(Fr. orgue à manivelle, orgue de Barbarie; Ger. Drehorgel, Leierkasten, Walzenorgel; It. organetto a manovella, organo tedesco).
A mechanical instrument in which the musical programme is represented by projections on the surface of a slowly rotating barrel or cylinder.
In its common form, the barrel organ comprises a small pipe-organ offering 14 notes or more in a non-chromatic scale and represented on between one and four stops or registers controlled by drawstops. To save pipes and space as well as expense, tunes were frequently pinned in only two or three keys, G and D being usual. The music is provided by a pinned wooden barrel arranged horizontally within the organ case and rotated by a worm gear on a cross-shaft extending outside the case and terminating in a crankhandle. This cross-shaft also carries one or (more usually) two offset bearings like a crankshaft and to these are attached reciprocators which pass to the lower part of the organ where a simple air bellows and reservoir is provided. Turning the crankhandle thus fulfils two purposes: it pumps wind into the organ chest and it turns the barrel. As the barrel is rotated, its circumference passes beneath a simple frame containing pivoted metal levers or ‘keys’. These keys engage with the barrel pins and are lifted by them. The lifting motion causes the rear end of the key to be depressed, pushing down a slender wooden sticker which enters the wind-chest and controls the pallet to allow wind from the bellows reservoir to enter a particular pipe and produce a sound. In all respects, other than the replacement of a manual keyboard by the mechanical keyframe and the barrel, the barrel organ mechanism is merely a simplification of the conventional pipe organ. Besides pipework, some instruments also included percussion in the form of a drum with two beaters, and a triangle. Rarely, an abbreviated octave of bells would also be added. The mechanism is one of simplicity and extreme effectiveness. That some instruments are still in playing order after 150 or 200 years, with little or no repair work or restoration, is evidence of the practical design and durability of the basic organ component assemblies. The mechanism of the barrel organ is illustrated in fig.1; for the cylinder mechanism itself, see Mechanical instrument, fig.1.
There can be few musical instruments whose nature and construction have given rise to so much confusion in terminology as the barrel organ. The term barrel organ has often been used indiscriminately to describe what is in fact a Barrel piano or the small street organ whose music programme is represented on perforated card or paper (see Organette and Player organ). While it is certainly true that small barrel organs were very popular on the streets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (makers such as Bruder in Germany, White & Langshaw in London and Gavioli in Paris made some extremely fine portable street organs), they were in general replaced by the barrel piano in the mid-19th century.
Although descriptions of automatic and hand-operated water organs go back to the 3rd century bc (see Hydraulis; Organ, §IV, 1; and Water organ), the first description of an automatic organ using a pinned cylinder appears in the 9th-century Arabic text by the Banū Mūsā of Baghdad, which discusses in detail an improvement to the hydraulic flutes originally described by Archimedes (d c212 bce) and Apollonius of Perga (3rd century bce). These early sources are discussed by Farmer (1931); see also Mechanical instrument, §2.
The oldest surviving barrel organ in playing condition is that built into the wall of the fortress of Hohensalzburg, built by an unknown maker in 1502, restored many times and still played daily. It is currently being restored again to play its original musical programme. The barrel organ had been perfected by 1597 when the Levant Company, with the approval of Queen Elizabeth I, ordered an elaborate mechanical organ to be sent as a gift to Sultan Mehmed III of Turkey, and Thomas Dallam was entrusted with making and assembling it as well as delivering and erecting it (1599–1600) in the sultan’s palace. Dallam’s remarkable diary, reproduced by Mayes, gives full details of the organ.
In 1615 Salomon de Caus described and illustrated an instrument in which the barrel was divided into musical bars and each bar into eight beats for the quavers. The whole drum was pierced with holes at the intersecting points so that the pins could be moved and reset to produce another tune. De Caus did not claim to have invented the instrument, only the adaptation of hydraulic power to rotate the drum. He admitted that he had derived inspiration from the writings of Vitruvius (1st century ce) and Hero of Alexandria (1st century ce). The organ was bellows-blown.
Robert Fludd (Ultriusque cosmi, 1617–24) depicted very inaccurately a barrel organ activated by hydraulic air compression. Similar drawings and descriptions were given at this period by others including Kircher (1650) and Caspar Schott (1664). In his Gabinetto armonico (1722) Filippo Bonanni depicted an ‘organo portile’: a small barrel organ shown resting on the player’s left hip, supported by a sling over the right shoulder; the player turns the handle with his right hand.
