What do you imagine once you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some type of whimsical furry beast with black and white keys for enamel, perhaps? A relative of My Neighbor Totoro’s cat bus? Or perhaps you picture a piano that contains several caged cats who shriek alongside a complete scale when keys are pressed that slam sharpened nails into their tails. If that is your reply, you would possibly discover people sluggishly againing away from you at occasions, or gently suggesting you get some psychiatric assist.
However then, imagine that such a perverse oddity was in use by psychiatrists, just like the 18th-century German physician Johann Christian Reil, who—reviews David McNamee at The Guardian—“wrote that the gadget was intended to shake malestal sufferers who had misplaced the ability to focus out of a ‘fastened state’ and into ‘conscious consciousness.’”
So lengthy, meds. See you, meditation and mandala coloring books.… I joke, however apparently Dr. Reil was in earnest when he wrote in an 1803 manual for the deal withment of malestal ailingness that sufferers might “be positioned in order that they’re sitting in direct view of the cat’s expressions when the psychiatrist performs a fugue.”
A bafflingly cruel and nonsensical experiment, and we’d rejoice to know it probably never happened. However the weird concept of the cat piano, or Katzenklavier, didn’t spring from the bizarre delusions of 1 sadistic psychiatrist. It was supposedly invented by German polymath and Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who has been known as “the final Renaissance man” and who made pioneering discoveries within the fields of microbiology, geology, and comparative religion. He was a serious scholar and a person of science. Possibly the Katzenklavier was intended as a sick joke that others took severely—and for a really very long time at that. The illustration of a Katzenklavier above dates from 1667, the one under from 1883.
Kircher’s biographer John Glassie admits that, for all his undoubted brilliance, several of his “actual concepts at present appear wildly off-base; if not simply weird” in addition to “inadvertently amusing, proper, fallacious, half-right, half-baked, ridiculous….” You get the concept. He was an eccentric, not a psychopath. McNamee factors to other, likely apocryphal, stories by which cats had been supposedly used as instruments. Perhaps, cruel because it appears to us, the cat piano appeared no crueler in previous centuries than the way in which we taunt our cats at present to make them perkind for animated GIFs.
However to the cats these distinctions are implyingmuch less. From their perspective, there isn’t a other option to describe the Katzenklavier than as a sinister, terrifying torture gadget, and those that would possibly use it as monstrous villains. Personally I’d like to present cats the final phrase on the subject of the Katzenklavier—or at the very least just a few fictional animated, strolling, discussing, singing cats. Watch the quick animation on the prime, by which Nick Cave reads a poem by Eddie White about talented cat singers who mysteriously go missing, scooped up by a human for a “harpsichord of hurt, the cruelest instrument to spawn from man’s grey cerebral soup.” The story has all of the dread and intrigue of Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest work, and it’s in such a milieu of gothic horror that the Katzenklavier belongs.
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Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness