The heritage collection · RA.1979.1
Penfield tone cabinet, Mk I
The first Penfield instrument: a walnut cabinet with twelve registers, made by Eldon Rosen as the piece that elected him an Associate.
1979
Every maker who is proposed as an Associate submits a piece of their own to the Council. In 1979 Eldon Rosen, then thirty, submitted a walnut cabinet that played, through a slatted grille, a low and continuous tone that could be tuned by a single dial to any of twelve registers, from Repose to Resolve. Visitors who sat beside it for twenty minutes reported that they felt as the register described. He was elected unanimously.
The cabinet was tuned in the small paneled room off the Salon that the house still calls the Penfield Room, and the instrument took the room’s name. 1,104 were made, by hand, over the next fourteen years. This one is the first.
It has no contact band, no Gravity family and no memory. It is still in working order, and the President is said to sit beside it, set to Repose, on the evening of each election.
Object record
- Object type
- Acoustic instrument for the regulation of mood
- Made
- The House, Seattle, 1979
- Maker
- Eldon Rosen, as his Associate’s piece
- Materials and techniques
- Walnut, brass, felt; tuned reeds and resonators
- Dimensions
- 58 × 46 × 34 cm, on turned feet
- Accession number
- RA.1979.1
- Certificate of provenance
- No. 9 114
- Location
- The House, Seattle. Shown on any visit
- Record
- Cataloged 1988; revised 2026
Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection