Hackney – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Transvestite barrel organ dancers in 1930s Whitechapel and the 1860s London West End

With acrobats, clowns, and Doris and Thisbe, goddesses of wind.

Acrobats whirling to the sound of a barrel organ on a chain carousel at the National Fair, Bergen, Norway, 1928.

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

PTSD

A friend who died recently lived his life in two halves. In his youth he was the boisterous, swaggering, electrifying bass drummer with a lederhosen band. An excellent natural lyric tenor addicted to the schlager repertoire, a fighter of German marines during wine festivals, a charmer of the ladies, he seemed destined to become an…

Irregular rhythmic irregularity in southern German music

How to write pastiche inconsistent non-isochronous subdivision for mechanical organ. With metrical analysis of the notes inégales in a bit of the Furtwängler recording of Mozart’s Gran Partita.