In the eighteenth century, many wealthy families had a bell-playing clock at home:a clock that played a fixed melody every hour. Marieke Lefeber, curator of Museum Speelklok in Utrecht, conducted PhD research into the music repertoire.
We made an appointment for the interview in Museum Speelklok, where Lefeber is curator. In this museum you will find many self-playing musical instruments, such as small music boxes, playing bells and street organs. There is even a piano with built-in violins that can play by themselves.
The museum is also the place where Lefeber got the idea to write a dissertation on bell-playing clocks. She tells how she got a job here fourteen years ago as a tour guide, next to her musicology study. “That was actually because of my grandfather who then said:if you are looking for a nice side job, you should go and have a look in that museum. They have an automatic violin there. That's how the ball started rolling."
Organ pipes and bells
Lefeber became fascinated by the dials of the bell clocks, in which Dutch song titles were engraved. Until then, little research had been done into the music repertoire of these bells. And that while in the eighteenth century it was an object that many wealthy families had at home. “Not the top layer, by the way,” the researcher explains, “because they usually had organ bells.” Playing clocks have different sound sources, as we see here in the museum. These can be organ pipes or strings, for example, or:bells.
For her dissertation, Lefeber investigated the repertoire of these bell-playing clocks. To collect enough music fragments, she had to look outside the walls of the museum. Most bell-playing clocks are still privately owned. She tells how most of her corpus came about through collaboration with a watch restorer from Zutphen. “He restored a lot of playing clocks, and always made recordings of them.” In this way she collected a total of the music of 107 bells. According to the researcher, this is about ten percent of the total number of bell-playing clocks that can be found in the Netherlands.
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Twelve-tuned Dutchman
Bell playing clocks were popular in the eighteenth century not only in the Netherlands, but also in England, Germany, France and America. The Dutch clocks were made in our country, but also partly in England. Many clocks that were made in England for the Dutch market were provided with Dutch music. “You even had a certain type called the Twelve-tuned Dutchman ”, says Lefeber.
The researcher compared the melodies of the bell-playing clocks with all kinds of other sources, among other things to track down lyrics that the bell owners may have known from the melodies. For this she used the song bank of the Meertens Institute. That is not so easy, because often she had few clues other than a title, which gave little information. “Then the dial would say, for example, Mars, but of course there are a lot of them.”
Special acoustics
Fortunately, the PhD student was able to use the Witchcraft search engine developed at the Meertens Institute. This is a search engine that makes it possible to identify melodies only on the basis of a sound file. Only then there was another hitch, says Lefeber. “The bubble melodies turned out not to be suitable for the search engine. These have special acoustics, with many overtones, making them difficult to recognize for a computer.”
But there was also a solution for that. “By chance I came into contact with a researcher from Ljubljana (Slovenia) through a colleague who was involved in the acoustics of bubbles. He developed an algorithm for me that could convert recordings of the bell playing clocks into a sound file that Witchcraft did understand. All in all I managed to identify two thirds of the melodies.”
Shared song culture
Although the bell-playing bells' repertoire was quite broad, there were certain melodies that were very common. “Contrary to what you might think, these tunes usually refer to fairly simple and flat songs. Sometimes it's about love or politics, but much more often about drunken peasants and courtships." In that respect, the song culture of the high bourgeoisie did not differ so much from that of the lower bourgeoisie and the workers.
“There was indeed a shared culture”, says Lefeber, “but at the same time there was a field of tension. The Mirliton, for example, is almost always a dirty song about sex, with references to genitals. In the eighteenth-century magazine the Hollandsche Spectator I found an anecdote about this by Justus van Effen. In it, a man visits a family where the child begins to sing the Mirliton. The mother has to laugh about it, but the visitor really thinks it is not possible.”
Foreign melodies
Incidentally, the melodies on bell-playing clocks were almost never Dutch in origin. “The melodies came from abroad, often France, and were given Dutch lyrics here. Opera melodies or serious, composed music could also penetrate the bell-playing clock repertoire, but then with a Dutch title and lyrics. Like Locatelli's Minuet. Although this composer composed many minuets, it is always the same one on bells. And several Dutch texts were also known on this minuet.”
Finally, the poorest strata of the population generally sang other songs, which were bought through song sheets on the street. So there were major social differences in music repertoires, but they were not completely separate from each other. That's why the songs that the high bourgeoisie listened to were still a lot simpler than you might think.
In this video from Utrecht University, Marieke Lefeber explains what her dissertation is about and shows us some examples of bell-playing clocks in the Museum Speelklok.