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went there while haiku-ing on vacation

Cool apple*, , ,
but what does it all mean?
and where is House on the Rock?

Mike

http://www.thehouseontherock.com/html/attraction.htm

House on the Rock is this incredibly funky, unbelievable, huge museum in southern Wisconsin.. there are about 20 older grands scattered about and lots of harpsichords, old squares and piano harps on the walls.. not to mention 3 of the largest theater organs ever.

tons of other stuff besides one of the greatest collection of antique music making instruments and displays ever. for 50 cents (in addition to the admission cost) you can hear automated, antique, orchestral conglomerations play pieces. there are quite a few of those as well as old music boxes and machines.

i love it.

Apple

I always thought playing a piano was a daunting task until I saw the organ. Yikes. Looks like the cockpit of a Boeing 777.

8 Manuels?! Dear God! some one better open up a window! (from 1776....its called a joke....uhhmmm yeah.... ) The biggest i've played had 4! Apple- did they let you play the instruments?

Matt

Wow, cool pictures!

Where's Keith Emerson when you need him? :-)

the first one has 15 manuals! and no touching unfortunately.

i've other pics but must work on making them presentable. (lighter and smaller).

beautiful pics apple*

thanks for sharing

and here you go..

I love that reed organ!

Are those 15 manuals and 8 manuals for real? do the benches have some kind of hydraulic lifting mechanism for the organist to reach all those keys, stops, and couplers?

Don't be fooled by the many fabrications that are on display at the House on the Rock. The "artist" who put this museum-thing together had great fun "pulling your leg." This "buyer-beware" message is from a Wisconsin native and resident.

Isn't the house on the rock fun? I love that place.

The organ with three sets of manuals was a homemade job. Not playable I hear. It's art though.

Here is a sample of that those things sound like. This particular one changes colors and rises up and down in front of the stage (lowers in this case). The purpose was to drop into the floor to accompany silent films but to rise up for solo work.

Unlike a church organ, a theatre organ was nicknamed a "unit orchestra" and was designed to replace the orchestra in the pit with pipes designed to imitate orchestral sounds.

They are great fun to play.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVptDkDmyK0
YouTube - Plaza Cinema Organ

Yours truly at the console of the Oaks Amusement Park Wurlitzer, Portland OR last summer.

Many of these babies still play.

cool

my church organ is like a portable digitable in comparison

There is a not-really-similar, but still related place in northern Michigan. Certainly worth 2-3 hours if you're in the area:

http://www.musichouse.org/

bachsky:

I don't know if his pneumatics even worked when he put them in the house. I get the sense that he was a junk collector. Some of them work a little but a lot of speakers are hidden.

Believe it or not, companies still make pneumatic-played banjos and stuff. Here are a couple of interesting links:

Van Halen\'s "Jump"

Earl\'s Breakdown automated banjo, guitar and bass with traps

I went through the House on the Rock a few years ago and felt I got taken for $20 on the admission (plus additional money on tokens to operate the fake machines). This place is a dreary, dim, endless maze of dusty, worn-out machines and musty carpeting. The few instruments that are real (such as a Welte orchestrion) are generally in poor repair and not being maintained. As others mentioned, many of the homemade contraptions "play" via hidden speakers, accompanied by a wheezy pneumatic or two half-heartedly adding a little movement occasionally. Towards the end of the self-guided tour, you find yourself walking faster and faster as you enter room after room of themed collections... Christmas decorations, cast iron figurines, dolls, electrical equipment, circus memorabilia, horse-drawn carriages, etc. It just goes on and on through a series of metal buildings surrounding the actual house.

The polar opposite of the House on the Rock may well be the Sanfilippo Music Salon near Chicago, which is not open to the public but which occasionally hosts benefits, tours and special performances. A description found on the web:

Jasper Sanfilippo lives in a 64,000-square-foot house in Barrington Hills, with most of his children living elsewhere around the 100-acre estate.

Nearly half of Jasper's house is given over to a grand concert hall, called the Palace Musique, with a 75-foot ceiling decorated in a fairy-tale Second Empire style. It's here that Jasper houses his collection of musical instruments, ranging from a massive old Wurlitzer organ to more than 100 music boxes, automatic pianos and orchestrions, self-contained orchestras in miniature. Many are more than a century old and have been meticulously restored under a music maintenance budget that runs more than $400,000 a year.

The elder Sanfilippo doesn't play an instrument himself. His concert hall has seating for 300 and is the setting for regular performances by guest artists, often for the benefit of local charities such as the Barrington Youth Dance Ensemble, St. Anne's Catholic Church and Hopeful Heart. Jasper's collecting doesn't stop with music: In various barns on his property he also keeps antique locomotives, circus carousels, slot machines, penny arcades, 1920s-era Rolls-Royces and tower bells from old Chicago churches.