J.T. de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1596
Caspar Shott, Magia Naturalis, 1657
French journal "La Nature," 1883
Weckerlin, Musicana, 1887
Invention of the katzenklavier, or cat-organ, is attributed to German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Though many incorrectly believe that he first proposed the device in his 1650 musicology treatise Musurgia universalis, the peculiar piano was described by Kircher’s student Caspar Shott in the 1657 text Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive recondita naturalium et artificialum rerum scientia. The origin and authenticity of the cat-organ were the subject of some debate in volumes 5 and 6 of the hard-to-find journal Experimental Musical Instruments, but according to one modern scholar, Thomas Hankins, Kircher introduced the instrument with the following story:
“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?—and so was the prince raised from his melancholy.”
Although another modern paper on the bizarre instrument includes an illustration of a katzenklavier-like device from 1596, several years before Kircher’s birth, a number of animal-based instruments were apparently developed independently by other thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including a donkey chorus and a pig-piano.
Speaking of obsolete scientific theories, Johann Christian Reil, an early scientist of mental illness and creator of the term “psychiatry” suggested a katzenklavier-based treatment for patients distracted by “constant reverie” and unable to focus. In his book, Rhapsodieen uber die Anwendung der psychischen Curmeth- ode auf Geisteszerriittungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychological Methods of Cure to the Mentally Disturbed), Reil proposed that:
“[The cats should] be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument—when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.”
Fortunately for the rest of us, this theory would soon be discredited by modern psychiatric research.
