2020 Essays

Spinet Playing by Itself

Hiebert, Benjamin

The cursory description on fol. 104v of an automatic, mechanical version of the spinet, a plucked-stringed keyboard instrument, is one of a handful of entries on music or mechanics in Ms. Fr. 640. The author-practitioner likely had some familiarity with plucked-stringed instruments and possessed a curiosity for “invention,” a term he used to describe the automatic spinet and one with broader meaning in the sixteenth century than it has today. An automatic spinet would have belonged within relatively elite social circles, and it shares technical features with musical automata of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A scaled-down reconstruction questions the likelihood that the author-practitioner ever undertook the entry’s instructions himself. Rather, the “Spinet” entry probably resulted from his interests and encounters, reminding readers that the manuscript should sometimes be seen as a collection of thoughts and observations as well as a practical guidebook.