Note: Mirabile dictu! 11:08 AM—Altice internet has been in and out this morning. As usual, of late. If it stays in, even with annoyingly slower-than-usual upload speed, this disquisition will be published. It will have been, anyway, or you wouldn’t be reading it.

Whoops. 11:09 AM—Altice internet is out again . . .

4 April—Here’s some music to make your day. It’s played on marvelous instruments variously known as fairground organs, steam organs, and—mostly in the United States—band organs. They’re the biggest members of a family of ingenious musical machines known as orchestrions.

Consider these magnificent instruments player pianos on steroids. Of nineteenth-century French origin, fairground organs were designed to produce music loud enough to be heard in—you guessed it—fairgrounds and other open or otherwise expansive venues with lots of ambient noise. Fairground organs were steam powered for portability in the old days; now electricity usually does the trick, often generated by the engines of the trucks the impressive machines are mounted on. Of course digital technology is displacing the punch-card rolls and folded sheets that substituted for live musicians in the day—actually a form of artificial intelligence dating back millennia.

Typically, the motive power of a band organ is mechanically transferred to operate a bellows to generate the high-pressure wind that operates the wind and percussion instruments, which is why orchestrions are considered to be organs. Some orchestrions also use string instruments.

Manufacturers of fairground organs also made smaller instruments for dance halls; guess what they’re called. (You wouldn’t normally have found dance hall-size organs in ballrooms, so there are no ballroom organs.) Still smaller portable instruments for street use (like barrel organs but more complicated) were imaginatively called street organs. Carousel music is usually played by orchestrions.

And so on. Now for the music: Colonel Bogey March by Kenneth Alford (really F. J. Ricketts); The Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa; Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fučík; Rasputin by Frank Farian, George Reyam, and Fred Jay. Played on four different instruments, but not any of the ones in the pictures . . .