In 1752 Leonhard Euler (1707–83) and a Berlin mechanic, Hohlfeld, produced a device, called the Melograph, for recording keyboard performances so that they could be converted into pinned barrels. Similar experiments were made by several other makers (e.g. John Joseph Merlin), but without much success until the invention of the Reproducing piano at the beginning of the 10th century.
Details of the construction of the barrel organ in the 18th century were given by Marie Dominique Joseph Engramelle and by François Bédos de Celles. The former's account is of special importance as it describes the method of arranging the music while the latter giving great detail regarding pinning the barrels to give a particular tune.
Instruments were made for both secular and church use and frequently used the same style case; these are referred to as ‘church and chamber’ barrel organs. Normally each barrel might contain eight or ten tunes, so with four barrels the repertory could be quite large. Secular instruments were often provided with barrels of jigs and reels for dancing and popular airs from the operas and national songs, while for Sundays there would be a barrel of hymn tunes. Such instruments might be 70 cm wide and 180 cm high. The smallest chamber barrel organ was the serinette or bird organ (see Bird instruments, §1), typically measuring some 34 cm wide by 20 cm deep and standing 18 cm high.
While English and French instruments of this type are invariably hand-turned and fully automatic, clockwork-driven instruments were also made, especially in Austria, powered with descending weights. The heavy weight, sometimes in excess of 60 kg, would be wound up to the top of the case using an internal hand-winch. When set to play, the thrust of the descending weight would be regulated by the clockwork mechanism which also turned the barrel and pumped the bellows. Clockwork barrel organs of a very high quality, both weight-and spring-driven, were also made in southern Germany, Black Forest and Bohemian makers being among the best in the world. Some of these very large instruments were fully chromatic. From them the barrel organ developed in three directions: the miniature barrel organ as used in the Musical clock, the large automatic Orchestrion, and the Fairground organ.
The barrel organ has enjoyed a particularly rich history in England. It has been said that the barrel organ was first introduced into an English church about 1700, that one was installed in that year in the church of King Charles the Martyr, Peak Forest, Derbyshire, and that the instrument was still there in 1870. It has also been asserted that early in the 18th century a certain Wright of London built a barrel organ for All Saints, Fulham. Unfortunately, none of these stories can be corroborated. Instruments were certainly in use around the middle of the 18th century as replacements for church bands or, where churches had ordinary organs for incompetent organists. The peak period of the church barrel organ may be regarded as c1760–1840; during that time hundreds were made by over 130 makers, principally in London. Among the earliest makers were John Tax of St Martin’s Lane (known to have been active in 1753) and E. Rostrand of Orange Court, Leicester Fields, who made ‘all sorts of Chamber-Organs to play with fingers or barrels’. A small chamber barrel organ of his has four stops and two barrels of eight tunes. It is dated 1764 and is still in working order. During the height of the barrel organ’s popularity, virtually every organ builder also made mechanical instruments. Such was the skill of these makers and their barrel-pinners that Burney, commenting on the general use of barrel organs, added that, ‘the recent improvements of some English Artists have rendered the barrel capable of an effect equal to the fingers of the first-rate performers’.
Chamber barrel organs were often enclosed in very handsome cases which reflect the high standard of cabinet making of the period. Church barrel organs, too, were set in elegant cases but varied greatly in size. Some were placed in a gallery or loft as at Brightling, East Sussex; Hampton Gay, Oxfordshire; Woodrising, Norfolk; Raithby, Lincolnshire; Avington, Hampshire; Sutton, Bedfordshire; and Muchelney, Somerset. Others, usually of small dimensions, stood on the floor of the church. The music played is itself of great interest because an analysis of both the church and secular repertory reveals the popularity of certain tunes. The titles of some 1300 such tunes have been listed by Langwill and Boston.
In the early 19th century several important developments took place. The first was the design of a ‘revolver’ system to make barrel-changing simpler. Three or more barrels were mounted between circular hoops in a pivoted frame, and the whole mechanism could be unlocked and rotated in a matter of seconds to bring a fresh barrel into play. A large barrel organ with a revolver mechanism for four barrels was built for Northallerton Church by Bishop in 1819. Forster & Andrews of Hull advertised a barrel organ with ‘three barrels in a frame’ in 1845, and in the following year offered to install improved instruments with three, four or five barrels.
