This past Saturday I had a fine experience cranking my 31-note Raffin
monkey organ for a crowd of kids in Maine, aged 2 to 12 or more, who
were busy stuffing straw into old clothes to make scarecrows for
Halloween.

Most of the kids (and their 30's parents) really enjoyed my organ
music.  My tunes were a motley collection, spanning several eras and
styles.  Some went over better than others, but a few kids watched and
listened attentively, while many adults asked questions about how my
organ worked.

I was especially impressed that some kids stood very close to the front
of the organ, with its delicate façade pipes, and even felt for the air
puffs coming out of the pipes, but nobody touched anything!

I think the lessons learned from this are:

    (1) play fun music.  Slow classical pieces just don't grab atten-
    tion.
    (2) be out there and visible.  People do like to see human inter-
    action with the mechanical instrument.  An Ampico or Duo-Art play-
    ing all by itself is not as  enticing as a person pedaling away and
    manipulating the levers on an upright pumper.  Even large band
    organs get less attention than a  hand-cranked grind organ like
    mine.
    (3) Be eager to talk with anyone who asks.

I should mention that I have added a MIDI interface to my grind organ
so that I can play it from my PC where I arrange music and from a Palm
Pilot PDA that sits on a little shelf I built onto the organ cart.  I
played most of Saturday's gig from the Palm Pilot, and some from rolls,
just for variety and to show how the rolls worked.  They are indeed
more fun to watch.

I was glad that nobody seemed to think the organ was fake or amplified,
just because I was running it from the Palm Pilot.  But several
commented on the blending of old and new technologies!

Let's use modern means to get contemporary music onto our instruments.

BTW, you can hear my own organ arrangements and compositions on my
private web site:

    http://members.aol.com/knudsenmj/myhomepage/Organs.htm

Mike Knudsen