Organ grinding literature review

Following on from the start of exploration, what’s the deal with Brundibar?? My mental image of an organ grinder is a man with a monkey. He is standing in Manhattan. It is near the year 1900. He is an immigrant.

“Surely some of these organ grinders were Jewish?” I said to my spouse.

She started looking and found a portrait of an organ grinder, painted by a Jew hiding in Belgium during the war.

Nussbaum painted organ grinders multiple times. See https://berlinischegalerie.de/en/digital/provenienzen-kunstwerke-wandern/nussbaum-leierkastenmann/ and https://keesvanhage.wordpress.com/4-18/, the latter of which comes with an essay. It states, “The organ grinder with his mobile instrument is a typical Berlin figure and not only the symbol for the artist living in poverty, but also for the artist as a craftsman, who has to work hard, turning the organ crank.”

It’s unclear to me whether they mean a character found in Berlin or a character that appears often in Nussbaum’s work during his Berlin period.

So were some organ grinders Jews? Not typically. Most of them were Italian and obviously there have been Jews in Italy since the Roman era, but stereotypically, this was a job for Catholics.

According to Walkowitz: Edwardian author, Olive Christian Malvery put Jews and organ grinders into distinct categories when writing for ‘Pearsons’ in 1904. As an investigative journalist, she cosplayed at several types of poor person living near the Thames, including as an organ grinder, for which she pretended to be Italian.

However, she also separately wrote about Jews from a distance, as aliens whose migration should be controlled and reduced.

Therefore, we can be reasonably certain that organ grinding, which does carry ethnic baggage in Malvery’s poverty drag, was not associated with Jewishness. Indeed, Malvery put Jews and (Italian) organ grinders in direct binary opposition.

‘Unable to gain entrance to the parts of Russia from which Jews were fleeing pogroms, she focuses attention instead on the local conditions of Southern Italians whose primitive conditions are meant to stand in for the Jews. The “condition” of “Russian Jews in their own homes,” she assures her readers, “is quite on a par with the lowest type of Italian emigrant’. (p 25)

However, she goes on to say that Italians willingly submit to fumigation, but Jews “really believe that cleanliness is unwholesome and washing a dangerous adventure.” (p 26)

‘Although Malvery tends to link Jews and Italians on the continent, she emphatically distinguishes between these two immigrant groups when they appear on English soil. Italians may be degraded in their native country, but, once in England, they readily assimilate themselves to local conditions. Malvery expresses “warm feelings” toward “the children of the sunny south,” who, as organ grinders and street entertainers in Lodnon, bring music to the poor and pose no economic threat to “native” English workers.’ (ibid)

‘Unlike Italians, Jews cannot be integrated into the body politic of the English nation; they remain a parasitic class of foreigners, with no real homeland.’ (p 28)

The organ she ground, by the way was quite large. Pulled by a man on a cart, the operated the handle.

The ethnic stereotypes are not solely an English phenomenon. Organ grinding is also associated with Italians in Massachusetts in 1871.

‘ “What work could be harder” they ask, “than carrying this organ all day?” ‘ (Russo p 49)

‘One [Italian economic migrant] is a coal-heaver in winter and an organ-grinding “troubadour” in summer: the opposition of the paleotechnic drudge and the carefree gypsy [sic] singer of love songs corresponds to the seasons . His “lazy,” “soft-eyed” boy, who collects money with his tambourine . . .’ (ibid)

‘Despite having been cheated of his wages and left destitute in South America, the “swarthiest” organ-grinder possesses “that lightness of temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from the south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men”. Stack observes that “Brahmins [upper class Bostonians] distinguished between Northern and Southern Italians from the very beginning of the Southern Italian invasion of Boston in the 1880s. Consequently, Brahmins viewed those Italians from Northern Italy as a part of Western civilization.” According to the Brahmins, the “Germanic blood” and “artistic achievements” of the northern Italians “sharply distinguished them from the ignorant peasants of Southern Italy.” (p 51)

‘ “The poorer classes of foreigners in any city are led by similarity of language and occupations to gather into neighborhoods according to their nationality, and the Italians are especially clannish. The fruit-venders and organ-grinders form separate colonies, each distinguished by the peculiarities incident to the calling of its inhabitants,” ‘ (p 64)

But what was happening in London? Again with the binary oppositions.

