I beg your pardon for the words I'm about to use but it's most likely because they were hard as fuck to build and expensive as hell. These instruments were used around 1800, and back then it was much easier to build and pay for an machine that plays for an entire band alone than having an entire band. Nowadays we can listen to music whenever we want to, anywhere we want to, but that wasn't a reality in the old days. A lot of people would never even hear a instrument for their entire lifes, and those who did had the luck to be around a band or rich enough to hire a band (belive me they were really expensive). And to deal with the difficulty to decorate perfectly more than 20 pieces without missing a single note, these music automatons does not require rest, practice, or even time to preparate. But I do have to agree that is a shame no one else in the world makes them. I don't think you can even find someone to build one. God knows how much joy it would bring me to have one of these at home.
D.C. Ramey Piano Company, based in Ohio, still makes orchestrions (what the company calls "automatic musical instruments"), and they also restore old ones. There are a number of videos of a Ramey "Banjo-Orchestra" machine playing different tunes, for example at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qnB7x7CmfBw.html
@@Danadop They were used from around 1900 to the late 1920s before the phonograph took their place. Also, there are a few people who still actively restore and repair these instruments. I'm currently in the process of building my own orchestrion out of a player piano. A fully restored Clarabella would cost around 50,000 to 80,000 USD depending on the make and model. Some of them had complicated lighting fixtures, and some had more simple cabinets.
I don’t claim to have restored it. Didn’t do the pouches for example. I just wanted to make it play and still keep the original look. The recording was made with my iPad on a chair in a huge open space.
Does anybody know the name of the song ? I know it'a also featured in Disney's Silly Symphony "Santa's Workshop", but I can't seem to find its name ...
@@billsoper1411 I was talking sound-wise. The piano sounds very faint on this recording. On the other recording after restoration, it's much louder, so maybe that's why it was restored. Or maybe it's because all the panels were off. It's an outstanding instrument and you are lucky to have it.
