Melophon

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Melophon with a separately positioned lid, 1830s. Czech Music Museum in Prague .

The melophon is an originally French hand-drawn instrument of the 19th century with the outer shape of a guitar.

Design

Outwardly, the melophon resembles a deep-bellied guitar or a hurdy-gurdy , but is functionally an accordion . The bellows and the tongues are built into the body . The bellows is operated by a pull rod with the right hand. The neck shows a series of buttons that are connected to the tongues in the body via a mechanism and are operated with the left hand. The tone is described as " harmonium-like ", but also has a similarity to the bassoon or clarinet .

Development and use

The Melophon was developed in Paris in 1837 by the French watchmaker Pierre Charles Leclerc and subsequently improved several times. In the Realencylopaedie of 1848, Wilhelm Binder refers to the French musician Musard, who used the instrument in concerts immediately after its invention. The French composer Jacques Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) wrote a Melophon solo for his opera Guido et Ginèvra ou La Peste de Florence , published in 1838 . Otherwise the melophon seems to have been little used as a concert instrument.

On his concert tour in 1840/41, Giulio Regondi , accompanied by Joseph Lidel, used an instrument known as a melophon . Regondi, however, probably actually used a concertina , which he only announced as a Melophon .

Preserved copies

Individual copies are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston , the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Other designs

In the Musical Instrument Museum of the University of Leipzig there is a Melophon zither that is both a string and a hand-drawn instrument. The Melophon zither was invented in Vienna around 1888

literature

  • Arthur WJG Ord-Hume, Josiane Bran-Ricci: Mélophone. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 439

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Musical World, A weekly record. Vol. 12, 1839, p. 520
  2. ^ Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments . London 1975, p. 743
  3. Polytechnic Association for the Kingdom of Bavaria: Kunst- und Gewerbe-Blatt, Volume 29, 1843, p. 789
  4. ^ Allan W. Atlas: The Wheatstone English concertina in Victorian England . Oxford 1996, ISBN 0-19-816580-3 , p. 51
  5. ^ Studia Instrumentorum