Playing: Music on Cats' Tails.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 293, 25 August 1888, Page 4

Playing: Music on Cats' Tails.

Jr.vx CniSTOVAii, a Spaniard, gives an account of a procession which took place at Brussels in 1549, at the fdtes in honour of Philip 11. 'The 'body of music ' ' (orchestra), he says, * was upon a lai-ge car ; in the middle sat a great bear playing on a kind of organ, not composed of pipes, as usual, but of twenty cats, separately confined in narrow cases, in which they could not stir; their tails protruded from the top, and were tied to cords attached to the keyboard of the organ. According as the bearer pressed upon the keys, the cords were raised, and the tails of the cats were pulled to make them mew in bass or treble tones, as required by the nature of the airs.' Live monkeys, and other animals made by curious mechanism with movable joints, such as wolves, deer, &c, danced to this music. 'Although,' says the chronicler, ' Philip 11. was the most serious and the gravest of men, he could not refrain from laughter at the oddity of this spectacle.' Turning from the cruel king, Philip 11., to men of science, we find that Pere Kircher amused himself during his whole life with musical oddities. The cat organ which he describes differs, however, from the mechansim invented by the Flemish people in honour of Philip 11. Instead of cords which pulled the cats' tails, Kircher speaks of spikes fixed at the end of the keys, which prodded the poor animals, and made them mew piteously. Another learned individual of the seventeenth century, deriving his inspiration from the labours of Pere Kircher, undertook to popularise the invention of the cat organ. Gaspard Schtot adds a drawing of the machine in which the cats are shut up to * the chapter of ' Magia Universalis,' entitled ' Felium Musicamexhibere.' This machine is a long box, with an aperture through which the heads of the cats protrude. The wretched animals tortured by imprisonment and the pain inflicted on their tails (their most sensitive part), were infinitely amusing to pitiless spectators of this atrocity.

XL was a large, pleasant room, opening into a kind of balcony that ran the entire length of the house, and commanded a fine view of the surrounding country.