$1,200
Sold
sold

Click image to enlarge
Description
The hand-driven barrel organ is cased in a lovely fuitwood box, with 8 tunes and ten open metal ppes. Ostensibly designed to teach canaries to sing, it is likely the easy portability of the case made it functional for other puposes, too. Steve Ryder in Music in Time book notes, "One presumes the bird trainer must have gone mad, listening to himself play the same eight tunes, ad infinitum, and through the tempo was literally in his grasp, it must have been played rapidly to produce effective results." Circa 1850.