A mechanical organ used to provide music for merry-go-rounds and in amusement parks, circuses and skating rinks in Europe and the USA. The instrument originated in Europe as an outdoor version of the Orchestrion, voiced to sound above the hurly-burly of the fairground. Initially it was put near the entrance in order to attract attention. It was usually built in an elaborately carved and colourfully painted case which sometimes incorporated moving figures in its façade. All but the very largest instruments were designed to be portable. With the coming of bioscope (moving picture) theatres, the organ sometimes became the front of the show-tent, its façade incorporating entry and exit doors.
The earliest fairground organs, those of the late 1870s, were of the Barrel organ type. By about 1880 such instruments were being produced in sizes containing several hundred pipes and a variety of percussion effects; these large models were powered by steam or water engines and later by electric motors. Major builders of barrel-operated organs included Gavioli of Paris, Wilhelm Bruder of Waldkirch, Limonaire of Paris, and Eugene DeKleist of North Tonawanda, New York. In 1892 Gavioli developed a new mechanism for playing organs in which a series of perforated cardboard sheets were hinged together to form a continuous strip. As this was drawn across the keyframe by rubber-covered rollers, the music was read by a row of small metal keys which extended through the perforations and caused the appropriate pipe to speak via a responsive pneumatic mechanism. Other keys operated percussion effects or could turn ranks of pipes on and off. Barrel organ manufacture declined after 1900, and the cheaper and more versatile book music system came to be used extensively by European builders such as Gasparini, Limonaire and Marenghi (all in Paris), Hooghuys (Geraadsbergen, Belgium), Mortier (Antwerp), Wrede (Hanover), Ruth, Bruder (both Waldkirch), Wellershaus (Mülheim an der Ruhr) and Frati (Berlin).
Shortly after 1900 the German organ-building business of Gebrüder Bruder adopted the perforated paper-roll playing action for their fairground organs. As with the player piano, the musical programme was arranged as a series of perforations in a roll of paper that was passed over a tracker bar (initially of wood but later of brass) containing a single row of openings along its length. When a hole in the tracker bar was uncovered by a perforation passing over it, air was sucked into the hole and thus triggered a pneumatic mechanism to sound a note or operate an organ function. This system was later taken up in America by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Manufacturing Co. of North Tonawanda, which was the manufacturing agent for many European musical instruments and eventually had its own factories. Most instruments made in the USA employing this system used vacuum (negative pressure) to read the rolls; European organs used positive pressure, but in Europe the paper-roll system was never widely adopted for organs, and Gebrüder Bruder remained the principle manufacturer of this system. As with book music, the choice of tunes available on rolls was unlimited; selections ranged from classical pieces to the popular songs of the day.
The pipework in fairground organs consisted of both flue and reed pipes voiced on 203 to 304 mm of water-gauge pressure. Pipes were usually made of wood, but in the earlier organs the reed pipes had polished brass resonators arranged symmetrically in the façade. Organs ranged in compass from 35 to 112 notes. The pipework was divided into bass, accompaniment, melody and counter-melody sections. On a small organ a typical distribution of notes in each section might be 5, 9, 14 and 13; on a large instrument it could be 21, 16, 21 and 38. Only in very large instruments were these sections chromatic. Certain notes of the scale were omitted in smaller organs in order to keep the physical size of the instrument to a minimum; this permitted them to be played only in certain keys, precluding the correct performance of many pieces; arrangers would often modify the music to fit a given organ scale.
Of similar design to the fairground organ was the European dance organ, designed to provide music with a strongly accentuated rhythm and a wide variety of percussion effects. Since these instruments were for indoor use in the dance-hall, they were voiced more softly and on lower wind pressure than the fairground organ; they used either books or rolls and, not needing to be portable, were produced in immense sizes. The Dutch street organ (known in Amsterdam as pierement), a smaller but similar type of instrument, also used book music, but was turned by hand. It had a selection of cleverly voiced pipes which gave it a particularly sweet and lyrical tone. An important maker of these was Carl Frei of Breda.
The economic conditions of the 1930s caused the failure of most fairground organ companies, though a small number of craftsmen still build instruments and restore original organs. A rich postwar revival has resulted in the building of a number of new instruments.
For illustration see Mechanical instrument, fig.8.
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DURWARD R. CENTER/ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME