Hello all,  do you know Mackenbach?  I am sure that most of you
don't know the name of this village since I didn't as well until
September 5th.

Mackenbach lies near the popular city of Kaiserslautern ("K-Town").
The village has 2000 inhabitants, and its greatest attraction is
the West Palatine Musicians' Museum or Westpfälzer Musikantenmuseum;
visit http://www.musikantenmuseum.de/ 

The museum documents the history of orchestra musicians who travelled
around the world 200 years ago to collect musical instruments, which
are shown there.  One of them, which later came to the museum, is
a 15.5" Polyphon upright machine which originally was coin-operated
but is now programmed to run until the end of the spring.  It's
exciting -- who else has such antique music boxes and shows them to
the public!

It was no accident to chose September 5th for my trip, because it
was exactly the 10th anniversary of the opening of our great music
box exhibition, "Musikalische Romanzen (Musical Romances)" in
Waldkirch.

That's why I played "Il balen del suo sorriso" from Verdi's "Il
Trovatore" at the beginning, 'cause it was also the "opener" of the
exhibition, played on Raphael Lüthi's 12" Mira music box, but in
this video played on an old piano, which is not exactly tuned.

After that, you can hear the Polyphon with disc #1579, "The Postillons
Song", by Adam.  As you can notice, the instrument is in relatively
good condition, although the highest tones are not exactly tuned and
sound too high ; also you can hear minimal damper noises.  Here's the
link to the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdAqfj1UB3w 
With this video, nice collector's regards go to Walter Behrendt,
who is living in South Palatinate.

I made another one, where I play a folk song of the area on the
old piano, the "Mackenbach Song".  In the video I bring the German
sub-text, and while playing I sang the refrain, although it might
not be very understandable because of the mask!  Anyway, the link
to this one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEK2H1xl15g 
Enjoy the new video series.

Best collector's regards from Marburg, Germany,

Jochen Schäfer, a.k.a. Jochen Kopf