A portable self-playing Reed organ. It enjoyed an enormous popularity between 1880 and the early 1900s. The first automatic keyboardless instrument of this type was the Cartonium made in 1861 by J.A. Testé of Nantes. A series of sprung metal fingers were held down by a strip of perforated cardboard which was drawn across these fingers by friction rollers. Where a hole appeared in the card, the relevant lever would rise, so opening a pallet to a reed and allowing air to be sucked in to an exhaust bellows worked by a hand crank. Further developments took place simultaneously in Germany and in the USA. While most German organettes worked on Testé's mechanical fingers and vacuum principle, American makers generally adopted the pneumatic ‘paper-as-a-valve’ system in which a music roll of perforated paper is drawn across a row of openings in a block or tracker bar. The pneumatic system, adopted in the later pneumatic piano player and Player piano, enabled instruments to be made very cheaply. Huge numbers of instruments were made: sales of the Leipzig-made Ariston, for example, had exceeded 300,000 by 1893 while the repertory of tunes available numbered over 4000 titles and 6 million of the cardboard tune-discs had been punched out. The tonal range of the organette was never fully chromatic and usually compromised between 14 notes and 28 notes, although Vocalion's Syreno had a 46-note compass (one version of this, the Tonsyreno, was provided with a keyboard). Other makes of organette models included Ariosa, Ariston, Cabinet Organ, Celestina, Gem Roller Organ, Herophon, Intona, Kalliston, Organina, Phoenix and Seraphine. Alternative forms of musical programme to the perforated paper roll or cardboard or metal strip included punched metal or cardboard discs, punched music in ring (annulus) form, endless card or paper bands, and small pinned wooden barrels of the barrel organ type. One instrument played ‘square discs’ by rotating the entire player mechanism beneath the perforated tune-sheet. For a discussion of larger self-playing organs (other than the Barrel organ type), see Player organ.
R.A. Moss: ‘The Organette’, Music Box, i/4 (1962–3), 22–30
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: ‘Organettes … a List of Makers and Models’, Music & Automata, no.13 (1989), 260–75
ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME