Let's relax a bit this week and ease up on the throttle. I’ve always enjoyed the occasional wander down the byways of music. All my life I’ve been aware that, for every big-name composer that we’ve had, there are scores who never really made it beyond obscurity, and thousands over the centuries who remain nonentities, or who have been consigned to the realm of the footnote. I remember as a youngster being introduced to the music of Telemann, through an LP my dad played a lot. Telemann is well known now. Not then, he wasn’t. But I responded well to his music. It’s all relative, of course: I hated Handel, and the bulk of Bach left me beleaguered. I preferred Telemann’s fleet chunterings to the heavy artillery of Bach (or that’s how I perceived it all as a youngster).
Anyway, back in July I set off on one of my occasional saunters into the byways. They don’t always lead somewhere. That’s ok: if you go for a proper wander in the countryside, you’ll possibly amble, not have an itinerary or a timetable or even a definite destination. And you might not have your mobile phone: the only tweets I would want are of the avian variety. On this wander, I encountered a composer I wasn’t familiar with. Something about him caught my attention, and it wasn’t his music, though that was lovely. He just seemed like an interesting and enterprising bloke. I was about to become very busy, so I tucked him away and resolved to fetch him out and check him over when I had time.
And that came last week. His name was Johan Daniel Berlin. He was a composer, and not a bad one, as far as I can judge. He didn’t write much, though some of his music might be lost in the past. He’s certainly not one of the big boys: there is absolutely no chance that when we refer to the “Three Bs” – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – they will ever become four, with Johan Daniel joining their ranks.
Berlin was a decent composer, a good craftsman and a fine organist, by all accounts. But he was much more than that. He was also a writer of books, educational and otherwise, an instrument-builder, a cartographer, a designer, the captain of a fire station, the civic official in charge of a city’s waterworks, and something of a specialist in astronomy and meteorology. Oh yes, and he was also an inventor, of devices visionary and practical, for musical and community purposes. Let’s have a wee look at this remarkable character, first placing him in space and time.
He lived from 1714 to 1787, so he was 30 years younger than Bach and Handel. He was Prussian-born, though his adopted country, where he became extremely prominent, influential, and a key member of musical and civil society, was Norway. His own family background was musical – his dad had been the town piper. At 16, Johan Daniel moved to Copenhagen to become a pupil of the city musician, an official civic post. By 23, he was in Norway, himself now appointed city musician to Trondheim, and organist at Trondheim Cathedral, one of two such posts he held.
Among his diverse duties as city musician, including all of his playing, organising concerts and so on, he immersed himself in pedagogical commitments: he wrote many specialist papers and the first-ever text book in Danish for teaching the elements of music (which is apparently influential to this day). He developed a very broad portfolio of responsibilities that seeded him deep into his community. He designed maps for the city, and was an architect advising on civic projects, including the city’s waterworks, of which he was appointed Inspector. He was also appointed the head of Trondheim’s fire service, and there invented a fire hose, which suggests he knew his physics and the principles of propulsion.
In his beloved music, he owned a huge collection of printed music, instruments and literature. He built instruments and invented adaptations including a gizmo (an app!) to allow both loud and soft contrasts of sound on his harpsichord (not possible; so how)? He invented a device to measure musical intervals and to facilitate the tuning of an instrument – another app! My boys have an electronic one for tuning their guitars: Johan Daniel was there first, centuries ago.
One of his last inventions was a threshing machine to ease the farmer’s workload. It was never built, but Johan Daniel’s pristine and precise designs survive and, enthrallingly, serve as the cover artwork on a CD recording of music by Johan Daniel and one of his sons, played by the Norwegian Baroque Orchestra on the SIMAX Classics label. Some guy, eh?
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