The Dutch national museum, "Van speelklok tot pierement" (National
Museum from Musical Clock to Street Organ), was very happy to be able
to purchase the Haydn-Niemecz flute-clock in 1993.  Unfortunately the
wooden cylinder was badly damaged so they decided to make a new one.

The museum produced a CD, bundled with a book, with the music produced
by this new cylinder.  The book is in Dutch, but has an English summary
which, with many thanks to the museum, is part of this article.  Since
the summary does not give much information, I wrote down [translated]
the above text.

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English summary

Already under Nicolas I Esterhazy (1583-1646) a small group of
musicians formed part of the Esterhazy household; during the reign
(1762-1790) of Nicolas II the "Magnificent", this had developed into
a full-fledged orchestra.  It was under this great patron of art that
Haydn served as Kapellmeister for almost three decades.

Contemporary with Haydn, and working for the same patron, the reverend
Father Primitivus Niemecz (1750-1806) was the librarian at the Esterhazy
court.  He was a many-sided man with great skills, both in the making
and the playing of musical instruments as well as in the building of
complex clocks.  In combining a clock -- a timepiece -- with a
self-playing musical instrument, Niemecz was a past master.  It is here
that the joint genius of Niemecz and Haydn produced a number of organ
clocks (Fluetenuhren) which are nothing less than spectacular, both
technically and musically.

Musical clocks

The combination of mechanical time-keeping devices with musical
automata has taken almost every conceivable form.  It embraces more
than six centuries of turret clockwork with bell music.  It also
includes most of the great astronomical showpieces (since the
fourteenth century) with bell music and/or organ music.  As early
as the sixteenth century it included a wide variety of domestic
free-standing clocks, wall clocks, bracket clocks and table clocks with
music on bells, pipes, strings, or (after ca. 1810) a tuned steel comb.
It even includes the pocket watch with bell music (eighteenth century)
and comb music (nineteenth century).

By the fourteenth century, iron cylinders were being made the surfaces
of which had a regular pattern of holes which could be set with a
musical programme in the form of iron pegs.  When the drum rotated its
musical pattern of pegs operated a number of levers.  Each lever was
connected to a bell hammer.  The "playing" of the set of levers -- the
keys -- by the rotating musical programme thus provided a series of
sounds that were ordered in time and pitch.  As a programme carrier,
the cylinder reigned supreme to the end of the nineteenth century.
From about 1890 on, a wide variety of new programme types was
increasingly to be found -- the steel disc with its punched-out
projections, the perforated paper roll, the zigzag folding cardboard
music book -- but these do not concern us here.

In the eighteenth century the art of building musical clocks reached
its zenith and great composers like Handel, W.F. Bach, C.Ph.E. Bach,
Haydn, Mozart (both father and son), and Beethoven wrote their special
compositions for the musically most interesting and challenging
category of self-playing instruments: the organ clock.

The Haydn-Niemecz organ clock of 1793

As distinct from musical automata with hammers playing on bells or
strings, the cylinder of an organ clock is programmed both with the
customary pins and with "bridges" of varying lengths.  The pins take
care of the short notes and the bridges represent the range of longer
notes.  The programming of such a cylinder therefore requires not only
the exact positioning of each note (as with hammer-playing automata)
but also the marking of the length, the duration of each note.  This
means that an organ cylinder preserves far more musical information
than a "pins only" cylinder.  In combination with the enormous
repetition advantages of organ mechanisms over hammer playing
mechanisms, the former instruments are capable of a much greater
musical complexity and finesse in their performance.

The only major restrictions are the playing length of the music and the
musical scale.  The Haydn-Niemecz organ clocks all belong to the
"one-turn-one-melody" type.  After each revolution, the cylinder makes
a small lateral shift of some 1.5 mm and a new piece of music can be
played.  The revolution time of an average music cylinder may vary from
30 to over 100 seconds, but even so the playing time per piece is quite
short; the so-called helicoidal or screw-type notation with its
continuous performance of up to ten minutes does not concern us here.

One can readily imagine that a clock that can be placed on a mantel
piece or on a wall bracket may contain some 15 to 20 organ pipes but
that these pipes, for reasons of space, have to be quite small.  Any
pipe longer than about 30 cm just wouldn't fit in a space that not only
has to accommodate the time-keeping and striking mechanisms but also
the musical mechanism with its motor, bellows-assembly and programmed
cylinder with its hundreds of tiny pins and staples.

This battle for space can clearly be detected from the scale
specifications.  The Haydn-Niemecz organ clocks, then, all have one
single rank of 17 up to 29 stopped wooden pipes.

Restoration

Over the past four years the restoration of the Utrecht Haydn-Niemecz
organ clock of 1793 has been carried out by the restoration department
of the museum.  The spring motor has been cleaned and re-bushed where
necessary; four new springs of correct length and thickness have been
fitted two by two in the two spring barrels and the steel wire between
barrels and fusee has been replaced with gut line.

(The two-barrels-four-springs formula has been used in order to even
out the inevitable fluctuations in power due to variable friction of
the spring coils against one another.

The two feeder bellows, the large storage bellows and the wind chest
assembly have been releathered, the keys aligned and the voicing of the
pipes equalized.

Because of the fact that the wooden cylinder had been badly warped --
resulting both in inadmissible out-of-roundness and in three major
cracks -- it was decided to leave this priceless document of Viennese
classical music programming well alone and to make a new cylinder that
was an exact copy of the original.

The musical programme on the old cylinder with its ca. 10,000 tiny
brass pins and some 500 bridges of varying lengths has been "read" by
the actual keys into a computer, complete with all the inconsistencies
resulting from the above-mentioned problems of the original cylinder.

Apart from that, the twelve compositions have been translated into
twelve MIDI files, based on the Gerlach publication (see bibliography)
and on the direct physical programme information on the cylinder.
This has allowed the many major and minor errors to be corrected.
The computer-corrected musical programme has been translated back
onto the new cylinder employing a step-motor moving incrementally.
Museum-produced brass wire of 0.7 mm width and 0.3 mm thickness has
been used for the pinning of the cylinder; extra thin wire of 0.15 mm
thickness had to be made for the programming of some of the finest
trills.

After a final round of minor corrections of the precise pin
positionings -- a time-consuming and patience-testing procedure
requiring a good musical ear and a skilled handling of a pair of
tweezers -- the Haydn-Niemecz organ clock of 1793 once more sounds as
of old within the walls of its new home: Utrecht's National Museum
from Musical Clock to Street Organ.

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The book with the included CD can be ordered from the museum.  They
have a web site at http://www.museumspeelklok.nl/ and in English also
at http://www.museumspeelklok.nl/speelklok/uk/

Jan Kijlstra

 [ The book and CD are mentioned only at the "Nieuws" page:
 [ http://www.museumspeelklok.nl/speelklok/nl/news.html
 [ which says (roughly):  "You can buy the book 'Haydn Herboren'
 [ by sending an email to <post@museumspeelklok.nl>.  Provide your
 [ complete address including name, telephone number and the number
 [ of books that you would buy.  Price 24.95 euros plus shipping cost."