Category:Odessa barrel organs
References
edit- Oleg Gubar (Odessa) (2002-11-03). "Barrel Organs from Odessa (Russia)". The Music Box - An International journal of Mechanical Music 21 (1 (Spring 2003)): 8. The Journal of the Musical Box Siciety of Great Britain. ISSN 00274275." There's truth in the joke that jazz was born in Odessa. In any case, the culture of street music is deeply rooted here. By the middle of the twentieth century every self-respecting tavern had its own band (violin, clarinet, flute, horn, bass fiddle, and drum) or a "musical machine," that is, a mechanical organ. They were made in the city, at piano factories, which were owned primarily by people of German descent-Haas, Stapelberg, Raush, Opperman, Vitsman, Gershgeimer, Hek, and others.
Odessa pianos and "musical machines" were distributed throughout Russia. One popular instrument was the sharmanka. The name comes from the first line of a very popular song, "Charmante Katharine." The Ukrainian name for the instrument, Katerinka, comes from the song, too. The sharmanka was a portable organ without keyboard, used by wandering musicians. The Odessa factories gradually learned to put several dozen popular melodies into the music box: folk songs, waltzes, and opera hits. The organ grinders usually set up near bars or "houses of ill repute" and were subjected to moralizing lectures for exploiting pretty girls of eight to ten, making them dance, tumble, and do various tricks with hoops to amuse the drunken audiences. Activists from the Society for the Protection of Animals persecuted the organ grinders for dragging around the monkeys and other exotic animals with them.
By the 1860s the sharmankas and "musical machines" of Morits Raush were available in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, and Warsaw and were especially popular in Tiflis, and in the 1880s another Odessite had become a major figure in that market-Kondrad Hek. And even in the early twentieth century, when wind organs were being replaced by more modern methods of mechanical reproduction of musical instruments (foremost by the gramophone), the Odessa sharmankas continued to sell well both in the empire and abroad. They were manufactured at the factory of Ivan Viktorovich Nechada, located on Balkovskaya Street, 191 , where it borders on Vinogradnaya (today, Isaac Babel Street). Nechada's high-quality and beautifully ornamented sharmankas were used by street musicians for many decades, right up until the 1960s. / Oleg Gubar / Odessa, November 03, 2002 "
Media in category "Odessa barrel organs"
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Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix (51998660135).jpg 4,571 × 5,666; 17.66 MB
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