Olden Life: What was a serinette?
The serinette is a small bird-organ, used to teach dance tunes to pet birds in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The name derives from serin, the French for canary, as these robust little birds were particularly adept at learning new sequences of pitches. Introduced to Europe in the 1500s, the canary quickly caught on at court, then as a popular parlour bird. The novelty of a bird singing well-known melodies such as The Blue Bells of Scotland or La Petite Chasse encouraged the development of an international bird trade, with songsters commanding significant sums. Hence the invention of the serinette.
Before the rise of the bird-organ, bird-keepers played airs to their pets from a collection of scores known as The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (1715-17) using a flageolet (a kind of recorder).
The serinette, which originated in Mirecourt, France, enabled families with little musical skill or knowledge of birds to train them successfully, thus providing ambient music in the home. The bird and its serinette became status symbols, demonstrating the triumph of science and culture (in particular, refinement and artifice) over the natural world and offering an antidote to the noise of urban crowds.
Serinette construction was remarkably consistent: instruments built a century apart bear a strong similarity. The serinette consists of a hand crank that pumps the bellows inside a wooden box, supplying air to a set of ten pipes, while simultaneously turning a barrel encoded with tunes by the pins embedded in it. As the bird-trainer turned the handle, the barrel's pins and staples lifted the keys, opening the valves to let air into the pipes.
A serinette usually played about eight tunes and these were listed on a paper pasted inside the lid. A larger version of the serinette was the merline (from the French for blackbird, merle). There was also the perroquette (parrot) and the turlutaine (from the French for curlew, turlu); this was probably used by bird-catchers to entice the curlew.
One of the finest serinette-makers was Monsieur Davrainville (born 1784; Christian name unrecorded). The son of a serinette-maker in Paris, he had built his first by the age of 13 and went on to create ever more ambitious bird-organs, including one that could play four overtures.
The use of the serinette declined in France following the 1789 Revolution and the abolition of the royal court. Its function as a teaching aid faded with the development of new technologies such as phonographs, recording equipment and the radio. Consequently, the serinette was played more as a music box.
Today, it's simply a curiosity, attracting the attention of the Musical Box Society and interested collectors. Mechanical-musical-instrument-maker and -restorer Rob Baker recalls working on one: ‘Compared with other types of larger barrel instruments, the construction [of the serinette] is rather basic and rough.'