A modified grand piano with parallel (not overstrung) strings, fitted with a mechanism which caused a ‘pièce de touche’ or buffer to come down on the strings, thereby producing sounds of a very individual timbre. The device was named ‘jeu de harpe tirée’ by its inventor, the Belgian organ builder Georges Cloetens. His first patent for it, granted on 28 January 1919, shows a very strong damper added to the strings which resulted in a kind of imitation of the ‘lute-like’ playing of the harpsichord (‘jeu de clavecin’), very rich in harmonics. The keyboard was arranged in two halves, dividing at middle C. With four draw stops (two each for the treble and bass, as in a harmonium) the performer thus had nine combinations of timbres available, including the normal timbre of the piano.
Ravel used the instrument for the accompaniment to his violin piece Tzigane (1924); he also scored for it in his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (1920–25). In the latter work, he suggested placing sheets of paper between the hammers and the strings of an upright piano as an alternative method of obtaining the jeu de clavecin, a technique which was employed at the Paris Opéra and which had previously been used by Satie in Le piège de Méduse (1914). A luthéal has been discovered in the cellars of the museum of the Brussels Conservatory and restored. In 1987 the French government commissioned the building of a luthéal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ravel’s death; this instrument is now in the Musée de la Musique, Paris.
‘Séances de la Société: séance du jeudi 14 juin 1972’, Revue de musicologie, lix (1973), 317 [report on R. Cotte: ‘Un instrument de musique peu connu, le luthéal, utilisé par Maurice Ravel’]
R. Cotte: ‘Le luthéal’, Hi-fi stéréo (1976), 221–4
H. Davies: ‘Maurice Ravel and the Luthéal’, Experimental Musical Instruments, iv/2 (1988), 11–14
ROGER J.V. COTTE