On the same day the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a small Mexico City pharmaceutical manufacturer offered the distinguished Hungarian Jewish contract bridge player, George Rosenkranz, work synthesising progesterone from inedible yams. He fell in love with the city immediately:
I saw the blue sky, the volcano, and heard this music outside my hotel window. An organ grinder was playing a hand organ downstairs. This was fantastic.
The instrument he heard was almost certainly made in Berlin by an Italian immigrant called Frati, who, following his break with Messrs Bacigalupo and Gatorna, constructed and sold barrel organs under his own name from various addresses in the Schoenhauser Allee, which I believe was the centre of European barrel organ construction in the latter part of the 19th century. All the many street organs I saw in Mexico City and all but one of those in Guadalajara (the exception was a local imitation) were by Frati, and they all looked turn-of-the-century-ish. (Pictures, pictures, pictures!)
Mexico’s organists typically work in pairs and are united in the state-recognised Unión de Organilleros. Those who carry the 50-60kg case (slightly less here) are called burritos, little donkeys (slogan: anyone can play, few can carry), while those who hold out the cap are called limones, lemons, for reasons unclear to me. Some women are used, but I didn’t see them doing the donkeywork.
Adrián Reyes says–I think on authority of the Union of Organ-Grinders–that the tradition of street organ playing dates back to the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. This seems likely–it’s difficult to imagine an entrepreneur ordering several hundred expensive machines to sell or lease during the chaotic years following the overthrow of Díaz in 1911.
Some organ grinders, however, believe that their activity is more recent and revolutionary and that it has something to do with Pancho Villa. This, says Joaquín Torres by way of Adán Gallegos, is because of cleanup of the profession during the Plutarco Elías Calles era (mid-20s to -30s). The organists were either told, or decided, to swap their rags for a uniform, which by unanimity became the beige kit of Pancho Villa’s Dorados. (It is for this reason that I speculated initially and in several bars that organ-grinding was a profession reserved for (handicapped) ex-soldiers.)
Unfortunately, Calles cum suis seem to have been less concerned about how the instruments sounded, and, as technically capable leasors died and spare parts dried up, so the music that so charmed Mr Rosenkranz of Budapest (he probably recognised the tunes, since the barrels were also imported) morphed into today’s (John) Cage-ian gamelan splattershooting. I think that the Mexican singer and actor Javier “King of the Bolero Ranchero” Solís‘s 1965 hit Amigo organillero may have marked something of a watershed in this decline:
Amigo organillero
arranca con tus notas pedazos de mi alma,
no importa que el recuerdo destroce mis entrañas
tú sigue toca y toca.
Or, reasonably literally:
Hey cool mister organ-grinder man
Tear out bits of my soul with your notes
It doesn’t matter if the memory destroys my entrails
Just keep on playing, playing.
Barrel organs and male voice choirs are famous for having destroyed “real” folk music in Europe, so it’s kind of amusing that instruments made by Italians in Germany should have become the focus of preservation campaigns by Mexican traditionalists. Here‘s an older tradition, from Monterrey:
Agapito Treviño “White Horse” only used to rob people of a few coins. What he really liked was making his victims dance to the sound of his harmonica [organillo de boca–the technique is basically the same]. On being captured for the nth time on July 25 1854 he was shot, aged 25, in what is now Plaza Hidalgo.
Food for thought there.
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I would like to think Frati of the Schoenhauser Allee is the same Frati who disturbed WS Gilbert during rehearsals for the latter’s last fairy play, Broken hearts:
An Italian organ-grinder, Paoli Frati, ground away under the windows of Essex Villas. ‘Basta!’ cried the dramatist. First, a penny, demanded Frati. Gilbert gave him in charge, and at Hammersmith Police Court the organ-grinder apologized through an interpreter. Whereupon Gilbert asked if he could plead in Frati’s defence and, when refused, quixotically paid the Italian’s 10-shilling fine.
(Jane Stedman, W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre)
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