(b Prague, 21 Dec 1756; d Prague, c1830). Czech composer, pianist and inventor. He studied law and philosophy at Prague University and music with the Prague organist Joseph Prokop. Two of his Singspiels were performed in Prague: König Wenzel (1778) and Die Bezauberten (1779). The piano part of the cantata Pygmalion (1781) and some German songs (1807) were also published in Prague; the first edition of his German songs had appeared in Leipzig in 1799. Kunz was an exponent of the late 18th-century fad for designing combination instruments, constructing in 1791 a piano-organ which he called an Orchestrion (not to be confused with the mechanical instrument of the same name). Between 1796 and 1798, in collaboration with the Prague piano-makers Johann and Thomas Still, he made a second, improved model. Shaped like an over-size grand piano and housed in a mahogany case with sides of ornamentally carved frames backed with blue taffeta, the lower part comprised a two-manual positive organ of 65 keys (compass F'–a''') with a 25-note pedal department (C–c''). It was said to have 21 stops and 360 pipes. To the left and above the pedal keyboard was a foot-pedal for operating the bellows. The upper part of the instrument was a straight-strung grand piano with the same compass and a total of 230 strings. Each instrument could be played together or separately as desired. Kunz descibed this instrument in his ‘Beschreibung des Orchestrions’, AMZ, i (1798), p.88. In 1799 he made improvements to the Bögenflügel (see Sostenente piano, §1) made by Pieter Meyer of Amsterdam, introducing a less noisy bow-wheel mechanism.
Beckers National-Zeitung der Teutschen (1796), 434
R. Haas: ‘Thomas Anton Kunz und sein Orchestrion’, Der Auftakt, xi (1931), 43–5
R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte (Cambridge, 1933)
S. Marcuse: Musical Instruments: a Comprehensive Dictionary (New York, 1966, 2/1975), 378–9
ALEXANDR BUCHNER/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME