HIT IT JOE!

Joe is playing a sort of modified orchestrion, which is an organ played with paper rolls like a player piano. This rendition has something of the 1812 Overture about it. For some reason the instrument is called an American fotoplayer, an odd name for something acoustic rather than visual. In this case, his highly physical enhancement of the piece is downright maniacal. These keyboard instruments were popular in the parlour in the early 20th century. They provide such a workout that it's a wonder Joe isn't more slender.

I have a fascination with mechanical musical instruments - I could go on and on, but I have to be somewhere - their hokey artificiality, out-of-tune-ness, and outlandish methods of propulsion, such as the steam-driven calliope popular with travelling circuses and Mississippi steamboats. Like bagpipes, which also utilize hot air, they're outdoor instruments, too deafening to be played in the parlour. These were instruments on the move, in circus wagons or on steamboats (or marching bands in kilts). 

It was technology of a sort, though analogue/manual. Obsolescence interests me, for reasons which kind of frighten me, sometimes. Like so many of my generation, I am slouching not-so-slowly in the same direction.

Joe has an entire YouTube channel of fotoplayer performances (link below). They are extremely intense, even noisy, so listen to them at your own risk.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEWQTsDz39znxWbohaQPoKw

Incendiary instruments

Welcome to my nightmare. One of my continuing feverish obsessions is with, what, old stuff? Old stuff connected to music, to musical instruments. . . to mechanical instruments, which fascinate me most of all. These were built to amuse the very rich in the days long before any sort of recording existed, and far exceeded the music box in out-of-tune-ness and general detestibility. But it is this that makes me love them so.

I would have included automatons, but I couldn't find any, which appalled me because I know hundreds of such videos exist. I can't find anything at all under "automatons" any more because it's now the name of some game or TV series or something, but I'm fascinated with them too because they combine music with jerky, macabre movements. Something weird going on here, too, because all of these instruments seem to be on fire, or about to put out a fire (the rackett at the top looks quite a bit like a medieval fire extinguisher) - the open-air calliope, designed for an old-fashioned riverboat, looks more like a giant out-of-control gas barbecue, and the bottom one, well. I guess we could call it steampunk. The awful camera work is for effect, I assume. These instruments were designed for old-fashioned circus wagons and were definitely made to be heard outdoors, at as great a distance as possible.

I shouldn't do it, I tell myself - stay up so late, get so engrossed - and find so many odd things, it's quite unbelievable.

We never liked musicians anyway

Here it is, the musicianless musical instrument: an auto-eroticon, if you will, self-stroking or pounding. These all seem to have clever, if fusty-sounding names like maestoso and orchestrion and hark back to a time when people wanted to hear something musical without bothering to hire one of those sloppy, usually inebriated boors who knew how to play.

And so, an art form was born, melding the technology of automata (first built in the medieval era, with a very few, very freaky surviving examples) with things like organ pipes and drums. The mechanics of these things, sometimes visible like sewing machine workings, are truly incredible. Somebody must have worked it out. Restoring them was a process in itself, kind of like working on a '61 T-bird on the weekends.Where they would get the parts, I don't know.

The videos I've posted today are things I found years ago, then lost (couldn't find the name of the place anywhere, then when I randomly hit on it, 71 videos jumped out at me). They're taken at a place called the Siegfried Mechanical Musical Cabinet Museum in Rudesheim, which is in either Germany or Switzerland depending on your bias. The contraptions have a mildly Bavarian flavor to them, most of them, and some of their heartily Germanic ha-ha-ha anthems are so hearty they are personally disturbing.

I can see these things loaded on circus wagons or in the village square to celebrate an execution or something (because people really did - my parents told me once that it was considered festive in their day to go see a hanging). They were a way to bring people together to hear some truly hideous music, without having to pay anybody to play it. Does it get any better than that?