The Waning Popularity of Mechanical Music

Al Good shared his experience with small organs.  These organs
remain popular as ever.  I have two that I perform on at the
Dickens Christmas Fair held near San Francisco at this time of year.

I have noticed some differences this year.   For the last five or
so years I have cut a new song or two for my 20-note organ that is
tweaked to play from the GEM 20 scale.  This gives me access to 1850s
music, some of which was based from the titles on Dickens own works.
This year I cut "Dora's Waltz" from "David Copperfield".  "Cricket
on the Hearth" is one of my favorites.

What is different this year is that I (or others when I am performing
in Dickensian character) have to explain what a player piano is to the
younger Millennials -- they simply have no exposure to the baseline of
mechanical music.  If you tell them the organ is an early iPod, then
you see the effect of understanding in their body language.

There is also a bit of crossover to the Steam Punk, Maker Movement.
In this area of aesthetic design mechanical music is alive and well.
The interest, however, is not the nostalgia for the 1920s and 1930s
music that was loved by children in the late 1940s and 1950s.  I base
this observation on my own parents and friends that are now in their
80s; most were too young to have heard the music in the 1920s.  Such
folk did hear the music in the 1950s and probably made them nostalgic
for their early years.

In my own personal experience,  I tend to favor music from the late
1950s through the 1970s.  These are my classics.  I did have early
exposure to the old stuff at Sutro's Whitney Museum.  (The museum
burned when I was 3 years old so it does not really count, other than
I was sad when it burned.  My aunt who took me said I was fascinated
with the stuff.)

I also had exposure in the 1960s at Playland.  I must have heard the
Wurlitzer 165 band organ on the merry-go-round; I remember the swells
opening and one could see the pipes.

As for the Maker movement,  these are shared spaces used for 'hacking',
which is the new word for tinkering, or these folks called themselves
Hams.  Such terms are not to be confuses with Phishers or other Cyber
Criminals.  Hackers use terms like White Hat, Black Hat, and other Hat
colors to differentiate.  Such is language in evolution.

The space I am currently part of is in a heavy industrial area near oil
refineries.  As my generation starts to retire, they have access to
toys like EDM, CNC, 3D printers, laser cutters and other Santa Clause
devices.  When the industrial companies toss one in the scrap heap, the
retires and kids get it and 'hack' it back to something useful.

The younger members can not get enough of this stuff.  I had one asking
me for clock springs, as they want to make clockwork windup toys and
"wearables."   Given a Canta Clause machine (or Star Trek replicator),
look as what the kids want to discover for themselves.

This generation _is_ learning for themselves.  They have no exposure
to Great Grandpa's music.  When they do discover it, such will be
re-molded into something else.  This is the nature of the way music
changes through history.

When the Dickens Fair started in the 1970s, one of the founders
purchased a box of sheet music in London.  This was mostly music hall
works.  We have performed these songs for the last 40 years.  Now,
with the Internet, it is discovered that these 'Popular Victorian
Songs' date from the 1880s and 1890s, and that if the composer was
alive at the same time as Dickens (1812 to 1870) the composer would
have been three years old at the time!

This does not preclude me from including such hits, as "Where Did
You Get That Hat", "Champagne Charlie" or "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me
a Bow Wow."  I also sneak in "Estudiantina" and the barrel organ
plays the "Blue Danube" waltz.

Dr. Jan Jap Haspels wanted to put Beatles music on a 16th century
barrel organ for the British Museum.  As I recall, he did make a
similar one for Utrecht.  Now the Beatles music is 50 or 60 years old!
To a millennial, this is no different than any other ageless classic.

Julie Porter