By the thirteenth century, the best itinerant jongleurs in medieval Europe were expected to play a number of musical instruments, sometimes many of them at once. Their bindle of horns and tambourines gradually grew into a portable orchestra, which by the sixteenth century had become codified as the Musikalischer Wunderschrank, or ‘cabinet of musical wonders.’ It typically included tuned instruments like the sackbut and crumhorn, alongside a seemingly endless collection of percussive rattles, blocks, and claves.

In the early nineteenth century, antiquity became a central theme in Romantic literature, and attention turned once again to the Musikalischer Wunderschrank. But this time, it was revisited by the more scientifically-inclined minds of the Enlightenment. The Musick-Cabinet, as English and American manufacturers called it, reemerged not merely as a suitcase for the traveling musician, or a vitrine for the gentleman collector, but as a single integrated instrument. Driven by a keyboard, and capable of producing many timbres, it was a veritable portable pipe organ, or an early mechanical synthesizer. These instruments by Barlow & Moore of Boston expose a sophisticated viscera of sound-making devices, only some of them recognizable, and few of them actually connected with the functioning acoustical apparatus.

Published January 9, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.