Allegretto for Mechanical Organ

Mankind’s fascination with time is elemental. It is also one of the most recurrent and profound sources of inspiration for art, including music. Music, one often hears it said, is the temporal art par excellence. As W. H. Auden stated, “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.” At the risk of eschewing this massive and massively profound topic—several books would not be enough to do it justice—let me bring the tone a little more down to earth. For at root, music is just sound organized in time. And apart from the final work on the program, tonight’s concert celebrates quite basic connections between music and time. We start with the mechanical aspect: devices we mankind has invented to measure the passage of moments.
Though now often performed on organ, compositions have been written for a device called the musical clock. These are functioning clocks that performed any number of musical selections on the stroke of the hour—ranging from the familiar cuckoo clock to the more robust, carillon style of larger machines. These instruments were elaborate and expensive, hence largely the property of only the most well-to-do individuals. Yet they show the 18th century’s more widespread interest in merging art and technology or, at the very least, in trying to make scientific devices more aesthetically relevant.
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was not alone in writing for this particular instrument. Mozart, Beethoven, and Handel are among the giants who penned miscellany for the musical clock. Still, no one was so prolific in the genre. Haydn created over 40 works for musical clock and the related mechanical organ, largely between his famous trips to London in the early 1790s. These include several works that share thematic material with symphonic movements. The music in this case is based on the final movement of a string quartet (Op. 71 No. 2 in D) that Haydn completed at this time. It is something of an open question about which version—for strings or clock/organ—actually came first. Lasting barely 90 seconds, the piece includes the merest touch of gravity (a turn to C minor) and much humor (the skipping main theme and its accompaniment by 16th notes in the latter stages). Haydn was a peerless master at such light-hearted moods, and it requires a master’s touch to achieve this balance between simple and simplistic.

(c) Jason Stell