‘ Unlike Jewish or Irish objects of disdain, Italians came from the land of the Roman Empire, of Verdi, and of the cultural glories of the Grand Tour. Their struggles for national independence in the mid-nineteenth century gave them added glamour—and yet when on the streets of London they also aroused fear and loathing in a particularly complex and venomous way, as this essay will show.’ (McAllister p 286)

Ok, so, Victorian organ grinder discourse:

Organ grinders in London and the Eastern US were stereotypically Italian. The social position of Italian migrants in that era was complicated partly because of the association of Italy with the Grand Tour. (This was a sort of arts holiday still practised by young americans going to the art galleries of Europe’s capital cities via a Eurail pass, only then it was a tour of Italy and English people also did it.) Thus Italians and Jews were placed in a good migrant / bad migrant binary opposition, although both were bad for being migrants.

To say more definitively, we must learn what the position of organ grinders was in Czechoslovakia during WW2, but I think it’s likely that the reason Brundibar uses an organ grinder as the Hitler-analogue antagonist is more about the properties of the organ: it was loud, it was a capital investment, it likely didn’t (and couldn’t) play Jewish music. It was therefore something that would drown out children, that they couldn’t afford, and that they could not accompany as it didn’t play their tunes.

Was the Victorian discourse even still valid in WW2, and in another country halfway across Europe? In either case, what impact does this have on a project actually in London? How do these historic discourses speak to our modern time?

McAllister’s paper does suggest some of the Victorian era conflicts are kind of timeless in their shape, if not their particulars. ‘The fragility of masculinity and social status [of middle class Victorian men] was such that it had to be remade in almost every context, from one’s own hearth to street confrontations. In such a situation, uncertainty was raised about boundaries of all kinds, and therefore much of the mid-nineteenth-century discourse about the organ-grinders explores liminal spaces—or that contested boundary between the hard-won home space and uncontrollable outside and other spaces (depicted in cartoons as pavement). In infringing upon this space, the Italians, by their very national positioning, were made to serve as a repository for negative and feared qualities. For example, their very links with the world of music which could confer social and cultural capital, as demonstrated by opera composers, conductors, and singers, posited alternative values to those of the solidly—or stolidly—middle-class John Bull. This is of particular significance with the Victorian soundscape, where notions of aurality and the value and acceptability of public sounds were open to negotiation in a shifting cultural climate.’ (p 292)

She goes on to discuss the social meanings of ‘noise’.

The social meaning of organs in that era was not what I expected. Honestly, I would have guessed that organs were exciting symbols of modern technology. Clockwork, punchcards, factory technologies and the industrial revolution were all there! But I guess in the 1980s “ghetto blasters” were also exciting new portable forms of newly accessible technology.

Previously, I called street organs ‘protestant*’. But they had a different cultural position when they were hotly debated – Italians generally were not protestants. The organs themselves were different. Malvery’s organ was huge. BOGA** has said that many Victorian organs were reed organs, (like a harmonium or accordion) whereas people now tend to use pipes. I also think street organs now are more often stereotyped as Dutch. So how did these changes come about. And *when* and *why* was the current 20 note scale picked?

I should have started with wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_organ

‘In New York City, the massive influx of Italian immigrants led to a situation where, by 1880, nearly one in 20 Italian men in certain areas were organ grinders.’

