This term is used both of simplified or scaled-down versions of conventional instruments, mostly wind and percussion, and of special instruments and sound devices made by and for children. Toy instruments have existed since the earliest times, and until recently were often made from local plant and animal materials and stones; the knowledge of the construction and use of such home-made instruments still to some extent forms part of children's private lore.
A number of toy instruments from the second half of the 18th century have become well known because they were used as a concertante group, with a chamber orchestra, in several anonymous ‘toy symphonies’ composed at Berchtesgaden near Salzburg (a manufacturing centre for toy instruments at that time); these works include a cassation, three movements from which are better known as the Toy Symphony attributed to, among others, Leopold Mozart and Michael Haydn. The instruments themselves, cuckoo and quail calls, small duct flutes, wooden trumpet, toy bugle and french horn, ratchets, rattle, triangle and drum, are now in the Museum Carolino Augusteum in Salzburg (see illustration). Toy instruments similar to most of these continue to be made, and have been featured in many subsequent toy symphonies, including those by A.J. Romberg, Ignaz Lachner, Carl Reinecke, Malcolm Arnold and Joseph Horovitz.
In the second half of the 19th century toy instruments began to be mass-produced, including glockenspiels and pianos, zithers and autoharps, violins, drums, bugles, mouth organs, kazoos, bells, jew's harps, musical boxes, frog-shaped clickers and birdcalls (blown, rubbed, whirled or operated by clockwork). At this time, too, sounding elements, such as small bells and squeakers (consisting of a reed operated by a miniature bellows), were first added to dolls and other toys; a squeaker was even incorporated into a Victorian Christmas card. Dolls were also made to speak. One of the first people to succeed in this was J.N. Maelzel (inventor of the Panharmonicon mechanical orchestra and perfecter of the metronome), who around 1822 in Paris produced a doll with a bellows-operated set of reeds that said ‘Bonjour papa’ and ‘Bonjour maman’. Animals, such as dogs and lions, were also given voices, which were similarly activated by pulling a cord; the children's book Le livre d'images parlantes incorporated the cord-operated voices of the elephant, ass, cow, goat, cuckoo and cockerel. (A related but simpler mechanism, in which a small bellows forces air past a reed and along a convoluted tube, is now used in the small cardboard cylinders that, when shaken or inverted, imitate the sounds of sheep, monkeys, cats and cows.) One of the earliest commercial applications of Thomas Edison's cylinder phonograph of 1877 was in talking dolls (from 1887); small plastic gramophone discs continued to be used in dolls until the end of the 20th century, but have now been superseded by microchips.
Elaborate musical automata, such as the figures (often life-size) devised by the engineers Hero of Alexandria (fl 62 ce), al-Jazari (13th century) and Vaucanson (18th century), have long been the toys of wealthy people. With the mass-production of clockwork devices from the beginning of the 19th century, wind-up musical clockwork toys, such as drummers, guitarists and violinists (often animals – monkeys were particular favourites), and singing birds became popular (see Mechanical instrument.
The mass-production of toys of all sorts greatly increased in the 20th century. Today toy instruments are frequently made of plastic and are increasingly manufactured in East Asia; among the commonest are single and double duct flutes, ocarinas, nose flutes, swanee whistles, sirens, whistles (including edible sweet ones) and water-filled nightingale calls (see Bird instruments, §3); free-reed wind instruments include various sorts of mouth organ, such as the end-blown, two-octave, keyed Melodica (made by Hohner) and the similar Pianica made by Yamaha, and devices containing a single reed of metal or plastic, such as the party toys in which a paper tube unfurls like a chameleon's tongue and instruments in which the reed is housed in a non-functional imitation trumpet, horn or saxophone. The Kazoo is found in various forms and is sometimes used in children's marching bands and, formerly, in working men's bands. Some toy instruments continue to be made of metal, including the hand-cranked Musical box, cymbals, the triangle, the sistro, and a miniature Nail violin with a suspended beater, housed inside a plastic animal or other shape, which is sounded by rocking the toy on its curved base. A tin drum features in Günter Grass's eponymous novel Die Blechtrommel (1959). In spite of the popularity of plastics, many toy instruments are still made of traditional materials such as wood, bamboo, paper and string: for example, duct and notched flutes, panpipes, swanee whistles, pop-guns, whirled drums with cog-operated beaters, tambourines and ratchets. Crude versions of folk instruments are made for sale to tourists; these include many of the types already mentioned as well as ceramic drums, barrel drums, pipes of different sorts, nightingale calls such as the South American ‘silbador’ pot, ocarinas, maracas and wind chimes made from bamboo, sea-shells and metal tubes. A true folk instrument, the String drum, may still be seen in European street markets, where it is usually demonstrated as producing the clucking of a chicken; under the name ‘Waldteufel’ it is used in street celebrations at Carnival time in Germany. Whistling cups and bowls, such as the miniature Japanese saké cups with a whistle that functions when the drinker inhales, are found in various parts of the world. In East Asia small soundmakers are often attached to kites.
