Many thanks to Peter Wellburn for the precisions he gave me about the
White and Langshaw organ I have seen.  He owns a Serinette and asks me
to give some precisions about these instruments.

They are usually small cylinder hand cranked wooden organs with 10
metal pipes.  They appear roughly around 1730, and were supposed to
teach the canaries how to sing.  There are several prints and paintings
(the most famous ones by the French painter Chardin) which represent a
lady turning the handle of a Serinette to teach a bird in a cage to
sing.  There is usually a piece of cloth covering the cage, as these
birds sing only in the dark.

Treatises have been written in the XVIIIth century about canaries,
their habits, and singing.

Serinettes show some remarkable features : they were usually made 
in Mirecourt (East of France) by several firms, and in a way and
dimensions which almost did not change from the beginning of the
XVIIIth century to 1914.  The tunes of course change, and if the
Serinettes of the XVIIIth and beginning of the XIXth century have
beautiful ornamented melodies (so, Peter, your Serinette is probably 
a very interesting one, and I should be curious to know the tunes it
plays), the tunes of the last produced serinettes are rather simple 
and harsh.

Nevertheless, some tunes appear on a lot of Serinettes, as "La Petite
Chasse" (Hunting tune).

These instruments were considered in the XVIIIth century as the
prototype of every barrel organ, offering so the possibility to record
the "works of the great masters".

The two important books about the Serinette building are not the
Encyclopaedia of Diderot and D'Alembert (rather crude drawings) but 
the monumental work of Dom Bedos de Celles about the art of building an
organ (L'Art du Facteur d'Orgues), and a small treatise by the Pere
(Father) Engramelle about "La tonotechnie ou l'art de noter les
cylindres".  Both works appeared about 1775, and explain everything
about the building of a Serinette, and the way to note tunes on a
cylinder.

They add that one who knows how to build a serinette and how to
"program" its cylinder can then build a barrel organ of any dimension.

This fabrication appeared very important at that time, because it was
then the only way to record music.  And today, it is for us a very
important way to know exactly how and at what speed music was played at
that time, with the non-written ornaments, and indications of how fast
you should turn the handle (20 seconds for 1 revolution of the
cylinder, if I remember well).  There have been several reprints of
these, in various publications (amidst them "Mechanical Music", by
Ord-Hume).

Much, much more could be said about the Serinette, but for to-night, 
I am afraid I shall stop there.

You may see a nice Serinette made by the very good organ maker
Davrainville on my web site Musica Mecanica, (see http at my
signature), by clicking on A-Z, and then on Serinette.

Best regards from France,

Philippe

Philippe Rouille
(Paris, France)
rouille@cnam.fr
http://www.cnam.fr/museum/musica_mecanica/