Livre - Golden Age of Automatic Musical Instruments

Yesteryear’s Treasures – The Fascinating World of Automatic Music. Magnificent music boxes! Self-playing orchestras! Automatic violins, harps and banjos! Pianos that duplicate the playing of Rachmaninoff! Thrilling mechanical organs of the fairground! These marvels of technology played in the royal palaces of Europe, elegant drawing rooms in New York City, speakeasies in Chicago, and the saloons of the Wild West! Learn why they were as popular in 1900 as the latest electronic marvels are today. You will discover: – Millions of dollars worth of rare musical treasures from yesteryear. – Beautiful art glass, elegant cabinetry, and mechanical motion pictures. – Inside views of fascinating mechanisms never before published. – Collecting stories: great instruments rescued just in the nick of time. – An illustrated tour of famous collections from the 1920s to the 1990s. – How automatic instruments can sound like accomplished musicians. – Manufacturers’ and agents’ list, extensive glossary and bibliography. – Helpful hints for collecting today. “This book is a treasure, a tour de force. I will keep my copy on hand and refer to it often.” Q. David Bowers, author of The Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments and many books on numismatics, early theatres and other subjects. “Welt done. Covers a lot of territory without excessive technical terminology.” Fred Dahlinger, Jr., director of collections and research at the Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin. “I enjoyed the stories, with technical details interwoven, as they are in actual life. The author’s ability to combine the human story with the technical is an asset.” Terry Hathaway, historian and co-owner with Q. David Bowers of Hathaway and Bowers, a large firm dealing in automatic instruments circa 1967-1972. These "musical time machines" transport you to the most delightful experiences of an earlier era. Never before has there been such an assembly of photographs, information, and rare instruments in a single volume. If you enjoy music or mechanical things, you will treasure this book! This book takes you back to an era when automobiles, airplanes and electric lighting were new, and the radio and sound movies were still a futuristic dream. Within these covers are millions of dollars’ worth of rare and sometimes one-of-a-kind musical treasures from yesteryear. Words and hundreds of color photographs describe what made them fascinating, and why they remain desirable today. Photographs of ingenious mechanisms – few of which have ever been published before – help to show how instruments play music automatically. Each chapter in Part One begins with a colorful vignette titled You Are There, by Q. David Bowers. These settings are a composite blend of real and fictional material intended to represent the atmosphere of the era. Part Two includes a photograph album of interesting historic collections dating back to the 1920s. Amusing anecdotes about instruments are recounted, along with the colorful history of some of the owners. Valuable tips for finding, preserving, maintaining and enjoying automatic instruments are also included. The Appendices include information on collectors’ groups; manufacturers and brand names; tables for converting the original prices of instruments into U.S. dollars and then into the number of hours it took the average worker to earn this amount; and technical information on how the music is programmed for many of the instruments. A Glossary, Bibliography and Index complete the volume. ABOUT THE COVER This magnificent Imhof & Mukle orchestrion was built in the Black Forest region of Germany in the late 1800s. It greets visitors as they enter the foyer of the Sanfilippo Victorian Palace, one of three spectacular collections photographed for this book. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arthur A. Reblitz is recognized as one of the world ‘s leading authorities on automatic pianos and organs. His shop, Reblitz Restorations Inc., has restored automatic instruments for the collections illustrated in this book and many others since the 1960s. Mr. Reblitz is also known worldwide as a music arranger for these instruments. His work has appeared on nationwide educational and network television, the National Geographic Special Treasures from the Past, in the Rose Bowl Parade, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Radio City Music Hall, the 1981 Paramount motion picture Reds, and the television special Colorado’ s Historic Carousels. Other books by Mr. Reblitz include Piano Servicing, Tuning and Rebuilding; Player Piano Servicing and Rebuilding; Treasures of Mechanical Music (with Q. David Bowers); and The Mills Violano-Virtuoso (with Michael L. Kitner). He has written articles for The Guidebook of Automatic Musical Instruments and The Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments by Q. David Bowers, the Bulletin and Journal of the Musical Box Society International (MBSI), the Bulletin of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors ‘Association (AMICA), and The Coin Slot magazine. Mt. Reblitz is the 1982 recipient of the Literary Award of the Musical Box Society International for Outstanding Literary Contributions to the Field of Automatic Music, and the 1993 recipient of the Leo Ornstein Literary Award of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors’ Association. ABOUT THE BACK COVER Left: A spectacular Philipps Monster Paganini, one of the largest orchestrions ever made, now in the Krughoff Collection. Right: An elegant revolver music box made circa 1880 by B.A. Bremond of Geneva, Switzerland, once owned by Henry Ford, and now in the Gilson Collection.