Bar organ: interesting facts, video, history, photo, listen

Barrel organ

Many of us in childhood read with enthusiasm the work of the remarkable French writer G. Malo "Without a Family". A story that certainly could not leave anyone indifferent. In this touching narration to the heroes who are in difficult life situations, one interesting subject helped to survive, a mechanical musical instrument - a barrel organ. To play it, it was not necessary to learn and even know the notes, twist the knob - the melody sounds.

At the present time the barrel organ is already a wonder. We listen to music from digital media, which was preceded by players and tape recorders, and even earlier - gramophones and gramophones. The progenitress of all this technology was the barrel organ, in former times it was so popular that many great poets dedicated their poems to it.

Sound

The voice of the barrel organ can be described as monotonous and sad. To play the instrument, you just need to twist the handle of the instrument, which is done by the organ-grinder - the performer on the instrument.

The sound of a barrel organ is created with the help of pipes located in an acoustic case. A very important element in the tool is a roller, with studs embedded in it. The studs are placed in a specific order corresponding to the tune we want to hear. If you rearrange the studs, the music turns out to be quite different. The instrument starts to sound when you turn the bar of the barrel organ, which starts to move rather not a simple mechanism.

A photo:

Interesting Facts

• In each country, the barrel organ has its own name. In Germany - Leierkasten, in England - Barrel organ, in France - orgue de barbarie, in Spain - organillo, and Italy - organistro, in Bulgaria - lattern, in Hungary - kintorna.
• The French “king of the sun”, Louis XIV, was the first monarch to appreciate the barrel-organ and to introduce fashion to the instrument.
• Many great Russian poets, among them A. Vertinsky, A. Fet, P. Antokolsky, O. Mandelstam, I. Annensky, L. Semenov, M. Tsvetaeva, V. Bryusov, B. Okudzhava, dedicated their own organ to their poetry.

• The musical instrument the barrel organ is very often found in children's literature, for example, in the fairy tales of H.K. Andersen's "Swineherd", K. Collodi "Pinocchio", A.Tolstoy "The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio," in the works of A. Kuprin "The White Poodle". O.F. Walton "Old Christie Bar organ", G. Little "Without family".
• All over the world, the instrument is treated with great respect. In many European countries, such as Switzerland, France, Finland, Hungary, Estonia, Germany, the Czech Republic, international barbeque festivals regularly take place. The most mass festival that gathers more than one hundred performers is held annually, usually in July in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The impressive procession of the organ-makers dressed in ancient costumes passes through the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard attracts attention and arouses the keen interest not only of the residents of the capital, but also of the guests of the city.
• In Brazil, to the sounds of the barrel organ even danced tango.
• In Denmark, it is still considered if the organ-grinder is invited to the wedding, the newlyweds will be happy all their lives.
• In the capital of Austria, Vienna, the sound of the barrel organ can always be heard on St. Stephen's Square near the main city cathedral.
• In Prague, the organ-grinders can always be found near the main historical sights of the city - Charles Bridge and Old Town Square.
• In Australia, many diverse, sometimes very eccentric and eccentric parades and festivals are held annually. They, as a rule, are bright and interesting, often accompanied by the sounds of barrel organ.
• Monuments to the street organ and the street organ can be found in different cities around the world: Moscow (Russia), St. Petersburg (Russia), Kiev (Ukraine), Gomel (Belarus), Berlin (Germany), Newport (USA).
• In Russian, there is an expression "to make a barrel organ", which means annoyingly talking about the same thing.
• At the present time the street organ is very popular in the form of a child's toy, developing muscles and finger motorics of a child, as well as having a calming effect.
• Sharmanka radio amateurs called their own radio transmitting device.

Design

The construction of the barrel organ is not as simple as it may seem. It consists of a handle, which is called a collar, a fur chamber, a pin, a sound roller, pins, levers, reeds, valves and pipes.
The handle of the barrel organ makes the pin and the sonic roller move. Using a pin, the air is pumped into the fur chamber at the bottom of the tool. On the sound roller are studs, in contact with which the levers rise and fall. The levers, in turn, force canes to move, opening and closing valves that control the air flow into the pipes, reproducing sound.

