The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Rifles can be used to produce music. Colonel Gaston Bordeverry, a French marksman, devised a crowd-pleasing way to combine melody with the traditionally percussive nature of the machine.
Details, including photographs, appeared in The Strand in 1904, in an article called "Playing the Piano with a Rifle" (vol. 28, December, 1904, pp. 580--81). (The article was quickly reprinted, with minor changes in the text, in The Musical Age, vol. 48, no. 8, December 24, 1904, p. 243).
The Strand says that the colonel, while highly skilled at firearms, had no formal and little informal musical training. It took him months to learn how to play only one song: the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's 1890 opera "Cavalleria Rusticana."
The colonel created the piano with help from Parisian pianoforte maker Lucien Burgasser. Reportedly he had first approached British manufacturers. But, The Strand reported, "English makers passed the chance of inventing the instrument. It was too much trouble, and they did not believe in its feasibility."
The Strand describes in some detail the mechanics of the performance:
What readers will first notice from this photograph is that the piano appears to all intents and purposes just an ordinary instrument---it is a cottage upright grand--- save that it bears a most curious pattern of circles and notes. The circles are bull's- eyes---at least, some of them are---not larger in circumference than a shilling.
When mention of playing a piano with a rifle is made one naturally thinks that it is done in the ordinary way---by firing at the keys.