Music of Its Own Accord
Aura Satz a b s t r a c t The disembodied hands of spiritualist sittings touched people and levitated objects but also strummed guitars, rang bells, played closed pianos and accordions in cages. Likewise, the mechanical music machines of the time (orchestrions, piano- las, etc.) seemed animated by invisible fingers. Highlighting the historical and haptic parallels between these manifestations, ands played a spectacular role in shap- In the darkened séance room it was the author addresses the lack H of a visible performing body, ing the manifestations of spiritualism. There were the many not the sense of sight that was privi- knuckles rapping out messages on tables in telegraphic code; leged but the tactile, dactylographic which remains implicit through the invisible animating agency. the hand of the medium scribbling out automatic writing; the evidence provided by hands, called She looks at the moment before touching fingers of participants placed upon the planchette upon time and again to demon- music became abstracted into of the Ouija Board; the interlocked sweaty palms in the circle strate the truth of events. People in- the grooves of the gramophone, of the séance sitting; the tied, manacled or chained wrists of sisted they could recognize the soft when music still looked like instruments, though without the the medium. Then there were the spirit hands materialized by touch of a deceased family member gestural presence of the per- mediums, the disembodied hands that manifested themselves or loved one or see the gentle ges- former. The article is illustrated by levitating things, stroking heads and knees, strumming gui- tures of their outstretched hands, with images from the author’s tars, striking drums, ringing bells. These floating hands were that their faces were patted or their project Automamusic. often luminous or invisible but palpable. beards and hair pulled. Male and female bodies, material and imma- terial, brushed up and touched one The Senses of the Séance another, subverting the polite conventions of gendered con- Hands, whether those disembodied, disassociated from the tact of the time. Human agency was embodied by the haptic visible living bodies in the room, or those that served as passive choreography of nimble fingers, so that while the hands of the transmission entities, could be said to be the true agents of séance sitters were gripped tightly in a chain of handclasps laid spiritualism. Séances took place in the dark or in the semi-light plainly above the table, these invisible fingers moved about of flickering oil lanterns or gas lamps, and the threshold of the making themselves known as presence and substantiating the visible tended to manifest itself through manual gesticulation. claim of a possible afterlife. The other sense organ that spiritualist manifestations most addressed, at the expense of the over-privileged witness of the
Aura Satz (artist, writer), U.K. E-mail:
Fig. 1. “Spirits and their Manifes- tations—An Evening Séance,” an original wooden type engraving fea- turing a seance from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, New York, 2 April 1887. This engraving depicts a typical 19th-century séance and includes standard phenomena such as spirit writing, flying instruments and a séance table. (Reprinted with permission from the Museum of the Macabre. All Rights Reserved.)
©2010 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 20, pp. 73–78, 2010 73
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021 1847, and this idea of acoustic presence Musical Instruments family of Athens County, Ohio, became prevailed in later manifestations. Chan- and Performance known for their elaborate musical sé- neled ghostly voices from the past, disem- Musical instruments provided an ex- ances [3]. They were ordered by the bodied and transformed, at times with the tension of these vocal manifestations, spirits to build a ‘“Spirit Room” and to aid of spirit trumpets, made themselves where again the spirits were challenged furnish it with a number of musical in- known, as if to proclaim the imminent to produce mere sound as presence, and struments: a tenor drum, a bass drum, technological advent of the telephone the faintest hint of melody was a bonus. two fiddles, a guitar, an accordion, (1876), the gramophone (1877) and the Combining both hand and sound, musi- a trumpet, a tin horn, a tea bell, a tri- radio (1895), just as, in another techno- cal performances became a prominent angle and a tambourine. During the logical ghosting, the rappings had cor- mode of communication with the dead. séances the spirits would give concerts responded to and indeed adopted the