A telharmonium, in prose

I just noticed that one of my commenteers asked me what a Telharmonium was. Good question. I forget that most folks haven’t had a fleeting obsession with abandoned musical instruments.

Indulge me for a moment. Rather than linking to an article, I’d like to share my description of it from Ghost Month. Perhaps this will serve to both spark your interest in the world’s first synthesizer - which had Mark Twain as an admirer and potential customer - and spark my interest in diving back into the plotting of the novel.

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In the basement of Liberty Music Hall, amidst the humming of the twelve immense generators that made up the guts of the world’s largest Telharmonium, Robin Johns resisted the urge to batter one of the ten foot generators into submission with his lug wrench. The rheotomes spun away on their pitch shafts, oblivious to his ire. Mounted horizontally in rows, lit by flickering electrical bulbs, each shaft corresponded to one key on the keyboard upstairs in the performance hall. Wire brushes reached out to contact the cylindrical rheotomes, generating a sound, to be shaped by the settings of the instrument to mimic violins, brass, pianos, even percussion.

Whenever the two Telharmonium players pressed a key – which, in the Mozart piece they performed, was all too often – brushes on every generator sounded the note. The Liberty Hall Telharmonium, owned by the Libertalia Electric Music Company, had fifty generators, all the better to push the richest possible electrical signal to the loudspeakers upstairs in the Hall, across the cables to the music salons across the island, and into the homes of those wealthy enough to afford their own receiver and wiring.

Fifty generators, each singing every note in unison. Notes sailed past his head like a flock of gulls circling a whale carcass: avaricious, cold, mocking – and slightly off. The untrained ear might not identify the detuning, but Robin could, and the musicians upstairs certainly could, and would berate him again for it after the performance, as if his job security were threatened. Unacceptable, they would sputter. Incompetent. A travesty of musicality. Must we humiliate ourselves nightly thanks to your stupidity? And on and on.

Robin did not like musicians.

After their tirade, delivered in the entryway where the cacophony was least intrusive, Robin would stalk back into the forest of white noise. He’d switch off the loudspeakers mounted on the walls by throwing a switch which always sparked with resentment. Robin would hunch his tall, gangly frame to make himself as small as possible, and hunt for the sour rheotome.

To create the sounds, four hundred and eight long cylindrical metal tone wheels – the rheotomes, invented by Thaddeus Cahill himself – spun at different frequencies to create the twelve note western musical scale. The magnetic coil brushes, held close to the raised bumps around the rheotome, generated electricity; but between the bumps, little electricity was generated, thus creating an alternating current that generated sound.

One bump on the rheotome would generate a low note; two, the octave above that, and so on up the octaves. Each generator had twelve shafts, one for each note, with rheotomes to generate the octaves (with sub-harmonics tuned to mix in for nuance of sound), seven in all. The touch sensitive keyboard that triggered the sounds had to be played by two musicians, one to play the notes, one to shape the nature of the sounds. Such skills were hard won, and Robin had never met a Telharmonium player whose ego was not a proportional size to the two hundred ton instrument.

With a seven octave range, the Telharmonium could imitate an orchestra. Some, its greatest proponents, claimed it could exceed an orchestra in purity of sound. The American writer Mark Twain lauded it as the “future of music making” – two decades before the inventor, Cahill, closed down his New York Electric Music Company for good.

Yet although the Telharmonium had given way to wireless radio transmissions in the Americas and Prussian countries, and had made no inroads in Cathay, remote countries well outside radio transmission range latched onto the device. Cahill’s successors dismantled his machine and brought it to Libertalia; it proved so popular that a new one was built, the one Robin worked on now.

Cahill’s machine, now forty years old, occupied the subbasement, serving as a backup for times when Robin had to shut the machine down for maintenance. The uninitiated, seeing the spinning shafts in the generators and hearing the electric hum, would mistake it for a power station generator. A running Telharmonium could electrocute a man in seconds.

Thus Robin’s reluctance to take out his ire on the closest generator.

Besides, the odds of hitting the right rheotome were one in twenty thousand. Not that whacking it would have any effect, other than venting his frustration.

After the weekend concerts, he decided, he would switch the wire contacts to the original machine. It had served well in the past. Then he and his assistant could begin the arduous task of testing each rheotome in turn.

Saeed padded into the room, wiping a screwdriver with a greasy rag. He always moved carefully during a performance, even though one of the four hundred odd pitch shafts weighed ten times as much as his pudgy body. His soft, expressive face gave the impression he was absorbed by the screwdriver; Robin knew the man never had the Koran far from his thoughts.

Robin cleared his throat to tell Saeed of his plan, but the short mechanic glanced up with dark eyes first. “Your wife is here,” he said.

“Oh. Ah. Listening to the concert?”

“No,” the Arab said smoothly. “Sitting in the lobby, glaring at the attendants.” He flashed a smirk. “Doesn’t she like music, Robin? Everyone likes music.”

Robin sighed. “Savannah doesn’t like anything.”

“Good,” Saeed said. “Then she won’t complain about the bad rheotome. It’s getting worse, my friend.”

“I know. So, um…” He blinked. “I think we should fire up the Cahill.” Robin tried to order his thoughts. Both men knew Robin was the island’s authority on Telharmonium repair. Whether he could explain himself clearly was another matter. Saeed was more patient than most of the assistants had been.

“And… when shall we undertake this task?”

“Oh. Yes. I hadn’t… tomorrow morning, before the devotional programming begins.”

Saeed grinned and wagged the screwdriver at him. “You’re a brave man to tamper with worship. Christians can be unforgiving.”

“If they want to worship in tune, then they can give me a little leeway.” He shrugged his helplessness before the power of technology.

Saeed chuckled. “Very well! I will bring you coffee. Do not let that beautiful wife of yours exhaust you.”

“Saeed –“

“I am teasing you. Go relieve her boredom.”

“I – okay, thanks.” Robin flushed and climbed the stairs out of the basement. Saeed was so friendly and relaxed that it made him feel even more awkward. If the Telharmoniums weren’t so massive, he would be happy working alone.