Gary R. Sullivan and Kate Van Winkle Keller. Musical Clocks of Early America, 1730–1830: A Catalogue Raisonné. North Grafton, Mass.: Willard House & Clock Museum, 2017. lv + 389 pp.; 525 color and bw illus., appendices, biographical documentation, bibliography, index of tunes, index. $65.00.
Connecticut is small, geographically, but it has played an outsized role in the history of American musical clocks due to what scholars call the Harland-Burnap school of clockmaking. It was named for London-born Thomas Harland (1735–1807) and Connecticut native Daniel Burnap (1759–1838), a Harland apprentice. Harland brought his musical clockmaking skills with him when he arrived here in 1773—abilities possessed by few colonial clockmakers. Burnap, for his part, aside from his many other horological accomplishments, became our nation’s most prolific maker of the musical clock form. Nineteen of his examples have been documented; sixteen are known. One is in the White House.
Pennsylvanians, often of German ancestry, likewise produced -numerous musical clocks. To name but a few, they include Lancaster’s Hoff family of clockmakers, whose patriarch, John George Hoff Sr. (1733–1816), born in Westerberg, Lower Saxony, bore four sons who followed him into the clockmaking business; Hoff Sr.’s son-in-law Frederick Heisely Sr. (1759–1843); John Eberman Jr. (1749–1835), also of Lancaster, the first of three generations of Eberman clockmakers numbering five individuals in total; yet another Lancaster citizen, Martin Shreiner (1769–1866), whose German immigrant father, Philip, was trained by the elder Eberman; York’s John Fisher (1736–1808), born in Baden-Wurttemberg; and Daniel Rose (originally Roos; 1749–1827) of Reading, who was also a musician and retailer of musical instruments. If you lived in this region during the period, you would not be blamed for thinking musical clockmakers were plentiful.
As a phenomenon, however, American musical clockmaking is minuscule in comparison to such major developments within the larger -history of horology in our country as the 1802 invention of Willard’s Patent Timepiece (colloquially, the “banjo” clock), America’s first successful wall clock. Musical Clocks of Early America, 1730–1830, Gary R. Sullivan and Kate Van Winkle Keller’s catalogue raisonné of every early American musical or quarter-chiming clock known or reported—a unique and definitive enterprise—comprises just 130 entries. Most musical clocks were made for elite members of American society, who alone could afford them, or else by the clockmaker for himself as a single, one-off masterpiece intended as an heirloom. Yet Sullivan, a well-regarded clock and early American furniture dealer, and Keller, a highly respected musicologist, convincingly argue that these rarities deserve to be more widely known and appreciated not only as extraordinary works of collaborative craftsmanship but for what they can tell us about our ancestors as individuals and as members of a new democracy.
To be clear, musical clocks play tunes. Alternatively, there are quarter-chiming clocks that play a simple series of notes on each quarter hour, like London’s most famous timekeeper, in the clock tower of Westminster. There are also quarter-striking clocks, whose bells indicate the quarters and hours. Only true musical clocks and some quarter-chiming clocks have been included in the reference work under review here.
Horologically speaking, it is the authors’ well-founded opinion that these clocks represent “a pinnacle of craftsmanship in Colonial and Federal America” (p. li). Their movements are much more complicated than those of more common early tall case clocks, which have only two gear trains: one for the timekeeping function, the other for the striking mechanism. Musical and quarter-chiming clocks have a third gear train, which drives a rotating pin barrel like those in music boxes. (Only one example in the book has a different type of mechanism, based on metal comb work.) A barrel’s set of pins are matched to a rack of graduated bells, which are struck by hammers. The pin locations are specific to the tune. Multiple tunes—and these clocks usually have six or seven—require multiple sets of pins. It does get busy in there.
What is more, these clocks are invariably housed in the most elaborate and elegant cases that could be obtained by their movements’ makers. Each of the two 1740s clocks included in this volume, both by William Claggett (1694–1749) of Newport, Rhode Island, has an exceedingly scarce aspect: an original japanned case. A single-tune clock made about 1795 by Isaac Brokaw (1746–1826) of Bridge Town, New Jersey, is housed in a cherry case made by New Brunswick’s preeminent case maker, Matthew Egerton Jr. (1769–1837). A quarter-chiming clock by Paul Rogers & Son of Berwick, Maine, a partnership active from 1803 to 1809, is in a case type seldom seen in New England: it is made entirely of boldly grained tiger maple. Usually some feature of the case allows the sound to be more effectively emitted than a nonmusical clock’s case would. Whether putting sounding holes in the sides of the hood, backboard, or roof board, or configuring fretwork and fabric in place of the hood sidelights, a musical clock case maker’s special challenge was to make such features both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Ironically, most tunes played by these rare clocks are common, or were in the heyday of their production, identified by the authors as 1785 through 1815. This is because familiar tunes are what typical clients wanted to hear. It is also because the clockmakers had already laboriously made the pin barrel charts for these tunes, and a client who ordered a special, uncharted tune would add to his clock’s already considerable cost. Among the most popular tunes chosen by clients was “Yankee Doodle,” which, as the authors remind us, is of British origin. Red-coated fifers played it as they marched to Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. “After the battle,” Keller and Sullivan engagingly write, “the Americans played it back at them as they sniped at the long red column desperately heading back to the safety of the British lines in Boston” (p. xli).
