Katzenklavier (Cat Organ)

Thanks (indirectly) to Matteo Pasquinelli, I discovered the Katzenclavier.

A “Cat Organ” is a fictive musical instrument consisting in a line of cats whose tails are stretched underneath a keyboard, so that each cat cries in pain when a key is pressed.

There are no records of this bizarre concept being built, although many writers and thinkers (among which French writer Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Athanasius Kircher, and German physician Johann Christian Reil) describe it.

Here’s an excerpt of Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin‘s “Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre (Musiciana, descriptions of rare or bizarre inventions)”:

“When the King of Spain Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his father the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin ride on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the archangel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand.

The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvete, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave… (chromatically, I think).

This abominable orchestra arranged itself inside a theatre where monkeys, wolves, deer and other animals danced to the sounds of this infernal music.”

In Misurgia Universalis (1650), Athanasius Kircher wrote:

“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”