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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 07.2
Dead medium: Cahill's Telharmonium
From: kadrey_AT_well.com (Richard Kadrey)
Source: from a review of "The Telharmonium: A History of
the First Music Synthesizer," review by Thomas L Rhea.
Computer Music Journal, vol. 12 #3, 1988
(((Until I can get a copy of the definitive work on the
Telharmonium (The Telharmonium: A History of the First
Music Synthesizer by Reynold Weidenaar, NYU, 1988), here
are notes from various sources.)))
From the review of Weidenaar's paper published in CMJ. The
review contains some interesting basic info about the
Telharmonium:
Reynold Weidenaar tells the story of Thaddeus Cahill
and his siblings, who constructed the Telharmonium, a
mammoth electrical generating plant and distribution
system designed to provide music for millions over
telephone lines. It is the hopeful tale of a vestige of
the Industrial Age: five U.S. patents, begun in 1895;
three completed instruments, including the commercial
models in 1906 and 1911; multimillion-dollar investments
in Telharmonic Music by otherwise astute capitalists; the
euphoria of inaugural triumphs in 1907 at Telharmonic Hall
in New York City; and the very early success at piping
music into the very correct Manhattan restaurants and
other venues.
It is a sad tale, involving the construction of
massive alternator tone wheels that tantalizingly predated
amplification technology; a business marriage with the New
York Telephone Company that soured when Telharmonic Music
proved to interfere with phone service (note: according to
another source, the Telharmonium's signal was too much for
the old switching systems, and tended to blow them out);
Thaddeus Cahill's fixed ideas about Just Intonation, and
the problems his 36-note-per-octave keyboard caused
Telharmonium performers; Lee DeForest's early radio
transmissions of the Telharmonium, and Cahill's inability
to perceive the implications; an ill-fated second season
at Telharmonic Hall, that was exacerbated by the financial
panic of 1907; the deterioration of the Telharmonium into
a musical freak show, and the failure of the licensee
companies in 1908; and an abortive comeback in 1911 that
struggled all the way into 1918.
It is a poignant tale of the wooden refusal of the
Cahills to realize that a (200-ton) musical instrument
chipped from iron was an anachronism even in the early
20th century; Arthur T. Cahill's crusade to carry forward
the ideas of brothers Thaddeus and George following their
deaths; and Arthur's circulation of a letter as late as
1951 trying to find a refuge for the first Telharmonium.
Arthur had been keeping the historic 14,000 lb
Telharmonium prototype in storage at his own expense for
almost 50 years, and finally sought "a permanent and a
public home for this priceless monument to man's genius."
There were no takers, and not even a small part of this
incredible music machine is now available to wonder at.
(((From SINGING THE BODY ELECTRIC, by Mark Sinker. The
Wire, September 1995, issue 139. An article looking at
various early electronic instruments:)))
"The first and most fabulous monster is Thaddeus
Cahill's Telharmonium: 200 tons, 60 feet across, taking up
a whole floor and the basement below. It looked, surviving
pictures tell us, like a church organ mated with a weaving
loom. Cahill, a Canadian, built it in Holyoke, MA.;
partially funded by the New England Electric Music
Company...it cost a then-phenomenal $200,000, and was
moved in 1906 to Telharmonic Hall in New York. The idea
was to transmit 'Telharmony' across America, to hotels,
restaurants, theaters and private homes, via local
telephone exchanges. The Telharmonium itself was a kind of
keyboard-operated dynamo organ; the bulk of the machine
consisted of vast teethed gears on engine-driven spinning
shafts which caused alternating currents in batteries and
magnets. There were no loudspeakers in those days; radio
was only five years old, and Lee DeForest's audion tube,
which amplified signals many thousand-fold, wouldn't
exist for at least another decade- so it fed straight
into the telephone system. Unfortunately, it needed huge
voltages and caused interference over the rest of the
telephone network, such as it then was- so that one day
an enraged businessman burst in, broke it up and threw the
machinery into the Hudson river, or so the story goes.
"Actually, there were no less than three
Telharmoniums, spread over some 20 years: the first Cahill
had started in 1895 in Washington, DC, patented in 1897,
finished in 1900; the Holyoke-NYC model was the second; a
third begun in 1908, was finished in 1911 and certainly
still in use in 1916. But the mid-teens radio broadcasts
into the home were the coming thing, and the project went
broke for lack of subscribers.
"For a short while, however, the Telharmonium was big
news. A story in McClure's Magazine, 'New Music for an Old
World,' brought it to the attention of Ferruccio Busoni, a
virtuoso classical pianist and critical intellectual,
Italian by birth, German by temperament, respected all
across Europe. Busoni (whose pupils included Edgard
Varese) cited the Telharmonium in a polemic he was then
writing (for some reason he calls it the 'dynaphone'). His
1907 'Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music' proposed that
music pass beyond its 19th century framings- harmony as
the possible combination of a mere 12 notes, a highly
selective and conventional instrumentation- the embrace
the 'infinite' gradations within the octave structures:
'The question is important and imperious, how and on what
are these tones are to be produced. Fortunately, while
busied with this essay, I received from American direct
and authentic intelligence which solves the problem in a
simple manner. I refer to an invention by Dr. Thaddeus
Cahill. He has constructed a comprehensive apparatus which
makes it possible to transform an electric current into
fixed and mathematically exact number of variations.'
"At which point Busoni hurtles intoxicatingly into an
airborne rhetoric that flatters Cahill's 200 ton
apparatus: 'Who has not dreamt that he could not float on
air? And firmly believed his dream to be reality? Let us
take thought, how music may be restored to its primitive,
natural essence; let us free it from archectonic, acoustic
and aesthetic dogmas; let it be pure invention and
sentiment, in harmonies, in forms, in tone-colours (for
invention and sentiment are not the prerogative of melody
alone); let it follow the line of the rainbow and vie with
the clouds in breaking sunbeams; let Music be naught else
than Nature mirrored by and reflected from the human
breast; for it is sounding air and floats above and beyond
the air; within Man himself as universally and absolutely
as in Creation entire...'"
Richard Kadrey kadrey_AT_well.com
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