Brian's review

> In the era of
> wooden machines (viz., the piano, the harpsichord)
> it would have been impossibly difficult &
> expensive to build a 5-octave instrument with
> 31 equal tones to the octave. If such an instrument
> could have been built, its keys would have been
> too narrow to be fingered; and the instrument
> itself would have been too mechanically complex
> and too fragile to survive an actual performance.

No no. More expensive yes, impossible to build not and well playable.
See my post of 13 aug. 1994:

On my holiday this summer I was in Vienna and paid a visit to the
collection of musical instruments of the museum of art history.
There was a beautiful 31-tone Harmoniehammerfluegel built by Johann
Jakob Ko"nnicke in Vienna and finished in July 1796.
It has 6 rows of 37 white keys and a range of F1-g'''. The keys of the
C columns have a large dot on it and the keys of the F and G columns
three small dots. The layout of the five upper rows is as follows:

Fx Gx Ax Bx Cx Dx Ex Fx Gx Ax ...
F# G# A# B# C# D# E# F# G# A# ...
F G A B C D E F G A ...
Fb Gb Ab Bb Cb Db Eb Fb Gb Ab ...
Fbb Gbb Abb Bbb Cbb Dbb Ebb Fbb Gbb Abb ...

The keys of the bottom row are coupled to other keys. This layout
enables an easy shift by a chromatic semitone of 77.4 cents by
changing a row.
Beethoven and Haydn have played on this piano, which was tuned in
31 tET. K"onnicke built it with instructions of the Domkapellmeister
of Linz, Johann Georg Roser who had ordered a similar instrument in
Brussels ten years earlier for Mozart. Roser had several meetings
in Linz with Mozart, who allegedly composed two little pieces for the
instrument (according to the manuscript of Roser's biography), and
which were regrettably lost. [snip]

Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl

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