The Origins of the Orchestra Machine

Abstract

During that summer, the music of the changing of the guard delighted him more than before. When they passed by his house, he would open the middle door of the room in the back in which he lived, where he listened attentively and with pleasure. One might have thought that the profound metaphysician would have derived pleasure only from music character­ ized by pure harmony, bold transitions, elegantly resolved dissonances, or from the works of a serious composer such as Haydn. But this was not at all the case, as the following circumstance demonstrates. In 1795, accom­ panied by the late G. R. von Hippel, he paid me a visit to hear my bogenflugel. An adagio with the flageolet stop, which is similar to the tone of the glass harmonica, seemed rather disagreeable to him, but the instru­ ment gave him uncommon pleasure when the lid was opened and its full force unleashed, especially when it imitated a symphony with full orches­ tra. (quoted in Drescher 1974:268) The eager listener described above is none other than Immanuel Kant, af­ fectionately chronicled by philosopher and theologian Ehregott Wasianski. This colorful description of Kant's fascination with loud military music is suggestive on many levels. Most obviously, it tells us something of his lis­ tening habits, inviting us to smile at the great metaphysician's somewhat unsophisticated musical taste. We could use Wasianski's sketch to begin deconstructing Kant's own musical upbringing and shed light on the infa­ mously negative valuation of music in his third Critique. This passage, how­ ever, also encourages us to consider the surrounding context and examine what Wasianski implies about contemporary musical aesthetics. First, he distinguishes between an intellectual mode of listening-the kind that ap­ preciates daring modulations and the nuances of Haydn's compositional style-and a more immediate mode that takes pleasure in the sheer noise generated by military music. Second, Wasianski makes casual reference to a bogenflugel;' one with various stops. Given the variety of musical instru­ ments invented during the eighteenth century, and the fact that so many of them are lost to us, we might ask exactly what he used to entertain Kant and von Hippel in 1795. Last, we can examine what it means for Wasianski sim­ ply to be able describe an instrument as imitating an orchestra, confident that his readership would know what he means. When interrogated in this way, this passage can be the starting point of investigations that help us