Many of the clocks play similarly patriotic songs, fife tunes that men tended to learn in the military—and men were the ones buying these clocks and selecting the music they played. “French King’s Minuet,” its subject being the beheaded Louis XVI, was chosen by most of Daniel Burnap’s customers. Another favored category was tunes appropriate for parties, that is, for singing and dancing along to. “Hob or Nob,” a country-dance tune from the late 1740s and later known as “The Campbells Are Coming,” is featured on twenty of the clocks documented here, by eight different makers. A pious sort obviously ordered the musical clock that Silas White Howell (1770–1818) made about 1797 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, now in a private collection in Massachusetts. All four of its tunes are psalms set to music. At the other end of the spectrum were clients who enjoyed bawdy songs, like “Cuckoo’s Nest.” Not that the clocks supplied the lyrics; the listeners did that. A seven-tune musical clock made by Nichols Goddard (1773–1823) about 1810 in Rutland, Vermont, featured three bawdy ones in its playlist: “Bank of Flowers,” “Careless Sally,” and “Heathen Mythology.” Taking stock of it at the Bennington Museum, in whose collection it now resides, the authors noted that, although the last song mentioned still plays, its title was at some point obliterated from its selector dial, likely by a previous owner offended by it.
In the late nineteenth century, a genuine travesty was enacted upon one of two musical clocks made by the great David Rittenhouse (1732–1796), far-famed as an astronomer, inventor, mathematician, surveyor, and scientific-instrument maker. We will never know why, but a repairman replaced the eighteenth-century music of the six-tune musical and quarter-striking clock that Rittenhouse made in the mid- to late 1760s in Norriton, Pennsylvania, with “Old Folks at Home,” “Home Sweet Home,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “Then You’ll Remember Me.”
Keller and Sullivan have done a great service by providing such a valuable resource, the first of its kind. (The chief focus of Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume’s The Musical Clock: Musical and Automaton Clocks & Watches, published in 1995, is Europe.) A bare description of the book’s format—a biography of each clockmaker, followed by a detailed discussion of the characteristics of each clock, its case, its musical selections, and its provenance, in alphabetical order—belies the wealth of information contained within these glossy pages, which are sumptuously illustrated with more than 500 color photographs of the clocks themselves, inside and out, as well as related ephemera, including reproductions of period advertisements. The impression one gets is that the two specialists have tried to distribute the riches evenly between horology and musicology, but for those whose true love is the latter, a bonus is available. It is the authors’ companion volume, The Music of Early American Clocks, 1730–1830 (North Grafton, Mass.: Willard House & Clock Museum, 2017), a compendium of 185 complete scores of the tunes played by the clocks. Not only of interest to scholars, the second book has a potential practical purpose as a source of information for any clockmaker who is today charged with restoring the music-making portion of one of these clocks. Due to their complexity and the skill required to repair them, the movements that survive most likely were, are, or will be in need of serious attention.
This extraordinary study has been built upon earlier, groundbreaking research published by Keller in the early 1980s. Sullivan’s interest in musical clocks goes back approximately to the same period, sparked by an initial opportunity to examine a Georgian musical bracket clock owned by a -Boston collector. In 2008 the authors met and began their ambitious partnership. Its first fruit, five years later, was an exhibition, Keeping Time: -Musical Clocks of Early America 1730–1830, which assembled thirty-three of the clocks that came to be included here. The sole venue, the Willard House & Clock Museum in North Grafton, Massachusetts, was engaged for an all too brief six weeks, ending in mid-November. Private lenders, understandably, wanted their clocks back for the season’s holidays.
Those of us who were able to visit the exhibition got a sampling of one aspect of these clocks that the books cannot offer: their sheer listening pleasure. Four clocks on view were made by Burnap between 1790 and 1800. The authors, who should know after their years of devotion to this topic, assert that Burnap produced not only quantity but quality. The reason that his clocks consistently sound better than most others of the period is, they say, due to “his use of finely tuned bells and the selection of melodies with notes that create harmonious chords as the tones linger in the air after -being struck” (p. 23). Jaded by life in our contemporary culture and all of its noise and electronically generated music, we can say this much: experiencing galleries full of clocks making music was a bit like experiencing the sound equivalent of roomfuls of candlelight, delivered by the beautiful machines of a distant era.
Jeanne Schinto
Andover, Massachusetts