Music Sold Separately

The money went into one part of the cabinet and the music into another. Behind the lower door of the Symphonion at Cole's Book Arcade was a store of steel discs. Behind that store was the cash drawer. A penny admitted the customer to a performance; a key admitted someone else to the takings.

Charles Bassett, head of the arcade's music department, ordered the instrument from Germany around 1889. It stood more than two metres tall, a substantial piece of oak and walnut furniture with turned columns and a glass door. Inside, a great circular disc faced the room. A handle on the right wound the clockwork that turned it.

The penny released one play. It supplied permission, while the wound spring supplied the power. Nor did the coin give its owner a row of song buttons to choose from. The available tune was the one already installed behind the glass. To put on another, an operator had to open the cabinet and handle a thin steel sheet about 64 centimetres across.

Books, birds and music

Cole's was a good place for an instrument that could make people stop. Edward William Cole had arrived in Melbourne in 1852, after leaving England and spending time in South Africa. He began selling books at the city's Eastern Market in 1865. His business grew into an arcade on Bourke Street in 1883, eventually extending through to Little Collins Street.

An album compiled in 1923 records a long interior under a glass roof. Shelves rise above the shoppers, galleries run along both sides, and books crowd the counters. The business sold much besides books: stationery, pictures, toys and music. A fernery, an aviary and monkeys made browsing part of a larger outing. A band supplied live music.

Cole also allowed visitors to read without buying. His own publications carried his enthusiasm for education and his opposition to racial divisions; his Funny Picture Book mixed pictures, jokes and improving material for children. The arcade brought those ambitions into a commercial space where a visitor could linger. A mechanical instrument belonged among its attractions without having to replace the musicians.

Bassett's order gave the music department a performer housed in its own furniture. Once wound and supplied with a disc, it could repeat a tune each time someone paid. Its repertoire could grow without replacing the cabinet or the clockwork.

That separation was the attraction of the disc music box. In a cylinder instrument, the projecting pins that determined the tune were fixed to a comparatively substantial barrel. Here the musical instructions travelled on a flat, interchangeable sheet. One machine could acquire a cupboardful of music.

Instructions punched in steel

A Symphonion disc has no spiral groove for a needle to follow. Its marks occupy concentric circular tracks. Each track corresponds to a note available in the instrument; the position around the circle determines when that note is called for. Marks aligned across several tracks can summon several notes together.

Punching the steel leaves small tongues projecting from its underside. As the disc revolves, these tongues catch the points of little star-shaped wheels. The wheels turn and pluck the tuned teeth of a metal comb. The comb makes the sound: the disc tells it what to do.

This is a set of physical instructions, rather than a recording of someone singing or playing. A tune had to be arranged for the notes the comb could provide, then translated into positions on the steel. The sheet could call for a note only where a corresponding tooth existed. Repetition and accompaniment had to fit around the circle, with the end ready to meet the beginning again.

There was work for the cabinet as well. Its wooden body helped the vibrating metal communicate with the surrounding air, much as the body of a stringed instrument does. The tall case was both shop furniture and part of the musical apparatus. Its glass door made the turning score visible while keeping hands away from the working parts.

Museums Victoria's film of this very instrument makes the change of tune easy to follow. Curator David Demant opens the storage compartment, removes the disc's retaining bar and lifts the sheet clear. Turned over, it reveals the projecting tongues. Beneath its edge, the small wheels and comb complete the chain from punched metal to vibration.

A closer look · 3:06 · English

Changing the Symphonion's tune

Play film

The sheet needs careful handling. Its thinness makes it much easier to store than another complete instrument, but the little projections still have to meet the mechanism correctly. An interchangeable score is useful only when it fits the machine that must read it.

More music sold separately

The music department offered another way of turning a tune into a purchase. An album view shows counters, stools, rows of drawers and sheet music displayed upright along the walls. Printed music needed a player. The Symphonion offered music through another combination of goods: an instrument, then a succession of discs.

A Toronto wholesaler's catalogue for 1900–01 makes that division explicit. Nerlich & Co offered a small Symphonion using 5¾-inch discs for $19, without music. Discs cost 20 cents each. Further up the range, a tall cabinet model cost $186, again without music; its 18-inch discs were $1.80 apiece. The catalogue was quoting trade prices, subject to discount, for different models. These were not the cost of Bassett's order in Melbourne.

The distinction mattered to a buyer. Purchasing the instrument bought the means of playing; purchasing another disc bought another arrangement. The same catalogue offered a much larger money-drop model, activated by a five-cent coin, with its own larger discs. Size and format belonged to the purchase as surely as the cabinet's appearance did.

In Melbourne, the trade continued beyond Cole's initial order. On 18 May 1901, A. Beckett advertised Symphonion music boxes in The Age, promising hundreds of tunes through interchangeable steel discs. The advertisement offered instruments across a range of prices and discs from sixpence, then invited readers to come and hear them. Its cheapest discs were not thereby interchangeable with the great sheet in Cole's cabinet. They belonged to a market with several sizes of instrument.

A second repertoire

Cole died in 1918. The arcade closed in 1929, and the museum bought the Symphonion in 1930 with ten discs. The instrument continued to change. In the late 1960s it was adapted for decimal coins and fitted with a 240-volt electric motor. It has since been restored to clockwork operation.

The music also changed through collecting. In 1982 the museum bought eight more discs to supplement the ten that had arrived with the cabinet. The Hansel and Gretel sheet illustrated here was one of those additions. Its presence in the instrument explains how the mechanism works; it cannot establish what Bassett's customers heard around 1889.

The lower compartment still provides the practical answer to a request for something different. Open it, choose another steel score, lift it into place and secure the retaining bar. The cabinet stays. The next tune goes behind the glass.