form of shorthand for indicating exactly all forms of musical ornamentation, and the establishment of the principles of mechanical music through the conversion of music to pins and staples on a barrel. By the time Engramelle published his important study La tonotechnie – in which the procedure was explained – in 1775 the craft of barrel pinning was already well established. His ‘shorthand’ clearly owed much to that used by François Couperin. Although Engramelle’s process ‘for geometrically dividing the notes’ was greeted with mixed opinion (Fétis considered it ‘une idée fausse’), the description of his invention of the numbered dial (cadran) and its application in ‘notating’ the cylinders of mechanical musical instruments represented an important step forward in his time and constitutes an invaluable source of information today on French and late Baroque performing practices. Engramelle’s study also provides charts for pinning 12 pieces of music. From this can be drawn several interesting observations: all tempos are strikingly fluid; endings are clearly retarded; the inequality of notes inégales ranges in proportion from 3:1 to 9:7; staccato takes precedence over legato; there are minute gradations of staccato (which is, however, normally extremely short), and there are similarly fine shades of differentiation for legato; grace notes are short and invariably fall on the beat; no trills maintain the same rapidity throughout; and finally all such ‘rules’ are allowed broad freedom in their application (see illustration). Engramelle’s work was subsequently revised and expanded by François Bédos de Celles.
FétisB
MGG1 (F. Bloch)
M.D.J. Engramelle: La tonotechnie ou l’art de noter des cylindres … dans les instruments de concerts méchaniques (Paris, 1775/R)
F. Bédos de Celles: L’art du facteur d’orgues, iv (Paris, 1766–78/R; Eng. trans., 1977); ed. C. Mahrenholtz (Kassels, 1934–6, 2/1963–6)
J.-B. de La Borde: Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, iii (Paris, 1780/R)
H.-P. Schmitz: Die Tontechnik des Père Engramelle (Kassel,1953)
A. Chapuis: Histoire de la boîte à musique et de la musique mécanique (Lausanne, 1955)
A. Birembaut: ‘Les frères Engramelle’, Congrès international d’histoire des sciences VIII [Florence and Milan 1956] (Florence, 1958) 149–55
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music (London, 1973)
F. Neumann: Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (Princeton, 1978/R)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ (London, 1978)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: ‘Ornamentation in Mechanical Music’, EMc, xi (1983), 185–93
HANS-PETER SCHMITZ, ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME
