The tiny Rhône village of Oingt, in the heart of Beaujolais country, plays host each September to one of the noisiest festivals in France. The barrel organs and their proud owners from all around the world vie with one another to see who has the sweetest and the loudest.

A century ago some of France’s best known lyricists wrote with the barrel organ in mind, such as Jean Rodor with his Sous les ponts de Paris:

…creating the timeless world of mechanical music.

Barrel organs are marvels mainly for their absolute simplicity. When you turn the handle, this turns the crankshaft, linked to two rods and two bellows, like old fireside bellows squeezed to get a blaze started. In the organ, the air goes into a reservoir until it is full. On top of the reservoir, springs put pressure on the air, which is dispersed into different pipes. Each tube, each pipe, corresponds to a note - do, re, mi, and so on - and a valve opens and closes to send the air into the different pipes.

The valve is programmed to operate by perforated cards or templates. Once they were all different, the means by which manufacturers distinguished themselves from the competition. Unless you possessed the correct template, the organ would play only gibberish. Nowadays all the manufacturers use the same template, with twenty-seven different notes, rather than any combination between sixteen and thirty-seven.

 

At one time the perforated cards were prepared by hand and this still is the only effective way to create tunes for antique organs. The special skill involved is an ability to read sheet music or interpret a sound recording, identifying the notes used and marking out their position in sequence on the card. You need to know the instrument the composer intends to be played, because each hole corresponds to a note. The larger the hole, the longer the note will play. The smaller the hole, the shorter it will be.

So when you have completed the arrangement, be it for any combination of instruments from drums or a saxophone to violins, and sketched out the positions, you can perforate the card. On modern machines, a CD traces the perforations, enabling much more complex pieces to be recorded than in the days when the organist would frantically change a whole sequence of cards as he went along.