Daniel Dunglas Home, a famous Scottish using the musical instruments. A circle Morse code of telegraphy (first trans- medium known for, among other things, of 20–30 people would be formed, the mitted in 1844). It is true that much has his levitating skills, describes a séance in lights would be extinguished, and the been made of spiritualism’s reliance on 1854 during one of his tours in New York, performance would open with fright- the visual evidence of spirit photography during which a guitar was first heard to fully dramatic drum-rolls, followed by and full body materializations, but in fact move in its case. Then the case was un- various musical performances, and end- from the 1870s onward these visible ma- locked and the guitar placed under the ing with human voices singing until the terializations were eclipsed by a distinct table, from which it was played repeat- room appeared to be inhabited by a full emphasis on “direct voice” phenomena edly, “not, to be sure, in the highest grade choir. All the while spirit hands and arms as it was known. Thus, voice became the of the art, but with very fair average skill” would form by the aid of a solution of highest form of spiritual communication [2]. Finally the guitar was passed from phosphorous. The effect of such concerts and the most immediate and immaterial hand to hand of the people present, un- in the dark must have been powerful, the guarantor of presence [1]. These voices, til it was removed by “invisible agency.” eyes straining to latch sound onto source, divorced from their owners, floating in Such amateur handless music was com- gratified at the sight of hands and arms the ether, were the ultimate evidence of mon practice in spiritualist circles, as forming and materializing, providing a a vocalic life after death. Much like spiri- was the conjoined, indistinct group au- sense of embodiment to what they had tualist automatic writing, the voices often thorship implicit in the passing of the just witnessed. The Koons’ exhibitions had very little of substance to say. They instrument from hand to hand, at once of musical “spiritual pyrotechnics” were provided just enough intelligible speech charging it with handfuls of added en- enlivened by the “luminous bodies flying to hint at a presence of sorts, through ergy while proving its handless autonomy. about with the swiftness of insects” resem- signs, initials, names and so forth. Also around the mid-1850s, the Koons bling “different-sized human hands” [4].
Fig. 2. Aura Satz, Automamusic, hand-printed cibachrome print, 2008. (© Aura Satz)
74 Satz, Music of Its Own Accord
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021 Fig. 3. Aura Satz, Automamusic, hand-printed cibachrome print, 2008. (© Aura Satz)
In one of the séances an old out-of-tune [8]. The hands of the medium could and tunes “without any visible agency” violin was tuned to concert pitch and likewise be termed self-playing, as they [10]. Again efforts were made to reduce played in various locations throughout would frequently play automatically as if contact between his hands and the accor- the room (including against the wall, with a life of their own, while the medium dion, and yet his hand was the powering and strings downward against one of was in trance, channeling an “invisible force, the animating plug, as it were, for the sitter’s knees!) [5]. The frail Lord piano-forte player,” for instance. Musi- he could hold the accordion from the sisters performed musical feats of the cal instruments, especially pianos, often bottom with one hand, the keys being most astounding physical force, playing served similar roles to tables, floating, out of reach, while leaving the other on a double-bass violoncello, guitar, drums, rocking and being rapped upon. Now the table, and even so the instrument accordion, tambourine, bells and more, and then the piano keys were used like played many a tune [11]. To add energy at times singly, at others in unison, cli- a typewriter of sorts to answer questions. to the accordion it was then passed into maxing the performance with the lights Much of the mystery centered around the hands of sitters while it continued turned back on to reveal one of the sisters the proximity or distance of the musical to play of its own accord. The eminent seated silently in her invalid chair sur- instruments to the hands, and the ten- scientist Sir William Crookes subjected rounded by a pile of musical instruments sion generated by insulating one from Home to a series of scientific experi- [6]. Similarly, the famous Davenport another. Music would leak out despite ments in 1871, by placing a brand new Brothers toured an act that consisted of all efforts to isolate contact between the accordion within a drum-shaped metal entering a cabinet with their arms tied instrument and the medium: Piano keys cage wrapped in copper wire. He ran an or manacled while instruments would and strings would be played while the lid electrical current through the wire, but float and play in the darkened room, and was locked and the keyhole sealed with rather than block Home’s psychic force hands, seemingly human, would be felt wax. Mediums were frequently restrained it seemed possibly to energize it—for it and seen, before they would “dissolve, in a variety of ways. Likewise the expert certainly produced no resistance. The melt into air in the very grasp and tinder medium could channel a spirit and play medium was still able to make the accor- of the spectator” [7]. The instrument was music with minimal contact, effortlessly, dion “expand and contract,” produce for the most part self-playing, or if there by merely resting one hand on the piano music, and even float, leading Crookes to were luminous hands, they remained de- while it was turned so that the keys faced believe that Home possessed a genuine tached and bodiless, floating alongside the wall [9], or by laying her additional psychic force [12]. Crookes also attested the instrument. As one spirit communi- ethereal hands on the guitar (Fig. 1). to actually seeing invisible fingers play- cated, as if to clarify a continuity between Home’s spiritual powers produced ing the keys of an accordion while both the tactile and the musical, “This is my the famous case of a self-playing con- hands of the medium remained visible hand that touches you and the guitar” certina accordion, which played hymns [13] (Fig. 2). The debunking theory is
Satz, Music of Its Own Accord 75
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021 Fig. 4. Aura Satz, Automamusic, hand-printed cibachrome print, 2008. (© Aura Satz)
that Home was performing ventriloquial in anatomical focus also coincided with ment sound still had a body of sorts and misdirection of sorts, as he possessed a a move from efforts in the imitation of looked like itself, in the form of music small one-octave mouth organ that he sound to efforts in the preservation of automata. Before (and even while) the could hide within his mouth and play sound that could then be reproduced. higher fidelity of the gramophone ren- rather skillfully as though the sound were Preservation implies an entombment dered them obsolete, these short-lived coming from the accordion [14]. of the acoustic event, which becomes technological marvels seemed inhab- relegated to its past-ness, clearly corre- ited and animated by invisible hands, sponding to the idea of spiritualist voice- much like the musical manifestations Ventriloquism channeling, bringing the voices of the of spiritualism. As The Illustrated London and Technology dead back into the present. And yet, both News reported on 5 July 1851 on the ex- Indeed ventriloquism can be viewed as prior to and concurrent with these shift- hibition of Kauffmann’s Orchestrion at the prime metaphor for the shifts in ing sonic paradigms, there were a series Buckingham Palace, “flutes, flageolets, technology that took place in this pe- of curious anatomical in-betweens of mu- clarionets, cornets, bugles, trumpets, bas- riod, many of which were engaged in sic reproduction that were not quite dis- soons, horns, oboes, trombones, drums the prying apart of sound and source. For embodied, nor were they exactly ears or it is almost miraculous to hear this invis- as the sonic manifestations of spiritual- mouths. These accomplished self-playing ible instrumentation” [17]. Such lavish ist sittings became more sophisticated, musical machines were still somewhat an- Orchestrions descended from the barrel music itself was on the cusp of losing its atomical, inasmuch as they simulated the organ and similarly used pinned barrels body—its resonating instrument body as hands of the musician skimming lightly to store musical data, until perforated pa- well as the anatomical body that played over a piano or a violin, ringing a bell or per rolls were introduced in 1887 (Fig. it—to transform into the incisive inden- striking a drum, or the air breathed into 3). The self-playing organs from 1882 tations on the tinfoil of the gramophone, a wind instrument. And indeed a view of onward enabled the understanding of as patented by Edison in 1878. Around the musical automaton’s inner workings pneumatic action and paved the way for this time sound technology shifted from revealed the viscera, lungs and mechani- the most famous exponent of mechani- attempting to create sound-production cal fingers of pneumatic