The Marimba Virtuoso’s Desktop Planetarium

Musser’s unique orrery was a hulking machine, standing over 2 meters tall and meant to be used in museums and university classrooms. He constructed the prototype in 1958 in the course of the Worldwide Geophysical 12 months. In accordance with the Planetarium Projector and Science Museum, fewer than 50 models have been made, they usually offered for roughly $6,000 (about $62,000 as we speak). Musser created the extra reasonably priced desktop model proven at prime for the Seattle World’s Honest. It stood about 60 centimeters tall, in regards to the measurement of a TV. (To see the desktop orrery in motion, take a look at the 2 movies on the backside of this listing on the Agent Gallery Chicago.)

Who was Clair Omar Musser?

Earlier than he designed his desktop orrery, Clair Omar Musser created a bigger model, appropriate to be used in school school rooms and museums.

Percussive Arts Society

I first stumbled throughout Musser’s desktop orrery, referred to as the Copernican Planetarium Mannequin 500, throughout a go to to the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, on the College of Cambridge. I already knew a bit about orreries, and I figured it could be simple to search out out extra about this one and its creator. I used to be fallacious.

A fast Web search on Musser returned a whole bunch of 1000’s of outcomes, however nearly nothing about his engineering work. In truth, after weeks of researching, I nonetheless know little greater than the three unreferenced strains on the finish of his Wikipedia page. Sooner or later within the Fifties, he left a instructing place at Northwestern College, moved to Southern California, and started working for Hughes Plane and possibly NASA as nicely. In accordance with Wikipedia, he additionally obtained a doctorate in engineering from Oxford College, though I used to be unable to trace down a duplicate—and even the title—of his thesis.

None of this might have been so odd, besides that previous to becoming a member of Hughes Plane, Musser had by no means labored as an engineer. Born in 1901 in Manheim, Pa., and introduced up within the Mennonite religion, he switched to engineering in his 50s.

The a whole bunch of 1000’s of Web outcomes on Musser, it seems, all cope with the primary half of his profession, as a world-renowned marimba virtuoso and composer. I didn’t know what a marimba is, so I regarded it up: It’s a percussion instrument much like a xylophone, however with a decrease vary and a hotter, deeper timbre. After I contacted a pal on the College of South Carolina’s College of Music and mentioned I used to be doing analysis on Musser, I obtained an excited “Wow!” Apparently, performing Musser’s etudes for marimba is a ceremony of passage for percussion majors.

Not solely was Musser a tremendous performer and composer, he was additionally a designer of musical devices. He made improvements in grips, mallets, and strategies, and he held greater than 40 worldwide patents on musical devices. In 1925, he launched a brand new instrument, the marimba-celeste, which had a five-octave vary that lined each the xylophone’s and the marimba’s registers. In 1929, he organized and directed a 25-piece, all-female marimba ensemble for Paramount Footage.

For most individuals, debuting an merchandise at a world’s honest can be a once-in-a-lifetime dream, however Musser’s orrery in Seattle was decidedly second fiddle to his participation within the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933–34. There, nightly within the Corridor of Science, Musser directed a 100-piece marimba orchestra. They performed unique compositions by Musser, in addition to particular preparations of well-liked items. After the honest, he toured Europe with one other 100-piece marimba orchestra. They have been scheduled to carry out for the Silver Jubilee of King George V, for which Musser designed particular “coronation” devices for every member of the orchestra, however their efficiency was canceled. They did play on the 1935 Brussels World’s Honest and different venues, earlier than returning to the US and taking part in at Carnegie Corridor. This video captures a live performance in Paris:

What was the Celestaphone?

I don’t know why Musser left the world of music to affix Hughes Plane. In accordance with the finding aid for the Clair Omar Musser Assortment on the Percussive Arts Society, he labored there for under about 5 years. It appears, although, he had a lifelong fascination with area.

Musser started accumulating meteorites in 1936, and his pastime grew to become extensively recognized sufficient that he obtained them as presents. In 1960, as an example, the Soviet Union offered him with a bit of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite. Two years later, the Philippines’ Atomic Vitality Fee contributed a siderite, a nickel-iron meteorite.

After 4 a long time of accumulating, Musser had amassed 630 kilograms of meteorites. Then, in 1977, he took about half of his assortment to a foundry and oversaw the work of melting them right down to forge 30 bars of exact sizes and tones. These “meteoric tone bars” grew to become the idea for a rare creation: the Celestaphone.

The Celestaphone is a vibraphone with a 2.5-octave vary on a chromatic scale, from the bottom violin G to the 1,000-cycle C above treble clef. It has one sustaining pedal. It now resides on the Rhythm! Discovery Center, in Indianapolis. Right here’s an illustration of the instrument’s ethereal sound:

In accordance with the museum’s research notes on this one-of-a-kind object, it was impressed by Halley’s Comet and Musser’s mixed pursuits in music and area. Musser would have been 8 years previous—an impressionable age—when Halley’s Comet got here into naked-eye view in 1910. It was the primary time the comet had visited because the invention of images. And on 19 May 1910, Earth really handed by means of the comet’s tail. By all accounts, it was a spectacular sight.

Musser lived to see the comet’s return in 1986, though Earth’s positioning with the solar made for among the worst doable viewing circumstances. (My 12-year-old self remembers staring on the night time sky and not seeing the comet.)

It’s going too far to ascribe to a comet the facility to direct somebody’s profession, and but Musser undoubtedly adopted his personal eccentric orbit. However simply as celestial orbits are periodic, music for pitched percussion just like the marimba and the Celestaphone typically depends on periodic musical phrases. Maybe Musser’s planetarium, like his spectacular corpus of compositions for the marimba, speaks to a permanent fascination with the music of the spheres.

A part of a continuing seriestaking a look at historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.

An abridged model of this text seems within the October 2023 print challenge as “No Abnormal Orrery.”