Year of the Rat Music Project

By Brian Childs

Fiorello LaGuardia, for reasons that are not entirely clear, hated organ-grinders. Organ-grinders were street performers, frequently Italian immigrants, who cranked small, pipe-organ music-boxes called monkey-organs and used trained monkeys to collect tips. In his memoir, LaGuardia recalls his detestation beginning with a jeer he received as a child about his Italian ancestry that associated him with organ-grinders, “Where’s your monkey, LaGuardia?”

Some say he was also under pressure from the fledgling radio corporations, but in any case, the end result was the same. In 1936, LaGuardia banned organ-grinding from the streets of New York. The ban was repealed in 1976, but organ-grinders never made a revival, until now.

On an April Saturday in a basement Greenlawn, amid stacks of dusty ivory piano keys, wood varnish and gear wrenches, four old-time music aficionados from the tri-state area created a hurdy-gurdy ruckus working over their antique self-playing pianos, monkey-organs and music boxes.

“They call us a secret society, but we try to publicize it!” Marvin Polan, 72, from Melville said as he cranked his monkey-organ with both arms in a jazzercise motion.

The workshop is a free, monthly event put on my the Lady Liberty chapter of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors Association (AMICA), a group of locals dedicated to the preservation and promotion of a dying art form. The workshop was designed to encourage owners of hand-me-down music-boxes to learn how to repair and maintain their antiques. It also allows the AMICA members to announce new broken machines that need saving from the trash, currently five player pianos and two monkey-organs. But, these free machines come with a warning.

“A lot of divorces have resulted from people who couldn’t turn things down,” Bill Maguire, 42, the president of AMICA, said. AMICA members are natural pack-rats, Maguire explains, rare is the AMICA member who just collects automatic musical instruments. A collector’s house is at constant risk of filling up with so much antique junk that it pushes out friends and family.

Polan explains that his wife makes him keep the machines he is working on in his basement. “We try to keep the house clean,” Polan said, “My wife is very patient.”

The average age of the meeting is over 60 and many of the members are retired hobbyists. Others, such as Maguire are artisans working as piano or clock repairmen. The workshop creates a forum where the group can swap tips and help out on individual projects. Maguire brings out a music box he’s repairing and holds up a giant rusted disc for the group to see.

“There’s a product on the market that you pour it in a shallow dish and you place the disc in and without any corrosion it removes the rust without destroying the print.” Polan said, “That’s the advantage of belonging to an organization, we help each other out.”

Exactly what constitutes an automatic music machine is another hot topic of debate. Do pianos with MIDI’s count? What about mechanical phonographs?

“The purists say ‘no,’” Polan explains, “I prefer to be inclusive rather than exclude someone.”

Automatic musical instruments, traditionally, are music making machines that were enormously popular in pre-radio America and Europe. On the outside they look like decorative boxes or pianos, but on the inside they are a symphony of polished gears, strings and pipes. They operate using pedals or cranks which force air into bellows and spin a roll. A paper sheet with small, strategic holes is spun across the bellows by the roll and the air is forced through the holes into specific pipes or in the case of pianos, causes the hammers to strike the cords, creating music. The music box version of these instruments involves series of set pins instead of a paper sheet, and thus limits the instrument to six or eight songs. Today, there are very few people left that can make paper rolls and no one that can create new pin music.

AMICA works to connect the remaining aficionados by creating a local and national community. “The meetings are open to anybody who is a member,” Polan said, “If we happen to be visiting our kids in California and we happen to find a meeting, we’re welcome.”

However the real reason behind the workshops, members will explain, is for the companionship. Repairing player pianos can be lonely work and the meetings allow members to gab with others who share their interests. They ogle over a picture of an Orchestrian, a machine that appears to have come out of a Jules Verne’ novel with three automatic violins that play in harmony with a piano. They talk aboutthat Yamaha’s new Britney Spears medley for player pianos. U.S. history is often discussed in terms of player pianos. The Great Depression caused many middle-class families to stop servicing their player pianos, Maguire tells me. World War II saw a decrease in production due to the scarcity of brass, Polan adds. Then the conversation shifts to Kurt Vonnegut’s death, and his first novel, “Player Piano.”

“When you become a member of AMICA, you get to meet a heck of a lot of nice people,” Polan said, “Not only that, you also get to visit places you never would get to. Multimillioniare’s homes, behind the scenes of museums.”

They even have celebrity guest speakers, of a sort.

Hi Babbitt, who created over 300 paper rolls in his lifetime, came to speak to the group last month and drew a crowd of 10. Paper rolls are long paper sheets with songs encoded on them which are run through player pianos and monkey-organs to create music.

“Everyone brought all of their rolls with his mark on it to get them signed,” Maguire said, displaying his signed sheet.

Recently the Lady Liberty chapter of AMICA became the heroes of the automatic music community through their efforts to save one of New York’s most beloved organs. In 2005, the owner and long-time operator of the B&B Carousel, Coney Island’s last carousel, died. His family was unable to afford the upkeep of the carousel and so reluctantly planned to disassemble the carousel and sell it off, including the organ inside, piece by piece, at auction. AMICA and Coney Island USA, a non-profit arts group, joined forces and petitioned the city which bought the carousel for $1.8 million. Now, the carousel is being restored with plans of being put back in operation in Coney Island sometime in the next few years. The Lady Liberty Chapter of AMICA has offered to be in charge of repairing and maintaining the carousel’s organ.

Oddly, talking about the saving the carousel doesn’t interest the AMICA members much; they’d rather talk about humidifiers and wood varnish.

“We get so enthused, we could go on and on, sometimes my wife has to let me know I’m telling them more than they want to know,” Polan said.

“Yeah, she’ll let you know,” Maguire said.

“Yeah, but she’s not here right now,” Polan said.