The Wild West of Yester-Year
Orchestrions
By Rachel Kovaciny
If you’ve ever seen the movie The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975),
you’ll probably remember a sequence where three children
roll down a mountain in a mining cart. The runaway cart
eventually crashes into a contraption that appears to be a
mechanical band. I grew up watching The Apple Dumpling Gang,
and now I watch it with my kids. Every time, I wondered,
“What in the world is that musical thingamajig?” Did such
things exist or did Disney make it up to add a touch of
humor and whimsy to the movie?
My mom said a mechanical band like that was called a
calliope. I saw something similar at a museum once labeled a
melodeon. Someone called it a harmonium on the internet. But
when I researched those terms, none of them fit. All of
those refer to unique and interesting musical instruments—a
calliope is a steam-powered organ or piano, a melodeon is a
bellows-powered reed organ, and a harmonium is a pump organ.
None of them have cymbals and trombones and trumpets and
drums like the contraption in The Apple Dumpling Gang.
I kept searching. This year, I finally found out what such a
conglomeration of musical instruments that play themselves
is actually called… an orchestrion. Once I figured out the
correct term, it was easy to learn all about orchestrions!
Yes, they really existed. Not only that, they were very
popular and would have been available (at a hefty price)
during the late 1870s, when The Apple Dumpling Gang takes
place.
German inventor Johann Mälzel built the first fully
automated orchestrion in 1805 and called it a “panharmonicon.”
Ludwig von Beethoven composed his Battle Symphony in 1813
specifically to be played on Mälzel’s panharmonicon. Soon,
inventors in Great Britain and the United States were
creating their own variations.
The simplest orchestrion is what we usually call a “player
piano.” Such pianos use rolls of paper with holes punched in
the paper in specific designs to tell the piano what to
play. Finger-like spokes attached to the keys inside the
player piano fit into those holes. The pattern of the holes
in the paper roll makes the keys play a melody. My
grandparents had a player piano, but the automated part had
broken before I was born. You could still play the keys like
a regular piano, though, and that made player pianos
different from many orchestrions—a human could play the
piano themselves, or the piano could play automated tunes.
Many orchestrions use paper rolls or metal spools to guide
what music will play, so one orchestrion can play many
tunes. You just need to switch out the music roll or spool.
Many orchestrions include a piano or organ, but combine that
with things like cymbals, a xylophone, violins, drums, and
even wind instruments like a trumpet or trombone.
Orchestrions were prevalent in European and American dance
halls, ballrooms, and even restaurants from the mid-1800s
through the early 1900s. Their popularity waned, however,
when radio became popular. By the 1940s, most large
orchestrions landed in the junkyard or a museum.
Today, two of the best places to view extensive collections
of restored and functional orchestrions are the Musical
Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and Siegfried’s
Mechanical Music Museum in Rüdesheim, Germany. You can
occasionally find them other places too—we saw a small
orchestrion at the Kruger Street Toy and Train Museum in
Wheeling, West Virginia, a couple of years ago. In fact,
that was what made me realize the musical contraption in The
Apple Dumpling Gang was probably a real thing, not something
Disney made up. And that’s what eventually led to my finally
learning that ‘orchestrion’ is the correct term for these
fascinating inventions. ♦