An unexpectedly popular toy, introduced around 1970, is the ‘whirler tube’ (it seems to have no standard commercial name – Peter Schickele uses one under the title ‘lasso d'amore’ in one of his ‘P.D.Q. Bach’ compositions): a length (approximately 90 cm) of coloured corrugated plastic tubing (probably derived from the conduit used since the 1960s to carry bunches of electrical wiring) is whirled round the player's head, producing increasingly higher overtones the faster it is whirled. Many composers and improvisers, including David Bedford, Mauricio Kagel (Der Schall, 1968) and Sarah Hopkins (as the ‘whirly’), have made use of this instrument, and a New York ensemble has played melodies on a collection of them, each member contributing a very limited number of pitches in the manner of handbell players. Similar tubing has also formed part of the Corrugahorns of Frank Crawford and Richard Waters. The toy piano has been featured in John Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948) and Music for Amplified Toy Pianos (1960) and included in works by George Crumb, Renaud Gagneux, Mauricio Kagel, Louis Roquin, Zygmunt Krauze, Leonid Aleksandrovich, Grabovsky and others, and compact discs with specially-commissioned – primarily solo – works have been released in the United States (Margaret Leng-Tan) and in Germany (Bernd Wiesemann). Improvisers, notably Steve Beresford and Pascal Comelade, have specialized in performing on a wide range of toy instruments. Toy instruments figure prominently in several compositions by Peter Maxwell Davies and single works by Lejaren Hiller, Kagel, John Beckwith, David Borden, Keith Humble, Anthony Gilbert, Dubravko Detoni and H.K. Gruber (Frankenstein!!, 1976–7); Joe Jones often incorporated toy instruments played by electric motors in his work. Tom Jenkins has built special humming tops, and very large tops, constructed by Floris Guntenaar and Rob Van de Poel, are used in Peter Schat's composition To You (1972). Susan Rawcliffe, Sharon Rowell and others have made many ceramic wind instruments, including pipes, flutes, whistles and ocarinas (including double and triple versions), often in ornate shapes and with unusual tunings.
Since about 1970 a number of electronic toy instruments have appeared, starting with the Stylophone (1968). This and several later instruments, including one model of Michel Waisvisz's Kraakdoos, the Suzuki Omnichord, Mattel's Optigan, Synsonics Drums, Synsonics Rhythm Maker and Magical Musical Thing and many Bontempi, Casio and Yamaha keyboard instruments (some of which have narrow keys for small hands and incorporate musical ear-training games) have also been used in concerts of rock and contemporary music. The Gmebogosse is a synthesizer designed for use by small groups of children. Electronic sounds, of the kind that are increasingly heard in all kinds of machines from digital watches to electronic games, are also incorporated into toys, such as imitation plastic guitars with push buttons along the neck instead of strings. Smallest of all are the diatonic Echo Piano and the chromatic Rhythm Pocket Piano, manufactured anonymously in East Asia, which have even been incorporated into song books for younger children. Since the 1980s the increasing complexity of the electronic circuitry contained within microchips and the corresponding reduction in power requirements (often needing only a single miniature ‘button’ battery as developed for pocket calculators and digital watches) meant that they could be incorporated in ever smaller toys and everyday objects, even such slim items as birthday and Christmas cards; originally restricted to sound synthesis, by the early 1990s cheap chips could store several sampled sounds, giving many toys their own voices, while some books for small children have incorporated a panel of up to a dozen or more pictorial touch plates that individually triggered appropriate sounds. From 1999 even small toy figures were enabled to ‘speak’ by using a hand-held receiver that also supplies power to the circuitry.
