Hi, Beatrice:  The thread you propose is an interesting one to spin out
for a while.  Here are some random thoughts on the matter which I offer
off the pointy top of my head without digging out reference material.

The tone of a musical box is influenced by several factors.
Setting aside for now any considerations of a merely acoustical nature
(sound boards, case materials, etc.), let me focus on three areas:
raw materials, quality of arrangement, refinements of tuning.

1.  With the notable exception of the Paillard firm (after 1875, at
least), the Swiss musical box makers all relied on a relatively small
handful of blanc makers, maybe as few as a half-dozen.  Some of these
companies/workshops are known to us:  SBI (Societe Billon-Isaac),
Kaarer, Jean Billon-Haller, for example.  These are the guys who
provided the basic setup (the "rolling blanc") of bedplate, cylinder
(unpinned), spring assembly and governor and comb (with teeth cut,
leaded and grossly tuned).

The blanc makers all undoubtedly used pretty much the same sources of
supply for their raw materials of brass, steel and cast iron.  There
must have been a lot of variation in the quality of these materials,
owing both to wars (e.g., the Napoleonic War), economics and the
imperfect metallurgy of the times.  Before the introduction of electric
muffle furnaces, the heat-treating of the steel in the combs was
particularly uneven, and there must have been a lot of discards which
perhaps went as "seconds" to be used in mechanisms of lower quality and
price.

Even within the same manufacturing run (e.g., 500 blancs for a 13-inch,
six tune unit) using materials from the same raw suppliers, there must
have been an appreciable gradation in the quality of the final product.
All of this argues that we should not be surprised by tonal variations
in identical units from the same blanc maker.


2.  The arrangers who notated the cylinders were probably relatively
few in number and free-lance, rather than owned by a single maker.  As
far as I know, we know the name of only one of these arrangers, and
that's Octave Chaillet of Regina fame.  He arranged for the Swiss
cylinder companies until he came over to Regina in Rahway, New Jersey.

I have often wondered about this unusual breed of people--they had to
be mathematicians, mechanics and good musicians.  None of the
horological training schools (e.g., Bienne or Basle) taught this
combination of skills, so these men and women must have been a small
and elect group of largely self-taught individuals.  Some of them were
obviously superb arrangers.

I hear in my head right now an arrangement of "Home Sweet Home" (which
dates from rather early, about 1830?) that one finds on many boxes of
different sizes by different manufacturers.  It's an arrangement that
is full of beautiful runs up and down the comb, and it is clearly the
signature of a single arranger who worked for several firms or whose
worked was freely plagiarized.

Anyway, the upshot of all this late-night rambling is that the quality
of a musical box owes a great deal to the skills of the arrangers, some
of whom must have been very pricey and therefore accessible only to the
more successful companies.


3.  Ah, yes--the tuners.  These women and men (and surely many of them
were women) are central to any discussion of the tonal quality of
musical boxes.  They were far more numerous than the arrangers, but
there clearly were some who were outstanding in their abilities.  Many
of them signed their combs (usually on the long tuning weight of the
bass note), and it's something I always look for.

Usually, I can't recognize the name, but once I found the signature of
Ami Rivence himself on the bass lead.  His beautiful, florid signature
survives on contemporary documents, so there was no doubt that this was
the real Ami Rivenc.  I felt at that moment what the French call a
frisson!

Okay, some of them were good and some not so good.  What does that
really mean?  Let's say we have tuner A and tuner B seated side by
side, both tuning the same comb to the pitches of the same master comb.
Won't both combs sound exactly the same?  Not necessarily.  Both combs
will certainly have the same notes, and the notes of both tuners will
match the master comb more or less precisely.  How is it then that the
two combs may still have different tonal qualities?

I think it must have to do with the ways in which the partials or
overtones of the fundamental note are handled.  Both tuners will
produce the same fundamental pitch in a tooth, but maybe one of them
has the ear and the knowledge to bring out the harmonics to better
advantage.  The basic note remains the same, but one tooth sounds
generally more pleasing, more rich, more full--that is, its overtones
have been brought out more deliberately, both in individual notes and
in the beats between or among adjacent teeth which have the same pitch.
Exactly how overtones may be finessed is the tuner's art and (I
suspect) closely-kept secret.

My thread bobbin is empty for now.

Joe Roesch