Story

The barrel organ at one time was so popular that several states of Europe: France, Holland, Switzerland and Italy are still arguing and looking for evidence of what country the barrel organ was first born of. However, the history of the instrument is lost in ancient times. The use of cam devices, which serve to form sound in a barrel organ, has been known since ancient times. Even then they were used in the construction of various kinds of entertainment mechanisms. For example, in ancient Greece there were theaters that represented self-propelled figures, which were called androids and moved to the accompaniment of sounds extracted by mechanical means. A well-known Chinese philosopher Confucius, who lived in the 6th century BC, for a whole week, without interruption, listened to the sound of melodies extracted from a device called "tiger ribs" and consisting of plates that make sounds of different heights. Perhaps this musical mechanism was the ancestor of the barrel organ. And even the pneumatic organ, invented in the III century before the birth of Christ by the famous ancient Greek inventor Ktezibiy, was indirectly related to the appearance of the barrel organ.

In the Renaissance, the mechanisms for extracting sound continued to be improved, and for the joy of the nobility, mechanical musical instruments were created that reproduce melodies: barrel organs, music boxes and snuff boxes.

The first instrument, preserved and reached us, was a primitive copy created in France in the 17th century. He could play only one melody and served to train singing birds, and therefore was called the "bird organ". The street-organ very quickly adopted the vagrant actors, because it was possible to play melodies on it without even knowing a single note, it was just necessary to turn the handle of the instrument. For example, the inhabitants of Savoie, a region located in the south-east of France at the foot of the Alps, in famine times, let the children independently earn their own food. Children traveling to large cities, to the sounds of a street organ with the participation of their four-legged pet marmots, organized various street performances. Under the impression of one of these speeches, the world famous song “Marmot” appeared on the verses of the famous German poet I.V. Goethe and music L.V. Beethoven.

The tool, very popular with the people, constantly evolved. Masters from different countries constantly improved it. Italian D. Barbieri, Frenchman J. Waqson and Swiss A. Favre are the mechanics and inventors who made very significant changes to the barrel organ design. The instrument became a small mechanical organ without a keyboard - a box in which sound tubes, fur and a cushion with small protrusions - pins were placed in rows. It was possible to play not only one melody on the barrel organ as before, but six or eight or even more, since the roller could be shot independently, thereby changing the instrument's repertoire. The scope of the barrel organ has expanded considerably. For example, in the English churches it was used to sound hymns and psalms.

In Russia, the instrument appeared from Poland at the end of the 18th century and was quickly mastered by wandering musicians as well as circus artists of the tent. The melody, first heard by the Russians in the performance of the barrel organ, was the melody of a song, which in French was called "Carmant Katarina". There is a version that it was from this name in our country that the instrument received such an unusual name - a barrel organ, sometimes it was also called “catarinka”. Another variant of the origin of the instrument name is also being considered. Perhaps, initially it was called a shirmanka, from the word folding screen, since the performers on the instrument during their performances often united with the puppets, who during the performances worked behind the cover.

Thanks to the organ-grinders, the popularity of the instrument in Russia grew very quickly. Earning food, stray musicians, sometimes accompanied by orphans singing in a pitiful voice, walked from house to house. The organ-grinders in their performances also involved small monkeys who built faces, tossed and even circled, dancing, as well as large parrots to the sounds of the barrel organ. The birds pulled out of the box rolled-up papers, on which the predictions of the future were written.

The barrel organ, being very popular, was constantly modified. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, several different types of tools were created. Rollers were replaced with ribbons with holes, each of which corresponded to a specific sound. This greatly increased the possibilities of the instrument and recording not only popular songs and dances, but even excerpts from operas. Such instruments are called aristones. Even in such a way, the barrel-organs survived until the 30s of the last century, and after the appearance of more sophisticated means of playing sounds: phonographs, gramophones, electric players, tape recorders, they were completely supplanted and gone.

At the present time, the barrel organ is a wonder that can be seen more often in a museum than hearing its sound on the street. True, the inhabitants of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and some other cities in the world still remember it, because there you can still find lonely playing organ-builders. And paying tribute to the barrel organ, which has passed the test of time, various holidays and festivals are constantly held with the participation of an ancient instrument, which has been considerably improved today.