Viola organista

The viola organista was a musical instrument invented by Leonardo da Vinci. It was the first bowed keyboard instrument, of which record has survived, ever to be devised.

Leonardo's original idea, as preserved in his notebooks of 1488–1489 and in the drawings in the Codex Atlanticus, was to use one or more wheels, continuously rotating, each of which pulled a looping bow, rather like a fanbelt in an automobile engine, and perpendicular to the instrument's strings. The strings would be pushed downward into the bow by the action of the keys, causing the moving bow to sound the pitch of the string. In one design, the strings were fretted with tangents, so that there were more keys than strings (several notes, for example C and C#, would all be played on one string). In another design each note had its own string.

Apparently Leonardo did not build his instrument. The first similar instrument actually to be constructed was the Geigenwerk of 1575 by Hans Haiden, a German instrument inventor.

A modern reconstruction of the viola organista by Akio Obuchi was used in a concert in Genoa, Italy in 2004.

Sources and further reading

* Carolyn W. Simons, "Sostenente piano", and Emanuel Winternitz and Laurence Libin, "Leonardo da Vinci," Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed April 2, 2005), (subscription access)
* "Sostenente piano", The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0674615255

External link

* Akio Obuchi's reconstruction as used in Genoa