Many sound sculptors and inventors of new instruments have received enthusiastic responses from children to exhibitions and demonstrations of their work. This has led some of them, for instance the Baschet brothers, Michael Waisvisz and Akio Suzuki, to invent musical toys or simple instruments or to design special versions of existing instruments for children. Several artist-designed toys have been marketed, especially by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, including Robert Deissler's Zube Tube or Power Tube (containing a long resonant spring) and Reinhold Marxhausen's nail violin-like Stardust. Bill and Mary Buchen, Hugh Davies, Max Eastley, Peter Phillips and others have run sessions at which children and adults can invent and build their own instruments. Educational instruments, used mostly by children, have been designed by Carl Orff, a team including Davide Mosconi, and the Baschet brothers, among others. The group Echo City has specialized in building instruments for childrens' playgrounds. A few instrument makers have used their inventions for therapy with emotionally disturbed, handicapped and under-privileged children, and in tactile exhibitions for the blind: several Baschet instruments have been used since 1967 by the National Theater for the Deaf in the USA; in Vancouver John Grayson constructed the permanent Environment of Musical Sculpture for Exceptional Children; and some 140 of Alfons van Legelo's foot-operated pentatonic Dance Chimes have been installed in public places worldwide since the mid-1970s, including for mentally handicapped children. The small Kraakdoos synthesizer and various Japanese electronic keyboard instruments have also been therapeutically effective.
Many books of instructions for building simple instruments have been published, a large number of them intended for use by children in school. Only a small selection of those available is listed in the bibliography below, but they have been chosen in many cases because they cover less common, often non-Western instruments.
M. Kagel, ed.: Kinderinstrumente (Cologne, 1972)
T. Wishart and others: Sun: Creativity & Environment (London, 1974)
J. Grayson, ed.: Environments of Musical Sculpture You Can Build (Vancouver, 1976), 12–17, 166–207
M. Hillier: Automata & Mechanical Toys: an Illustrated History (London, 1976)
D. Sawyer: Vibrations: Making Unorthodox Musical Instruments (Cambridge, 1977, 2/1980)
T. Wishart and others: Sun 2: a Creative Philosophy (London, 1977)
C. Armengaud: La musique verte: appeaux, sifflets, crécelles (Le Puy, 1979, 2/1981/R, 3/1984 as Musique vertes)
R. Banek and J. Scoville: Sound Designs: a Handbook of Musical Instrument Building (Berkeley, CA, 1980, 2/1995)
W. Haupt: ‘Mach-Mit-Konzert: musica creativa auf dem Linzer Hauptplatz’, Ars electronica (Linz, 1980), 55–60 [festival programme book]
F., V. and B. Baschet: Les tailleurs de sons (La Rochelle,1981) [programme book for a children's workshop]
H. Davies: ‘The Musical Potential of Found Objects in New Instruments Invented by Young People’, Musicworks, no.57 (1994), 14–20 [incl. CD]
B. Hopkin: Making Simple Musical Instruments (Asheville, NC, 1995)
B. Hopkin: ‘Sound-Making Mechanisms in Contemporary Children's Toys’, Experimental Musical Instruments, xi/1 (1995), 8–13
M. Leng-Tan: ‘Toy Pianos no Longer Toys!’, Piano & Keyboard no.189 (1997); rev. in Experimental Musical Instruments, xiv/1 (1998), 16–20
F. Baschet: Les sculptures sonores: the Sound Sculptures of Bernard and François Baschet (Chelmsford, 1999), 131–53 [incl. CD]
HUGH DAVIES