Emily Dolan, University of Pennsylvania

In his four-volume history of music, Charles Burney gushed enthusiastically over vocal prowess of the famed castrato Farinelli:

There was none of all Farinelli’s excellencies by which he so far surpassed all other singers, and astonished the public, as his … swell; which, by the natural formation of his lungs, and the artificial economy of breath, he was able to protract to such a length as to excited incredulity even in those who heard him; who, though unable to detect the artifice, imagine him to have had the latent help of some instrument by which the tone was continued, while he renewed his powers by respiration.

That spectators could rumor Farinelli faked his endless melody by means of some artificial device highlights the special status of the unending tone in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The allure of such a tone captured the period’s imagination, and inventors struggled to capture it in an instrument. They strove to create an instrument that produced a voice-like tone that lasted indefinitely and that could be nuanced in subtle ways. Most often these instruments were in keyboard form, so that their ethereal tone could be easily reproducible for anyone with some musical ability. Though all but forgotten today, these attempts—which had fanciful names such as the clavicylinder, xanorphica, euphon, and anémochord—testify to a widespread preoccupation with a kind of ethereal music that was celestial and ancient. Such tones were both the most natural kind of music, but also inextricably bound to notions of musical technology: humans could only access the ethereal nature music by means of an instrument.

In this paper I examine the importance of this kind of nature music and its associated affects, its relationship to more “mainstream” music of the period (i.e., Viennese symphonies, string quartets, etc.), and the instruments that were invented to capture it. I draw upon a variety of sources, including poetry inspired by the mysterious tones of the Aeolian harp, Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetics, and contemporary reports of, and reactions to, newly invented instruments in this period. The central text in this study is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “Die Automate.” Scholars have long recognized the importance of Hoffmann’s story in terms of contemporary notions of machine intelligence. But the importance of the story as a piece of music criticism has been overlooked, in part because the musical instruments he mentions appear at first blush to be fantastical monsters of his imagination.

Hoffmann’s story grows out of a fascination with the discovery of the tones hidden in nature and the technologies needed to unlock them. Yet Hoffmann’s critique also reveals an uneasy relationship between music, nature, technology, and feeling. He was highly suspicious of music technology, especially android performers, and he bemoaned the fact that each new creation tended to be accompanied by hyperbolic claims of its perfection (indeed, acoustician E. F. F. Chladni, for example, claimed that he conceived his euphon in a dream, in which its perfect, celestial tones announced themselves to him). Ultimately, these instruments all failed; but their very failure, I argue, created a space between celestial music and man-made technologies in which the notion of ethereal music could thrive as an unattainable ideal, ultimately changing the conception of music as a whole in profound ways.