Rose, the novelist -- I read your situation on the MMD list and wanted
to suggest that since player pianos did not exist until 1906 you might
want something more grandiose than a music box.  There were great
machines called barrel Pianorchestras, barrel pianos, barrel organs,
and the most grandiose of all being the barrel-operated Welte orches-
trion which was used often for beer gardens, dance halls, and large
elegant gathering places.

Barrel pianos can be as small as a suitcase all the way up to 8.5 feet
tall and as wide as an upright piano.  The Welte was even larger (about
12' by 6' to 8' and 4' deep).  You may see such instruments which go
back all the way to the 1700's in the Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical
Instruments by Q. David Bowers.

The early barrel pianos were toys of kings.  They were basically
a large music box using a barrel sometimes 5 feet long and 18" in
diameter with pins to play a primitive piano.  The barrels often take
two men to change.   Some of the instruments store a spare barrel in
the lower part of the case

They do not sound like a modern piano at all as the action is much
more primitive than a regular piano.  The Pianorchestra has the piano
with bass drum, snare drum, cymbal and a solo voice, either bells or
loud piano treble of an octave or more.  The Spanish version usually
had a repeating treble or mandolin sound.

Barrel organs were usually pipes but later were reed organs, too.
They vary greatly in size from a table top model to the one found in
a European church playing for services.

Some of the large orchestrions used two barrels which played one after
another without changing them.  Most barrel instruments played 6 to 10
tunes by shifting the barrel over one notch per tune.  This was either
done by hand or some shifted automatically with a mechanism that played
all the tunes and there was a klunk when the barrel shifted back to
tune # 1.  These instruments were either spring wound or some of them
cranked a 300# weight up the back and ran until the weight ran down
(usually about 2 tunes).

Some of these instruments were coin operated.  They are interesting
in that some of the coins they were intended to take do not even exist
today.  They often had fine artworks, usually oil paintings, on the
front panels of wood, glass or beveled mirrors with elegant woodworking
in the case.  I have not seen any with leaded art glass as the later
nickelodeons had.

The Welte Orchestrion was the only large instrument I mention here that
did not have a piano.  It was fully pipe organ based and had percus-
sions.  Beethoven wrote Wellington's Victory for the first Orchestrion
built by Maelzel who invented the metronome.  This instrument was
called the Panharmonicon.  The Welte company offered to convert any
customer's barrel operated Welte to paper roll operated for free
sometime in the 1890's so they could sell many rolls.  The barrels were
very expensive to make or re-pin to new tunes, so the rolls were very
inexpensive by comparison.

These instruments were built in almost every European country.  Welte
was German.  Most barrel instruments I have seen were built in Germany
or Belgium or Spain.

A music box is fine for your story but don't feel you are limited to
only a music box.

D. L. Bullock    Piano World    St. Louis