CERTIFIED 100% QUIRKY

Every musical instrument has at least a few quirks, but some were 100 percent quirky from the get-go. Here are five of the finest.

PHOTOPLAYER

The photoplayer was a player piano on steroids, designed for use in early movie houses. It had two tracker bars (the device that reads the paper music roll), so one could be changed while the other played. The piano was attached to big sound-effects boxes on either side that held drums, cymbals, castanets, perhaps some organ pipes, and sometimes a xylophone, as well as things like train whistles, car horns, telephone ringers, and police sirens.

One person played everything, and it didn’t require enormous musical skill, just knowing how to get the piano rolls going and when to push the buttons or pull the “cow’s tails” that activated the sound-effects devices. About 10,000 photoplayers were built between 1910 and 1928. They went out of style quickly as talking pictures came onto the scene and, today, fewer than 20 operable photoplayers exist.

To marvel at a photoplayer in action, go to youtube.com/watch?v=SF4BWllUEO0

THEREMIN

The makers of horror and science-fiction films are forever indebted to Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen, aka Leon Theremin. While working on a Soviet government project to develop proximity sensors in 1920, he noticed that the eerie, wavering pitch they emitted changed as his hands moved closer to and farther away from the detectors.

Theremin was a cellist and quickly became intrigued by his invention’s potential as a musical instrument. In November 1920, he gave his first public concert on the device, which he called the “etherphone.” Eight years later, Theremin and three other theremin-playing soloists

performed with the New York Philharmonic in short works by Handel, Mozart, Lizst, Saint-Saëns, and Rachmaninov. Despite this auspicious concert hall beginning, it was in Hollywood where the instrument really came to the fore, being prominently featured in horror flicks such as The Red House and The Spiral Staircase and sci-fi classics including The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World. (The theremin-sounding theme in the original Star Trek television show was actually sung by a famous studio musician, soprano Loulie Jean Norman.)

See and hear Leon Theremin playing the jazz standard “Deep Night” on his invention at youtube.com/watch ?v=WhR2e9ab-Uw

The theremin in Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still: youtube.com/watch?v=3ULhiVqeF5U

LITHOPHONES

Lithophones — suspended rocks that can be struck to create tones — go far back in antiquity and have been found at many archaeological sites around the world. In the 19th century, musicians and musically inclined anthropologists started to create new instruments using stones as their basis. Many resemble xylophones, such as the “Rock, Bell, and Steel Band” developed by Briton Joseph Richardson in the 1840s. Richardson and his three sons played the large instrument throughout Europe, including a command performance for Queen Victoria in 1849.

Contemporary lithophones vary more widely in appearance, with some being highly sculptural, such as Hannes Fessmann’s 2007 instrument carved from a single piece of solid stone, or conceptual, such as Jay Harrison’s circular, 24-stone, computer-programmed instrument, designed for the listener to stand in the center for a surround sound experience.

To see and hear Richardson’s Rock, Bell, and Steel Band at its current home in England’s Keswick Museum, go to youtube.com/watch?v=tQkeYlFs1Oo