tubes, heaving cal music, the pianola (or player-piano), machines modeled on the mouth to bellows, cranking arms and mechanically the wonderful self-playing piano that sound-transduction machines modeled articulated joints. For a moment—before experienced a golden age between 1890 on the ear, one of the phonograph’s most Edison’s thin iron diaphragm that he and 1930, until it was displaced, like the evocative precursors being the 1874 Ear himself termed a “tongueless, toothless rest, by the gramophone. Piano-playing, Phonoautograph, which used a real ear instrument, without larynx or pharynx” the distinctive trait that made the middle- from a cadaver to record (but not yet [16] was to visualize sound-frequencies class woman all the more marriageable, reproduce) sound [15]. This change as an indecipherable script—for a mo- joined the general technological impulse
76 Satz, Music of Its Own Accord
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021 toward automated domesticity, enabling of course there were also the cheaper purged of this visual distraction. The a degree of liberation of the servitude of and more portable mechanical musi- closer technology came to reproducing female hands but nonetheless retaining cal instruments such as the Autophone the peculiarities of timbre and nuance the pedaling agency of the feet. It played (1881), the Triola Zither (1920s), the of the human voice or of human musi- of its own accord, the keyboard graced Roll-monica or self-playing harmonica cal performance, the more abstract and with invisible fingers, although rhythm, (1925), the Playasax (1930). indecipherable it became: the less music tempo and emphasis were provided by looked like itself. The “sound-writing” of the feet. The pianola did wonders in phonography remains a script unread- democratizing the performance of mu- Automata able to all but the machine. The higher sic, allowing the musically ignorant to In all of these self-playing mechanisms the fidelity, the more distant and absent enmesh their performance of listening sound still looked like itself, and the vi- was the body that had produced those with a performance of playing, before sual presentation of the automatic mu- very sounds [20]. Hands were no longer the more passive mode of listening was sical instruments was as important as, if laid upon the instrument thus provid- established by the phonograph. Pedal- not more important than, the sounds ing a conduit for its performance; they ing away, the pianolist had to find the produced. On the verge of dematerial- no longer hovered around it, levitating, tune, incorporate it into the pace of ization, the physical marker of sound was strumming, striking it or playing its keys. the lower half of the body and chan- stubbornly reiterated. That said, often Hands no longer needed restraining, nel it. In 1891 wavy notation lines were they were slightly deceptive in their elab- tying up and manacling, to prove their introduced, printed alongside the per- orate rhetoric of display, showing some handless agency. Even invisible hands forations of the pianola roll, to provide parts in order to hide others. Cabinets were fast evaporating into nothingness. a more precise indication of how to le- would have glass doors or could open And in the gradual detachment of hand ver tempo and lend the pianolist a role up to show the workings of the machine and body from musical instrument, ped- some claim almost akin to that of music to the curious eye, but without reveal- aling, winding up and switching on were conductor. Music was still to be felt and ing all—the mandolin mode of playing subsumed into the cautious placing of a interiorized in order to be heard. The the piano strings of the Mandolin Pi- needle upon a groove, providing a very imaginary fingers lost their anatomical anOrchestra was clearly not enough of different image of sound. map, the left thumb playing perhaps a visual treat, and would have demysti- the place of the right, or extra invisible fied the implicit tight fit of a mandolin fingers playing melodies “more capable inside a piano. The piano accordion References and Notes than the ten human fingers” [18]; what of the Decap Organ was in fact played 1. See Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History did it matter when all that one saw were of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) deceitfully by the organ, while its saxo- p. 364. the keys pressed down in a sequence of phone, despite a mock mechanism that digits removed from anatomical con- appeared to operate the keys, was merely 2. From Daniel Dunglas Home’s supposed autobiog- raphy, Incidents in My Life (New York: Carlton, 1863) straints? (Fig. 