Oakeley, Sir Herbert (Stanley)

Orchestre Philharmonique des Pays de la Loire.

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

GEORGE PRATT

Orchestrion.

(2) A term, originally of German origin, widely used in the 19th and 20th centuries to denote a complex Mechanical instrument played by pinned barrels or perforated cards or paper rolls. Orchestrions are differentiated from the related street and fairground organs by the fact that they were intended only for indoor use, and for the performance of classical music and dances from the orchestral repertory. They were thus more sophisticated in their voicing, capabilities and design than their outdoor counterparts, and required lower wind pressures: otherwise they used similar technology.

An early example of the orchestrion was Maelzel’s Panharmonicon; another instrument of the orchestrion type was Winkel’s Componium. Martin Blessing (1774–1847), a maker of barrel organs in the Black Forest, is said to have been the father of the orchestrion industry in Germany. Among those trained in his workshop were Michael Welte (1807–80) of Freiburg, perhaps the most notable manufacturer of orchestrions, and the pair that went on to found their own business as Imhof & Mukle in 1850. A mechanical concert organ made by the Black Forest maker Georg Strasser in St Petersburg was bought by I.P. Tchaikovsky, father of the composer, and placed in the family home. Other makers included the Kaufmann family of Dresden, who toured England with their instruments in 1851, and such makers of barrel, street and fairground organs as Gavioli and Limonaire in Paris, Bruder and Ruth in Germany, Mortier in the Netherlands and Chiappa in London.

Orchestrions became increasingly popular in the mid-19th century as domestic entertainment for the wealthy and as a substitute for salon orchestras in hotels, restaurants and dance halls, reaching the peak of their popularity in the period between 1860 and 1880. The application of water or electrical power increased their practicality in the 1880s and 90s, and Emil Welte’s invention of pneumatic action in 1887 made possible greater mechanical complexity and a wider variety of effects. In addition to various types of imitative organ pipes and percussion devices, some large models also contained piano actions or chimes. Some instruments reversed this arrangement: known as piano orchestrions, they were self-playing pianos with organ pipes and other devices added. Early orchestrions were operated by pinned barrels (see ..\Frames/F000465.htmlBarrel organ, esp. fig.1), but by the end of the 19th century virtually all makers were using punched cards, which were hinged together and transferred from one folded stack to another as they passed through the playing mechanism; this resulted in easier changing, the playing of longer works and economy of space. For a fuller description of the playing mechanism, see Fairground organ.

At the height of its popularity and development, the orchestrion was capable of producing convincing performances of orchestral music, as proved by surviving examples in such collections as the Nationaal Museum van Speelklok tot Pierement in Utrecht. By the early 20th century the punched-card book was replaced by the perforated-paper roll pneumatic system that was developed for the fairground organ and the player piano. The piano orchestrion found a special niche in the cinema, where it was used to accompany silent films. Special types generally known as Photoplayers (a proprietary name that became a generic term), which combined piano, organ pipes, tubular bells and other percussion effects in a machine that could be played either with a keyboard or automatically using a music roll, were mainly an American innovation, but were also made by Hupfeld in Leipzig (see Sound effects, §1).

In the early 20th century smaller instruments gave way to less costly player pianos, which developed out of the same technology; the invention of electro-pneumatic organ action made possible full-scale self-playing residence organs which could reach considerable size. The orchestrion could not compete with these, and after the effects of World War I on the German musical instrument industry (particularly Welte) orchestrions were no longer made.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARBARA OWEN, ARTHUR W.J.G. ORD-HUME