Handcrafted America: Season 2
Season 2 Premieres Oct. 21st at 9:30p ET

Music Boxes

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Jonathan Herz Herz Fine Music Boxes

New England  |  Music Boxes  |  Website

Music makes the world go round just like the cylinder inside Jonathan Herz’s music boxes. Combining 19th century tradition with modern day technology, Jonathan has revived this historical form of entertainment and brought it into the modern world.


GET TO KNOW JONATHAN

What drew you to your chosen craft?

I suppose that I should start with my love of the music box itself, both as a music making machine and as a beautiful mechanism. There are very few machines that are so elaborate yet are entirely mechanical rather than electrical, and very few that are as beautiful in operation. And no machine creates such evocative music on its own rather than by replaying music made by a live artist.

Musical boxes are a unique intersection of many different specialties. They require detailed and precise engineering, good skills as a machinist, very exacting hand work as a craftsman, and a good ear for music. I cannot think of a single undertaking that better encompasses this skill set – relying in equal measure on all four of these dissimilar abilities.

What do you enjoy most about your craft?

I love being a craftsman who collaborates with composers and arrangers and listeners. When you get a comb tooth to play just right, when you get it to sing, you are listening to a note that will be heard and enjoyed for decades, if not a century or more. That vivid, personal connection with future listeners is exciting.

Likewise, when you have the cylinder playing perfectly, so that every nuance of the music is transmitted as intended by the composer, then you are working in partnership with a musical arranger who may have died 100 years ago.  That, too, is a great pleasure.

Why is it important for people to make things with their own hands?

We all feel drawn to beauty. We are drawn to creating beauty. Few things are as satisfying to the human spirit as creating enduring beauty. Of course there are many paths to satisfy this desire. Painting, dancing, music, all of these, brings beauty into the world that others can experience. But making things with your hands adds a further dimension of intimacy with the beholder.

You can listen to a recording, watch a movie, read a poem. But you can hold a handmade object. Your hands and the hands of the maker follow the same curves and features, experience the same textures. A mass produced item can be beautifully designed. Hold that object and you can see the intent of the designer, appreciate the design. But there can only be a physical connection to the creator with an object that has spent hours in the hands of the maker.

In what ways are handmade goods better than those that are mass-produced?

Many mass produced goods ARE as good as handmade. Many are better. But there will always be products that need individual care and attention to bring out the best features of the product or take advantage of unique variations in the material from which it is made. Music box combs are like that. You can measure comb teeth to any accuracy and automate the grinding of each tooth so each comb is identical. But the comb will not play to pitch or sound its best until careful listening and hand grinding brings out the musicality of every note.

What does the future hold for your type of work?

Since its invention, the music box has weathered boom and bust cycles of popularity. We cringe now at the loss of beautiful examples that were simply discarded when the “superior” technology of the gramophone was introduced. After the Second World War, a growing group of collectors started to appreciate and conserve these beautiful machines, and there was a rebirth of interest in mechanical music.

In recent decades there has been a decline in instrument making of all kinds as the ability of electronic synthesizers has improved. But there will always be value to the ability to create warm, vivid, live music, not merely reproduce it from banks of digitally stored samples of notes.

Speaking more personally, I would like to expand my work to include clockwork mechanisms and dolls such as 19th century French “automata.” There are many additions to music boxes made in the late 19th century that I would love to revive: drums and bells and castanets, all operated by pins on the cylinder. The music box has a long history and I would love to explore more of it.


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