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.

A feast for the eyes

When I tried to find hurdy-gurdy music on YouTube, I first had to wade through innumerable versions of Donovan's lame '60s song, which doesn't even have a hurdy-gurdy in it. I vagely remembered Allen Ginsberg reciting his poetry (Howl, perhaps?) while cranking one of these.


I could not figure it out: it had a sound kind of like Highland bagpipes, but it could also sound very Middle Eastern. It had a drone in the background with a "chanter" playing a repetitive tune, perhaps due to the restriction in range. It was fingered, not blown, but wind instruments are fingered too, aren't they? I had to turn to Wiki, and they told me this:

The hurdy gurdy or hurdy-gurdy (also known as a wheel fiddle) is a stringed musical instrument that produces sound by a crank-turned rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses tangents (small wedges, usually made of wood) against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board to make the vibration of the strings audible.



Most hurdy gurdies have multiple 'drone strings,' which provide a constant pitch accompaniment to the melody, resulting in a sound similar to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy gurdy is often used interchangeably with or along with bagpipes, particularly in French and contemporary Hungarian folk music.

So I was partially right. A stringed instrument that plays bagpipe music. Unfortunately I could follow this path all day (and for months) and collect more and more odd-looking, odd-sounding videos of rare or antique/obsolete instruments. I posted this mainly because the hurdy-gurdy looks so gorgeous, and at least appears to be ancient. The musical performance is minimal.

Help me, I'm lost! I need to get on with my work, and all this stuff keeps on intruding.