In my visit to the Special Collections library, I examined a collection of letters between Professor Arthur Fickenscher and the Law Offices of Kimmel & Crowell, with whom Fickenscher patented his Polytone keyboard in the US. This process took about a year, lasting from early in 1940 until the patent was officially filed in February 1941. While he had already patented an earlier version of the Polytone in Germany in 1912, the outbreak of World War I prevented it from being produced. During his time as head of the music department at the University of Virginia from 1920 to 1941, he worked on improving this design. Ultimately, he had a version of the Polytone constructed, and this instrument is currently on display at the university, though it no longer functions.

While Fickenscher poured great time and effort into patenting his design, his was just one among many keyboard designs in this period experimenting with subdividing the octave beyond twelve tones. A series of letters from 1922 to Fickenscher from a woman named Marie Lippelt discuss the development a “Pure-Tone” instrument at the University of Leipzig in Germany. She cites several other professors who had commissioned these sorts of pianos and suggests that all universities should have one, calling it a “wonder-instrument, for which the world has been waiting for centuries.” She mentions that previous versions have been “impractical” but that this new one could be more widely adopted for both teaching purposes and performances. While we don’t know of Fickenscher actually purchasing one of these, it seems as though he had similar goals of making these pure intervals easier to access so any musician could play them. These letters demonstrate Fickenscher’s connections to the broader modernist movement of the early 20th century, which saw many composers seeking to break free of previous “constraints” on music. While many focused on deemphasizing traditional harmonic movements by leaning into dissonance or atonality, and others prioritized incorporating unusual rhythms and meters, Fickenscher and many others shared an interest in new tuning systems and intervals. These composers sought to develop a variety of new instruments that could implement these microtonal subdivisions, believing this would revolutionize how music was both played and understood.

Fickenscher’s primary task in patenting his Polytone keyboard was to differentiate his personal design from those of other musicians exploring similar ideas. In preparation for his patent application, Kimmel & Crowell sent Fickenscher several other keyboard patents to review, which he argued showed “no real similarity” because they could only be used practically for the standard system of 12 tones. He claims the only similar ones he knows of are his own design patented in Germany and a design by R.H.M. Bosanquet, a British music theorist who created a keyboard tuned with 53 tones to the octave in the 1870s. Bosanquet arranged long, narrow keys in a series of rows so any scale could be replicated with the same fingerings and distances between keys, and it could adapt to various tuning systems (Keisler, 1987). This layout likely inspired Fickenscher, who adopted many aspects of this model for his own keyboard but arranged the keys in staggered diagonal rows, with one row for each of the 12 named tones.

Fickenscher was extremely particular in how he wanted his keyboard described for the patent, and in a letter from March 25th, 1940, he criticizes how Kimmel & Crowell had “radically altered” his description. He delves into complex, technical descriptions of tuning ratios and identifies numerous areas for revision. He especially takes issue with the patent’s reference to “whole and half tones” instead of “whole and half steps,” calling the former term “entirely unscientific,” though he is also careful to distinguish his own idea of steps from the “artificial” concepts of whole and half steps in traditional tuning systems. He changes several other instances of wording as well, trying to ensure the patent adhered exactly to the scientific principles he was emphasizing. Over the next few months, there were several revised descriptions of the keyboard’s layout until it exactly matched Fickenscher’s intentions, demonstrating the incredible levels of precision necessary for the patenting process.

Much of Fickenscher’s commentary on the Polytone from this time period can be difficult to understand due to its highly scientific analysis and discussions of different interval types. However, he also emphasizes the importance of such an invention and believes strongly in its ability to revolutionize how music is taught and understood. He argues 20thcentury musicians should not still be using the same tempered tuning system created by Bach hundreds of years earlier, viewing this as an outdated set of constraints hindering people from accessing the full possibilities of music. While the Polytone was primarily experimental, he believed it could be very effective for practical use, given that its 60 keys in an octave could allow approximately pure intonations that would expand the range of possibilities for performers. He emphasizes that his instrument has several pedals that can control dynamics, tremolos, and other expressive effects. The keyboard layout also allowed the player to use consistent techniques regardless of what keys are being played, making it relatively intuitive to learn. In making this sort of music accessible, he hoped to expand the range of tonal possibilities for all musicians, and he believed that these sorts of projects were important for all universities to have. As the first head of UVA’s music department, this invention was also significant for the university in setting a standard of musical research and innovation that future generations of leadership have sought to emulate, particularly in the school’s research on computers and electronic music.

With the patent approved in February 1941, Fickenscher retired from his role as head of UVA’s music department a few months later and soon moved with his family to California. Since the original Polytone was too large to be very portable, Fickenscher commissioned a smaller version to be used for lecture work around this time. However, Klann Organ Supply in Waynesboro could not finish its production due to the outbreak of World War II, and the version at UVA remains the only Polytone Keyboard created with his design to this day. A letter sent to fellow composer Henry Cowell in 1950 reveals that the factory still had the part, but Fickenscher wasn’t sure he could “ever carry on with it.” At this point, his wife had recently died, and the original Polytone at UVA had been dismantled and stored away. He laments that there is no one like Cowell at the university who can continue these experiments with microtonality, as he still believes in the “wealth of knowledge” this research could offer and hopes that it can be put into more practical use. Unfortunately, Fickenscher died only a few years later and his work in microtonality never reached the mainstream in the way he might have hoped. However, his invention of the Polytone still stands as an impressive feat of musical innovation and an important effort towards making these complicated concepts more practical and accessible.

Works Cited

Keislar, Douglas. “History and Principles of Microtonal Keyboards.” Computer Music Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, Microtonality (Spring, 1987), pp. 18-28.

**Call number info**

MSS 12731 Box 1

Kimmel, George P. and Cowell, Henry

1940-1950, n.d.

Letter from Arthur Fickenscher to Henry Cowell (1950) – last letter in folder