Museum Speelklok has a new attraction: a replica of a composing machine from 1821

The last organ pipes are mounted with meticulous precision in a two and a half meter high cabinet. Inside are two cylinders and an awesome amount of gears. Marian van Dijk, director of the Utrecht Museum Speelklok, a museum full of barrel organs, music boxes and other music machines, shows us around the exhibition space where the finishing touches are being put to Coincidence exists not – an exhibition on the work of the German-Dutch instrument maker Diederich Nikolaus Winkel (1776-1826).

The imposing instrument is Winkels Componium from 1821, which came over from the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. Before the instrument was irreparably damaged, it was able to randomly assemble an endlessly varying piece from 320 pieces of two measures of music. This composing machine is thus a kind of musical casino.

For centuries, composers and instrument builders have been dealing with the paradox between chance and artifice. Mozart and Haydn were already writing musical dice games, and in the 1950s Lejars Hiller and Leonard Isaacson programmed a computer to compose a string quartet. John Cage based his compositions on the whims of the Chinese I Ching; Brian Eno makes ‘generative music’, with endlessly branching algorithms, like Noam Chomsky’s language diagrams.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has also gained a foothold in music. It is now being used to draw a from scarce sketches and a database of Beethoven’s greatest hits Tenth Symphony to put together. Also Schuberts Eighth Symphony (the ‘Unfinished’) had to believe it, and got a B-movie music-like final part. They don’t really know how to convince yet, and land in the so-called ‘creepy valley’: recognizable as ‘classical’ music, but just not true to style or lifelike.

Using Winkels Componium, Museum Speelklok tells the story of chance, randomness and algorithms in music. From rhetorician games from the 16th century, via Winkel and Cage, to a musical Wheel of Fortune, commissioned by the young composer Joost Oehler. It’s still a surprise how it’s going to sound. Allowing chance and arbitrariness raises existential questions for this museum, where, according to Van Dijk, ‘everything is mechanized down to the last detail to sound as perfect as possible’.

Mini Componium

That is why it was very important to hear the involuntary composition processes of the Componium, which can no longer play, in action. Martin Paris, the permanent restorer of the instruments in the museum, therefore made a working model. For two years he worked on a small-scale mimicry of the mechanics, which he had to do – apart from a thesis from the 1980s – purely by sight, in the absence of original design drawings.

Not only restorer Paris was involved. Arranger Jan-Kees de Ruijter was given the task of adapting a musical dice game by Haydn for the composing machine. ‘It had to be decorated. This music is made to be sung or played by amateurs at the coffee table. It is never one hundred percent consistent,’ says De Ruijter.

The variations from the frail organ pipes of the Mini-Componium sound like a classical minuet, but due to a lack of repetition the musical sentence structure is strange. At the same time you hear and see the mechanical bellows pumps and gears and pins tick. In Winkel’s original this happened as a magic trick, behind a wooden casing. At Museum Speelklok, the mechanics are central.

At the exit of the exhibition a sign with the word ‘control’ flashes. According to Van Dijk, this is the crux of the exhibition: to what extent do you have to be willing and able to control random processes? ‘Music and composition are highly mechanizable’, she says, ‘but you still need the human genius to deviate from expectations in such a way that you create tension, but the music remains recognizable.’