The music of eighteenth-century bell-playing clocks in the Netherlands

Short description:

This research deals with the musical repertoire of bell-playing clocks in eigteenth-century Dutch homes and, with that, the eighteenth-century musical repertoire in the Netherlands in a broader sense. In this period more and more people owned clocks, which played a melody every (half an) hour. Many musical clocks have survived; they are an important source for research into eighteenth-century musical taste in the Netherlands.
An investigation of the melodies played by the clocks will be made and this repertoire will be compared to other eigteenth-century repertoires. Moreover, questions like the following will be dealt with: Who were the owners of the clocks and did they influence the choice of repertoire? In what way were already existing melodies arranged in order to make them suitable for the clocks? Is there anything we can learn from the clocks about historical performance practice?