There has been much press hooh-hah about a bowed keyboard instrument imagined by Leonardo da Vinci and built by an enterprising Pole. But does it pass the acid test of musicology? Apparently not. Here’s a response to the American Musicological Society Discussion List from Professor Edmond Johnson in Los Angeles. Sorry, folks.

I hesitate to represent myself as any sort of expert in the history of bowed

keyboard instruments, but I think I can probably answer Prof.

Warfield’s question about “Leonardo da Vinci’s Wacky Piano.” Basically, it

appears that the instrument built by S?awomir Zubrzycki is not so much a

realization of a design by Leonardo da Vinci as it is a reconstruction of

the instrument described as a “Geigenwerk/GeigenInstrument, oder

GeigenClavicymbel” in the second volume of Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma

Musicum (pp.67-72). Praetorius credits the instrument’s invention to Hans

Haiden of Nuremberg (who had apparently built a working model as early as

1575), and a woodblock illustration of a “Nürmburgisch Geigenwerk” can be

found in Praetorius’s Theatrum Instrumentorum.

To my knowledge, only one historical example of this type of instruments

survives—a 1625 Spanish instrument by Raymundo Truchado in the collection

of the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels—but there have been previous

attempts at making modern replicas (including four different instruments by

the Japanese builder Akio Obuchi).

Now it’s certainly true that da Vinci made some sketches of a

continuously-bowed keyboard instrument (which he dubbed the “viola

organista”) , but the sketches are pretty rough, and most of them show an

action that’s quite different from the one in Zubrzycki’s instrument (which

uses the same rosin-coated wheels as Haiden’s geigenwerk). In short,

Zubrzycki’s instrument seems to me to be a nice reconstruction of a

16th-century German instrument that just happens to share some of the

characteristics of da Vinci’s imagined “viola organista” (which Haiden

almost certainly knew nothing about).

While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “a circus sideshow looking for

suckers,” I think it’s safe to say that the idea of a long-lost instrument

by Leonardo da Vinci makes for far better headlines than “Instrument by

Obscure German Reconstructed… Again.”

 

Best,

Edmond Johnson

P.s. You can find some reproductions of the da Vinci sketches in Emanuel

Winternitz’s “Strange Musical Instruments in the Madrid Notebooks of

Leonardo da Vinci,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 2 (1969), pp. 115-126.