The larger instruments for use in church were also provided with separate mechanisms for blowing and for turning the barrel. The bellows were operated either by a blowing lever or by a foot pedal so the player could continue to blow while holding the barrel on a particular note or chord. This improvement allowed ‘pointing’ for psalm-singing.
For those churches already equipped with an ordinary organ, yet desirous of the benefits of the mechanical player, the ‘dumb organist’ was introduced in about 1800 to enable a barrel mechanism to be applied to a normal manual organ. It consisted of an oblong box which was fitted on top of the organ keyboard and which contained virtually all of the programme parts of a normal barrel organ save the pipes and bellows. The keyframe stickers projected from the bottom of the box and rested on the keyboard keys so that as the operator turned the crank handle, the stickers moved up and down to play the organ. A number of dumb organists survive.
By the end of the 18th century, barrel mechanisms attached to or built into organs were so common that contemporary records reveal quite specific terminology. Instruments are described variously as ‘finger organs’ (i.e. played with the fingers) or as ‘barrel-and-finger organs’. In the latter the barrel-playing mechanism was built into ordinary organs; this offered the best of both worlds for both home and church. A number of these survive despite the ruthless age when so many such mechanisms were considered redundant and scrapped. The largest barrel-and-finger organ in the world was the Apollonicon which could reproduce orchestral music: each work in its repertory was represented on a set of three very large wooden barrels.
As the 19th century entered its second half, the barrel organ began losing ground. An indication of the end of the barrel organ period may be gained from the last advertisement of Bates and Son who, in 1864, were selling off secular organs from £2 2s and church organs at £10.
See alsoReed organ
S. de Caus: Les raisons des forces mouvantes (Frankfurt, 1615, 2/1624)
A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650/R)
G. Schott: Technica curiosa (Nuremberg, 1664, 2/1687)
F. Bonanni: Gabinetto armonico (Rome, 1722/R, rev. and enlarged 2/1776/R by G. Ceruti with plates by A. van Westerhout; Eng. trans., 1969)
V. Trichter: Curiöses … Tantz … Exercitien-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1742)
F. Bédos de Celles: L’art du facteur d’orgues, iv (Paris, 1766–78/R; Eng. trans., 1977); ed. C. Mahrenholz (Kassel, 1934–6, 2/1963–6)
J. Adlung: Musica mechanica organoedi, ed. J.L. Albrecht (Berlin, 1768/R); ed. C. Mahrenholtz (Kassel, 1931)
M.D.J. Engramelle: La tonotechnie, ou L’art de noter les cylindres … dans les instruments de concerts méchaniques (Paris, 1775/R)
H. Mendel: Musikalisches/Conversations-Lexikon (Berlin, 1878, 3/1890–91/R)
H.G. Farmer: The Organ of the Ancients from Eastern Sources, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic (London, 1931)
A. Protz: Mechanische Musikinstrumente (Kassel, 1939)
H.G. Farmer: The Sources of Arabian Music (Bearsden, 1940, 2/1965)
S. Mayes: An Organ for the Sultan (London, 1956)
A. Buchner: Hudebni automaty (Prague, 1959; Eng. trans., 1959)
R. Quoika: Altösterreichische Hornwerke (Berlin, 1959)
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K. Bormann: Orgel- und Spieluhrenbau (Zürich, 1968)
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H. Zeraschi: Das Buch der Drehorgel (Zürich, 1971)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Clockwork Music: an Illustrated Musical History of Mechanical Musical Instruments (London, 1973)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: The Mechanics of Mechanical Music: the Arrangement of Music for Automatic Instruments (London, 1973)
H. Zeraschi: Drehorgel in der Kirche (Zürich, 1973)
L. Elvin: Forster & Andrews, their Barrel, Chamber and Small Church Organs (Lincoln, 1976)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Barrel Organ: the Story of the Mechanical Organ and its Repair (London, 1978)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Joseph Haydn and the Mechanical Organ (Cardiff, 1982)
W. Malloch: ‘The Earl of Bute’s Machine Organ: a Touchstone of Taste’, EMc, xi (1983), 172–83
H. Rambach and O. Wernet: Waldkircher orgelbauer (Waldkirch, 1984)
H. Jüttemann: Schwarzwälder Flötenuhren (Waldkirch, 1991)
LYNDESAY G. LANGWILL/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME