De Dulciaan Speelt

I have been collecting nickelodeon and band organ recordings since the sixties, and a few years ago I thought I would go through the LP's liner notes to see if any of the recordings were now available in CD format, and maybe pick up some new recordings along the way. The bad news was that many of the companies were no longer in business and the envelopes were returned to sender, unopened. The good news was that the Gay 90's Village (2107 E. Malone, Sikeston, MO 63801), sent a catalog of cassettes and a list of LP's still available, Clark's Trading Post (clarkstradingpost.com), had some new recordings as did Marion Roehl. I also found that Klavier Records (klavier-records.com), had some player piano and carrousel recordings.

Then in January '98 I got online and continued my search through the Internet. Miner was now selling Marion Roehl recordings: http://www.mrrecordings.com/. Terry Hathaway had some of his orchestrion recordings http://www.hathaworld.com/ on CD and Bill Black had a catalog of custom CD's and cassettes of band organs and other instruments, downloadable from his website: http://www.carousels.com/cmusic.htm, or he would mail an illustrated catalog to you. Another very nice catalog is put out by Nancy Fratti, e-mail: musicbox@sover.net.geentroep (remove .geentroep to use) specializing in music boxes, but has many band organs, fair organs, dance organs, museum recordings and books about mechanical music makers.

When I placed an order to Nancy Fratti I received a disk by mistake, due to the fact that two disks had the same stock number. When I informed her of this she graciously said that I could keep the wrong disk while she sent out the correct disk. The "wrong" disk happened to be De Dulciaan Speelt Klassieck - DR EP 9701, a terrific Dutch band organ recording. I never would have ordered this disk because the cover pictured an instrument that looked like it could have been played by Mozart himself, it was certainly not a band organ. See Figure 1:

I decided to use the Internet again to see if I could track down this instrument. Using the names on the inside I found the website of E. Pluer (bandorgan.com), the manufacturer of the band organ. On the site were many colorful pictures of organs E. Pluer had constructed over the years, but as luck would have it the picture of De Dulciaan was a murky black and white photo. Figure 2:

I sent him an e-mail and explained the situation and asked if he had a color photo he could send me. A few days later I downloaded a lengthy e-mail from E. Pluer containing a beautiful color photo of De Dulciaan! Figure 3:

A few minutes work with a graphics program produced the finished product shown in figure 4. My recording of De Dulciaan now had a cover which did justice to the music.