If It Ain’t Baroque Don’t Fix It––

More Than A Mere Music Box

By Dottie Evans

The hour is nearly 8 on a snowbound February evening at the Brushy Hill Road home of Louis and Martha Gaylie.

Mr and Mrs Gaylie, their daughter Grace and a visitor are sitting at the dining room table alongside a magnificent German-made organ-clock called a flotenuhr.

Like a very important dinner guest, the imposing 26-inch-tall clock encased in a fine cherry wood cabinet is the center of attention. Its gold and brass precision workings gleam impressively from behind beveled glass doors.

Finally, the two gold-plated hands on the porcelain dial touch the numerals XII and VIII.

Leaning forward, the four clockwatchers peer inside to see a tiny hammer swing down and strike a bell eight times.

Now other parts of the intricately balanced machine are starting to move.

A rounded wooden cylinder or barrel bristling with hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny metal pins begins to rotate, and the pins strike an adaptor. At the same time, two bellows rise and fall, pushing air into a fan-shaped array of 17 tin organ pipes.

Suddenly the room is filled with bright, harmonious sounds –– music as it was actually composed for organ-clock by Haydn, Handel, and Beethoven more than 250 years ago.

A lively rendition of “Good Christian Men Rejoice” according to a setting by Bach is completed in just 30 seconds.

To the 20th Century ear, this perfectly tuned instrument is like a voice from the past, making sounds that are subtly different from what we would hear in a live organ concert today. For one thing, more notes are being struck at once and at a faster speed, than seems humanly possible. Yet, the full chords are perfectly tuned.

Historically, this very organ-clock could have stood in an 18th Century German castle to entertain a baron and his weekend guests or in a tavern to delight visitors, yet it was made totally by hand only six months ago in the workshop of German clockmaker Matthias Naeschke.

There are only five Naeschke-made organ-clocks in the entire United States. Each one is unique and it was only by serendipity that this one found a home with the Gaylie Family in Newtown.

 

Black Forest Beginnings

Knowing that Louis Gaylie is in charge of watch design for the Timex Corporation in Middlebury, and knowing that Martha Gaylie is a graduate of the New England Conservatory with a master’s degree in sacred music helps explain how such an instrument would find its way to Connecticut.

It also helps to know that Grace Gaylie, a student at The Wooster School, is learning to play the bagpipes and like her parents, loves music.

It was Mr Gaylie who first fell under the organ-clock’s spell.

He had traveled to Switzerland in August 2002 to attend a jewelry and clock fair connected with his Timex job. While there, he read about master organ-clock maker Matthias Naeschke in a Swiss newspaper.

“When travel plans changed and I found myself stuck in Germany for a weekend, I visited his workshop in the Black Forest region,” Mr Gaylie said.

It was nestled on a hillside in a medieval town called Haigerloch.

Mr Gaylie described the experience of walking along the cobblestone streets of Haigerloch, looking over his shoulder at a Roman tower and standing within a stone’s throw of a 1,000-year-old medieval castle.

“You could hear the music coming out the open shop windows,” he remembered.

“Absolutely enchanting.”

Upon entering, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of Herr Naeschke’s organ-clocks, the large and small table models, the standing hall clocks and the decorative wall clocks.

Herr Naeschke was equally intrigued by Mr Gaylie.

“Matthias was fascinated by the fact that I am a watchmaker and my wife is a church organist. He wanted me to see this clock, which was an orphan of sorts.”

Apparently, the client who ordered it had at the last minute decided against purchase, so it was temporarily without a home. Having put months of time and effort into its construction, he was at a loss as to what to do with it.

“He had run out of space and needed to start other orders. Every single part of the organ-clock including its wooden case, was made and cut in his shop. Except for all the plating on the metal, which the town wouldn’t let him do for environmental reasons,” Mr Gaylie said.

“Organ-clocks today are made using the same meticulous and hand-crafted techniques as were practiced by their 18th Century creators. Matthias is a real artisan and has taught himself the trade,” he said. He is frequently asked to repair and restore antique organ-clocks in museums and estates.

Herr Naeschke is also a skilled church organist who has played a 1750 instrument tuned as it was in J.S. Bach’s time, Mrs Gaylie added, “with perfect thirds and perfect fifths called wolf tones. Today, we tune only to octaves.”

She, too, is a church organist, having once played at Newtown’s Trinity Episcopal Church.

Bring Home An Heirloom

After visiting the Haigerloch workshop, Mr Gaylie was enthralled by the organ-clock and wanted to buy it right then and there, but he decided his wife should come over to Germany and see it first.

“So I flew over within a couple of weeks, and we made the decision together,” she said, “and then we picked out the music we wanted for the drum that, luckily, had not been pinned yet.”

 It has six 30-second tunes all composed by 18th Century organ masters. They are Handel’s “Flight of Angels,” three Haydn pieces, a piece by Mozart, and a J.S. Bach version of “Good Christian Men Rejoice,” which Mrs Gaylie asked Herr Naeschke to transcribe just for her.

A different tune plays each time the hour is struck, and the organ-clock needs to be wound only once every 14 days.

When the clock was shipped to Connecticut, it came in a huge wooden crate that Mrs Gaylie says takes up half her basement. It arrived around Christmas time, which gave her “a perfect excuse,” she said, to have a few people over, to introduce the new addition to family and friends.

“We had it in the family room, but had to move it to make room for the hors d’oeuvres.”

Anyone interested in knowing more about Matthias Naeschke and his organ-clocks may visit the website http://www.lefils.de and be sure the audio is turned on. The text is in German, but the beautiful music is understandable in any language.