4) Later the technology a dummy, a shell of an instrument pro- p. 85, in which he described his own mediumship advanced to enable the removal of all viding embodied resistance to acoustic through a report in the New York Conference, 26 De- human agency, so that the mere switch of disembodiment. All the same, the invis- cember 1854. a finger could trigger an entire musical ible agents of spiritualism must have felt 3. J. Everett, who investigated the Koons phenomena, published the messages of the spirits under the title composition with the first electric piano somewhat stunted by these feats of tech- Communications from Angels (1853). in 1898 (1 year later, coin-operated pia- nology, where virtuoso invisible fingers 4. Britten Hardinge, Modern American Spiritualism nos such as the Tonophone would play at seemed to be at work, not as spirits with a (New York: 1870) p. 314. This is one of the most the drop of penny). Electrical pianos led message of presence, but as musician-less significant literary efforts to collate spiritualist mani- to reproducing pianos, which removed listening experiences with a trace of vis- festations and, like many other books of the time features extensive citations of newspaper accounts. the legwork and preserved the works of ibility. As the phonograph and radio took In this case it is a letter to the editor by Stephen composers “exactly as played by them,” as over, rendering these machines obsolete, Dudley in the Age of Progress, 1854. the ad for the Apollo Reproducing Piano an even purer listening mode came to 5. Hardinge [4] p. 317. states, showing an illustration of a semi- the fore. No longer the visual entertain- 6. Hardinge [4] p. 201. translucent Beethoven playing the piano ment of luminous hands operating the with nebulous fingers [19]. Similarly instrument, no more subtle mysterious 7. Thomas Low Nichols, A Biography of the Brothers Davenport, with some account of the physical and psychi- translucent hands graced the piano in interplay of hand and instrument, and cal phenomena which have occurred in their presence in the advertisements for the Welte-Mignon not even the spectacle of the instrument America and Europe (London: 1864) p. 47. See also reproducing piano, headed by the slogan playing of its own accord, by mechani- Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1926 History of Spiritualism (Echo Library, Middlesex, 2006,), chapter 10, where “The Master’s fingers on your piano.” But cal fingers of sorts. In both the cases of he described the “babel of sounds” produced by the there were other lesser-known examples, the musical spiritualist séance and the instruments, and how the instruments were dropped such as the Automatic Harp (1899); the musical automata, the acoustic experi- on the floor as soon as a light was turned on; p. 111. Banjorchestra (1907); the Mills Violano ence had been diverted to the fact that 8. Richard Cope Morgan, An Inquiry into Table-Mir- acles, their cause, character, and consequence; illustrated Virtuoso (1909) and the Hupfeld Pho- the instrument was playing “hands-free,” by recent manifestations of spirit-writing and spirit-music noliszt Violina (1908), a piano crowned thereby highlighting the visible absence (Bath: 1853) p. 15. with three violins played pneumatically of manual performance, marking this 9. Hardinge [4] pp. 104, 155, 202, 288, 463–464 and and by being pressed against a circular anatomical anomaly. What was actually more. See also many cases of musical manifestations spinning bow. Throughout the 1930s the played was to a degree less important, as cited in the two volumes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s History of Spiritualism (London: 1926). art-deco jazz-inspired Decap Organ intro- the marvel of a self-playing musical in- duced accordions and a full drum kit, as strument gave it an extra aural shine. The 10. Home [2] pp. 102, 110. well as other exotic instruments such as ear was more forgiving if the eyes were 11. Home [2] pp. 202, 226, 253 maracas and temple blocks, and in 1936 sufficiently entertained. 12. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of it even incorporated a saxophone. Then The experience of listening was to be Spiritualism (London: 1874) pp. 10–14.
Satz, Music of Its Own Accord 77
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021 13. Crookes [12] p. 92. duction, in that sound is separated from the body, and screened her work nationally and inter- and, in his contentious opinion, the female voice nationally, including at FACT (Liverpool), 14. See James Randi,
78 Satz, Music of Its Own Accord
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00015 by guest on 26 September 2021