-- forwarded message, please reply to sender and MMD --

 [ Nic wrote to me asking for information about organs by Nechada
 [ of Odessa and so I told him of the article in 020621 MMDigest.
 [ Then on 3 Nov 2002 he wrote to me:
 [
 [  "Hi, Robbie, Thanks for the prompt reply.  I am currently in Moscow
 [  and I just bought such a barrel organ from an antique shop.  They
 [  were widely in use in Tbilissi (Georgia) where even the name of
 [  the player was engraved on the front, etc.  I am in the process
 [  of editing a book on old Odessa (due out next year at Washington
 [  University Press, Seattle) and that will be a joyful additional
 [  illustration.
 [
 [  "Cheers, Nic"
 [
 [ I'll add the article and the new photo from Nic at
 [ http://mmd.foxtail.com/Pictures/nechada.html   See also
 [ http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/200206/2002.06.21.06.html
 [ -- Robbie

Hi, Robbie,  This text and illustration will be published in "Odessa
Memories", University of Washington Press, 2003.  I thought it might
be of interest to your MMD readers.

With best regards,

Nic Iljine
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Frankfurt am Main, Germany

 - - -

Barrel Organs from Odessa (Russia)

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