Hand-Organs E-Book

Edward Spencer

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This article "Hand Organs," by Edward Spencer, from the October 1865 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine, discusses the state and quality of American music at the time. 

Leseprobe

Hand-Organs

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Originally published in the October 1865 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine

Knickerbocker

Hand-Organs

Donald Caird’s come again!

Donald Caird’s come again!

Tell the news in burgh and glen,

Donald Caird’s come again!

JUST AS the harvest sun today was streaming down with the accumulated energy of mid-afternoon, and the sweaty cradle-wielders were bending over the heaviest of my wheat — a patch so heavy it would have done good to the eyes of a connoisseur in crops like John Johnston of “near Geneva” — my terriers raised a flurried bark, and then suddenly were still again, whole from the umbrageous region of the spring came the nasal melody of a wheezy hand-organ, straining piteously at the overture to “Semiramide.” Presto! What a change! The heavy cradles dashed into the brittle straw with renewed vigor; the rakers handled their implements, and the binders twisted the bands and tossed aside the sheaves as if they were performing parts in a cotillion, and, before the white-toothed Lucchese had gotten from “Semiramide” through “Hear me, Norma,” and opened with “Jeannette and Jeannot,” the “through” was cut, cradles and rakes thrown down by the fence, and my whole force, both black and white, had adjourned to the spring, to take a drink and hear “the music.”

“The music!” That brown-cheeked Italian boy, dirty, begrimed with sweat, and his smiles overcome with heat and weary walking; that battered organ, Apollonicon height, with its forlorn rickety puppet show, its polished crank, its dusty green baize, and its crazy, wretched, tuneless condition; the total want of expression with which it volublized in jerky gasps the tunes I have named, followed by a chorus from “Sicilian Vespers” (procul este profani!), “My Maryland,” “Rally Round the Flag,” “Dixie,” “John Brown,” “Marseilles,” “President’s March,” and “Yankee Doodle” —this was “the music!”

Yet, it was music. All listened, charmed; Lucchese, poor velveteen-clad wanderer “con la commedia,” reaped a surprising harvest of postage currency, and my laborers returned to their toils, really refreshed, strengthened, and as palpably benefited as if they had taken rest and a meal.