Another five eccentric musical instruments from the court of Joseph I, created by the workshop of Leopoldus Friedrich Rademacher (c. 1665–1721), if not the master himself.

Like the hurdy-gurdy, the organ, or the synthesizer, these are polyphonic multi-timbral instruments, designed to produce different kinds of sounds simultaneously, achieving the quality of many different kinds of instruments playing at once. In physical form, each in its own way is a meditation upon the relationship of the parts to the whole, from the riotous bazaar-like concert hall of the Omnisymphonium (fig. 1) to the stacked keyboards of the Tres-Sonos (fig. 4). These exhibit more interesting and impractical adjustments to the scale: only the fifth instrument depicts a standard twelve-tone scale, the others featuring various arrangements of keys and tunings inspired by Vicentino’s archicembalo of 1555. The scales in figures 1 and 2 omit the B♮, about which Rademacher had become superstitious after a encounter with a hornet; figures 3 and 4 use a ‘half-bastard’ scale of F♮, F♯, G♮, G♯, A♮, A†, A♯, A♯†, and B♮ (fig, 3, 4) for playing folk music in the Aortic and Ventral modes.

Published December 11, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.