Italian family of mechanical instrument makers, later active in France. Giacomo Gavioli (b Cavezzo, nr Modena, 16 Feb 1786; d Paris, 1875) began as a maker of horse-drawn cabriolets. In 1818 he went to Modena to work for the county watch repairer. In 1828 he advertised as a ‘manufacturer and retailer of carillons and organs’. He became Modena’s leading watch and clock-maker; his clock for the Palazzo Comunale is still in use there.
His son Lodovico [Louis] Gavioli (i) (b Cavezzo, 5 Aug 1807; d Paris, 1875) began to show his mechanical genius in his early innovations in clock design. During the 1830s he began making mechanical or self-playing instruments, including a harp-playing android David (1838). He also made a mechanical orchestra called the Panarmonico. He undertook repairs to small mechanical instruments (barrel pianos and organs) for street musicians, and eventually mastered their manufacture. At the 1845 Triennial Exhibition in Modena he was awarded a prize for a street organ of his own design, as a result of which he decided to manufacture the armonico a mano as his main source of income. He also built a barrel recital organ for Queen Isabella II of Spain. In 1854 he moved to Paris and set up as a maker of mechanical orchestras, taking over the old Pleyel piano and harp factory in Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The Italian king allowed Gavioli to use the Austro-Estense coat of arms on his factory. The following year he received a gold medal at the Paris Exposition for a mechanical flute-playing android; he also took out an English patent for the Clavi-accord, a portable reed organ. Lodovico and his sons Anselmo [Anselme] (1828–1902) and Claudio [Claude] (1831–1905) began making street pianos, and later made fairground and dance organs. The firm’s reputation, however, was based on the building of the Stratarmonica, the first true street organ; this was a large barrel organ on wheels with moving figures in its prospect.
Anselmo took over the management of the firm in 1863, but suffered a setback when his factory was destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. With financial backing from Prosper Yver and Leonce Julaguier, in 1871 he reorganized the company under the name of Gavioli & Cie. In 1876 Anselmo patented an improvement in pipe construction called the frein harmonique, or harmonic bridge. This consisted of a piece of metal positioned in front of the mouth of a narrow-scaled pipe to stabilize the wind curtain at the languid, allowing the pipe to be blown at high pressure without overblowing, an innovation soon used by makers of church and concert-hall organs as well. Until almost the end of the 19th century all street organs had been operated by pinned barrels (see Barrel organ). In 1892, using the principle of the Jacquard loom, Anselmo invented the ‘keyframe and music book’ system, in which a long series of hinged perforated cards (the ‘book’) is fed through the keyframe mechanism for playing. The advantages of the system were the compactness of the music programme, the simplicity of the method of preparing ‘the book’ (the holes were punched out on a treadle-operated machine) and, above all, that the music played could be much longer and more complex. This invention, together with Anselmo’s two-pressure system, patented in 1891 (low pressure for the pipes, high pressure for the action), heralded the beginning of a new era for street and fairground organs. Anselmo’s son and successor Lodovico (ii) (1850–1923) excelled in arranging music, and this period in the company’s history marked the high point in its musical superiority over other fairground organ makers. The firm produced some of the finest mechanical instruments of the age: around the turn of the century Claudio invented a book-playing ‘mechanical band’ called the Coelophone Orchestre but it seems to have had limited production, and none is now known to exist.
The Gavioli firm did not benefit as it should have done from these and other inventions. Financial problems plagued Lodovico (ii) and shortly after his father’s death his foreman Charles Marenghi left, with others trained by Gavioli, to start a rival business. Despite this setback, the firm went on to develop what many consider its masterpiece, the large 110-key Gavioliphone, which, after six years of design work, was put on the market in 1906 and seems to have been particularly popular in England. The centre of book-organ building was shifting from Paris to Belgium, where thriving builders such as Mortier and Hooghuys were capitalizing on a new interest in organs for dance halls. Gavioli tried to counter this, opening a branch factory in Waldkirch where a small number of ‘German Gavioli’ organs were made to suit the different demands of a German market. The firm might have held its lead in the industry, had it not tried to produce an even more ambitious 112-note keyless instrument (using paper rolls) with an experimental action and wind system. Patented in 1907, this new instrument was beset with mechanical problems, and purchasers sued Gavioli for damages under the terms of their guarantee. This, along with the fact that Mortier was infringing Gavioli’s patents, is probably what prompted the sale of the business to Limonaire Frères in 1910.
For illustration see Mechanical instrument, fig.8.
A.C. Spinelli: I due Gavioli (Modena, 1901)
R. de Waard: Van speeldoos tot pierement (New York, 1964; Eng. trans., 1967)
E.V. Cockayne: The Fairground Organ (London, 1970)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ (London, 1978)
H. Rambach and O. Wernet: Waldkircher Orgelbauer (Waldkirch, 1984)
ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME, BARBARA OWEN