This international conference, the first ever devoted to mechanical music as a source for historical performers, was hosted by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama as a joint event between the Guildhall School's research department and the National Early Music Association (NEMA) as part of the ResearchWorks series. Its organizing committee consisted of Emily Baines (conference convener and Guildhall DMus candidate), Mark Windisch (NEMA Chairman/Treasurer), Richard Bethell (NEMA Secretary) and Rebecca Cohen (Guildhall School of Music & Drama).

As musicologists and performers of old music we are well accustomed to analysing written sources in our search for information. We look to treatises, letters, anecdotal evidence, manuscript musical material and period instruments, which can provide us with many answers, and just as many new questions, to fuel our searches for inspiration. How much more inspiration can we gain then from period audio sources which may, at a first listening, contradict much of what we think we understand of the written material? Barrel organs, musical boxes, carillons and player pianos can reproduce music of past ages exactly as it would have been heard at the time of construction. From these ‘original recordings’ new questions certainly arise and with them perhaps a need to re-examine our interpretation of musical texts and treatises. This conference was convened to open up a dialogue between musicologists, performers and those with an in-depth knowledge of the construction of mechanical instruments of many kinds, thereby developing a deeper understanding of the ways in which mechanical musical instruments might contribute to the historical performance movement.

To this end, it seemed highly fitting that the conference should be opened by a keynote address entitled ‘Learning from Interpretations by Mechanical Instruments’ from Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, a central figure in research into mechanical music of all kinds for the past sixty years and a passionate advocate of its relevance to historical performers. Now in his eighties, Ord-Hume gave a lively and engaging talk which opened up many of the subjects to be discussed in later papers. ‘Writing down music is like trying to record the scent of a rose’, he noted, ‘and musical notation should be taken as a guide rather than a blueprint’. His address gave us an excellent background to the history and variety of mechanical musical instruments and the areas in which these could aid musicology. This subject matter was complemented perfectly by Peter Holman's later keynote address, ‘Automatic Musical Instruments and Historical Performance Practice’, which continued to delve deeper into the subject and explain exactly how some of these instruments could be used. Holman paid particular attention to transcriptions of organ clocks made by Charles Clay in the first half of the eighteenth century and which contain music chiefly by Handel, but his impressive array of musical examples also included other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century automatic musical instruments as well as some fascinating early recordings.

The papers presented at the conference displayed a hugely impressive variety of current work using mechanical sources in many fascinating ways. Some papers, such as that given by Johann Norrback and Jan Ling from the Göteborgs Universitet, were focused primarily on the instruments as artefacts and had a more practical approach, examining issues of preservation and reconstruction. We also heard from Rebecca Wolf (Deutsches Museum Forschungsinstitut für Technik und Wissenschaftsgeschichte) regarding an extensive project cataloguing and digitizing paper rolls for player piano. Others, such as the contribution from Jon Banks (Anglia Ruskin University), addressed the question of how mechanical instruments might be used to trace tunes which have either been lost or have mutated over years of oral transmission. Banks showed how English clockmakers used ‘Turkish’ tunes (a term used in the eighteenth century for the whole Ottoman Empire) in clocks for export to Turkey, and how they may have adapted these tunes to fit a Western musical understanding.

Some papers focused on highly specific subjects, such as Beth Pei-Fen Chen's (independent scholar) paper on ‘Mozart's Slurs and His Pieces for Mechanical Organ’ and Odile Jutten's (Université Evry Val d'Essone) analysis of the intricate ornamentation found in an eighteenth-century barrel organ made by Henry Holland which plays Handel's F major Organ Concerto Op. 4 No. 5 (housed in the Colt Clavier Collection). These contrasted with presentations introducing delegates to the broader uses of the information that may be extracted from mechanical instruments, including those by Áurea Dominguez (Helsingin Yliopisto; ‘Nineteenth-Century Performance Practice as a Specific Field of Research: Incorporating “Old Tools” to Create a New Methodology’) and Maria Welna (Sydney Conservatorium of Music), who spoke about Mozart's Fantasia in F minor, k608, in relation to the playing style of nineteenth-century composer-performers. Carl van Eyndhoven (LUCA School of Arts) also gave us an intriguing insight into what the manuals for repinning automated carillons of the Low Countries can tell us about performance, and especially about keyboard practice in the seventeenth century, in his paper ‘“ … shöne, lieblich gesang auf den glocken von sich selber … ”: Mechanical Carillons as a Source for Historical Performance’.

Particular mention should be made of the contributions by Inja Davidovic (Sydney Conservatorium of Music) and Rex Lawson (Pianola Institute, London). Davidovic's excellent paper, ‘Pachmann's Piano Rolls and Acoustic Recordings: A Guide in the Study of Performance Practice’, examined the reproducing piano rolls ‘recorded’ by Vladimir de Pachmann containing works by Chopin, and compared them to the pianist's gramophone recordings of the same music, with an eye toward explaining why the rolls were considered more successful at the time. Lawson drew the formal sessions of the conference to a rousing conclusion with his performance-based presentation on the player piano. Lawson called the player piano ‘a dying instrument’ but then proceeded to show his audience how an unwarranted low opinion of these instruments has led to a decline in the skill and knowledge needed to enable these fascinating machines to produce the immensely nuanced and expressive performances of which they are most evidently capable.

The other performance element of the conference was provided by Guildhall School students of historical performance, which I (Emily Baines) directed as the culmination of a project in which we analysed the ornamentation and performance styles found in both recordings and transcriptions of eighteenth-century mechanical instruments (my own research area). We attempted to use this material, first by imitation and then, as the styles became more familiar, by emulation in other works of the same period, with the objective of discovering what the benefits, questions and limitations associated with the styles might be. As a comparison, I also included some related material in the programme such as the folk-song settings by Geminiani, since so many similar pieces are included in eighteenth-century mechanical instruments. Among the many interesting discoveries of this project was that the styles, once we had got over any initial culture shock brought about by the sheer amount of ornamentation and some rather unconventional rhythmic weighting and phrasing, worked well on all instruments and voices (subject to idiomatic limitations). We also found that removing ourselves from a comfortably ‘received’ performance style worked as a great liberator, generating an exciting and visceral performance. The performance was gratifyingly well received and provoked much interesting discussion between academics and performers.

Finally, I should mention the contribution made by the Musical Box Society of Great Britain (MBSGB), who were kind enough to exhibit a number of their historical instruments as part of the conference, and the illuminating tour of the horology department of the British Museum organized by Windisch and led by the extremely knowledgeable Oliver Cooke (curator of horology). The tour included an interesting comb musical box playing Bellini and made during his lifetime. Both of these additions gave the conference a great sense of context and, in the case of the MBSGB exhibition, aroused a good deal of interest from passing students into the bargain. This contributed to the excellent atmosphere of the conference as a whole, and the chairs of the sessions – Marieke Lefeber (Museum Speelklok, Netherlands), Jon Banks and John Irving (Royal Musical Association / Institute for Musical Research) – ensured that the event ran perfectly to time, with wide-ranging and insightful discussion.

I hope that this event will be the first of many and that the community of scholars and performers forged here will continue to investigate ground-breaking new directions of study in its wake. The committee are also tremendously grateful to the other sponsors, The Institute for Musical Research and the Handel Institute, for their generous support. In due course proceedings will be available via the NEMA website at <www.earlymusic.info>.