Luke Daniels Heads to Exeter

How one folk musician and composer’s passion for the first music machine has seen him embrace the very latest 21st century music technology.

1. Painstakingly restore a 19th century 4ft high music box and reverse engineer the Victorian technology used to project music manuscript onto its 20” steel discs. 

2. Write the first new music for Polyphon in 132 years and develop a computer programme that turns midi notes into concentric coordinates to manufacture brand new discs.

3. Replace the machine’s coin mechanism with foot operated solenoid switches to enable stop/starting of discs mid-play. Fit an optical sensor to the governor wheel that measures disc  speed and sync this to an external computer via midi and 21st century music production software that enables sections of each disc to be looped or layered.

4. Arrange well-known folk tunes like Cumberland Reel and Canadee IO for polyphon, and melodeon/guitar and create a 6-disc 15 min new work with support from Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation.

5. Invite people to listen.

One of the world’s best melodeon players and critically acclaimed singer songwriter, Luke Daniels is touring an all-new ‘coin operated’ show, combining his outstanding musicianship as a songwriter, guitarist, pianist and melodeon virtuoso with an authentic Polyphon machine c1880. Beginning at the South Arts Centre in Reading, the tour takes place between February and March and includes dates at London’s Old St Pancras Church and Cecil Sharp House.

Polyphon is a disc-playing music box, a mechanical device first manufactured by the Polyphon Musikwerke, located in Leipzig, Germany. Invented in 1870, full-scale production started around 1897 and continued into the early 1900s.

With PRS for Music Foundation, Daniels has developed a computer programme that can create coordinates for his own music on the mechanical music machine, via it’s 19” steel discs. Daniels painstakingly restored the 19th century 4ft high music box and reverse engineered the Victorian technology to be able to arrange well-known folk tunes like Cumberland Reel and Canadee IO for polyphon.

Luke is appearing at Exeter Phoenix on Saturday 27 February. Details and tickets www.exeterphoenix.org.uk