‘Charles Babbage was a particularly virulent enemy of the organ grinders. He would chase them around town, complain to authorities about their noisy presence, and forever ask the police to arrest them.[10] The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on the other hand, was photographed in 1949 handing an organ-grinder in Berlin some change with the caption: “we musicians must stick together”.’ (ibid)

Current organ grinders ‘may perform at “organ rallies” (such as the “MEMUSI” event in Vienna), where many enthusiasts would assemble and entertain on the streets.’ (ibid)

But back to McAllister, ‘Mayhew quotes an organ-grinder, “you must have some opera tunes for the gentlemen, and some for the poor people, and they like the dancing tune.” We are then given slightly more detail about his current repertoire, “Two are from opera, one is a song, one a waltz, one is a hornpipe, one is polka, and the other two is dancing tunes. One is from I Lombardi of Verdi.” Picker also uses Verdi in his description of the grinders’ repertoire as a continuum “from the prison song in Il Trovatore to ‘Rule Britannia’”. Yet despite such links with high-status opera, these musicians were damned—their low status as performers was further undermined by their ascribed embodiment of dirt, poverty, and animality, and they represented the lowest possible strand of society. Thus, class concerns were embedded in the public reception of their music, whether opera or “dancing tunes.”’ (p 298)

Some of this repertoire lives on. At the Amersham Fair Organ Museum, I heard Rule Britainia on a much larger organ than even the one played by Malvery.

‘But of course Italians inhabited a particularly contested cultural area. They were dashing revolutionaries, winning their liberty; they were the inheritors of Rome, Dante, and Michelangelo; they were sensuous, exciting, musical, handsome, and therefore represented a possible threat to the self-esteem of an Englishman. So other strands of discourse about them were necessary. The bourgeoisie could constitute Italy as a place of peasants, whose much-vaunted cultural superiority stood revealed as a sham—a degenerate animal-like race who used street music as a weapon for blackmail and legitimized crime. This is the arena in which the war of the organ-grinders and Punch was played out.’ (p 309)

‘And then they were rehabilitated. The symbolic victory of The Street Music Act allowing Punch to quit the field with honor and the changing political and social context provided less dramatic images of Italians and they clearly presented less of a challenge. Once Italians had accepted England’s superiority, symbolized by their adoption of English-pattern constitutional monarchy in the 1860s, they could be safely patronized, and even adopted as honorary Englishmen, like Garibaldi. Italians faded from public view somewhat after the dramatic events of the Risorgimento, losing much of their exotic signification. Punch, once it had won a small but significant victory, moved to another, existing, target, the un-musical Irish, treating them in a similar, if less complex, manner. But the uniting of music and animality in these images from Punch provides several interesting insights into the processes by which the rich, and potentially destabilizing, possibilities of Italians gave rise to a xenophobic episode in English cultural history.’ (ibid)

Circling back back around to Malvery, she was a big deal in the Edwardian age and she was not the only woman of the era to dress up in this way! Voracheck writes about organ grinder drag and the position of grinders at the time, ‘The organ-grinder undermined the demarcation between private and public space with his music, a sound which could not be contained in the street. Carried into the homes of those who did not want to hear it, his music and his foreignness encroached on English domains. Moreover, organ-grinders travelled from East End slums to wealthy West End neighborhoods on a daily basis, freely traversing class-coded terrain.’ (p 409-410)

‘John Picker observes that the antagonism of the 1850s and 1860s was replaced in the 1880s and 1890s by nostalgia for street music. In the intervening years, protests against organ-grinders and street music diminished due to a middle-class exodus to the suburbs of London and because
public attention shifted . . ..

‘However, Italian organ-grinders did not become “quaint curiosities,” as Picker argues, but actually increased two and a half times between 1861 and 1901. This growth may have been due to an upsurge in the number of female Italian immigrants in the second half of the century, many of whom took up organ-grinding. Moreover, the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw an influx of Jewish immigrants to England, and according to historian Lucio Sponza, anxiety about this other “alien invasion” led to renewed agitation against organ-grinders and attempts to legislate against street music.’ (p 410)

‘The fact that female reporters’ articles are supported with visual documentation indicates that the authority for their investigations lies in their embodied experience of the lives of organ-grinders.’ (p 425)

‘ . . . by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, organ-grinding seems to have lost its association with Italians. When in 1911 Frank A. Morgan and Harry G. Hopkins recounted for the Pall Mall Magazine their three-day experience of playing a barrel-organ on the streets of London to raise money for charity, Italians and the Italian colony received nary a mention.’ (p 429)

Works cited

MC ALLISTER, A. Punch’s Campaign against Italian Organ-Grinders, 1854–1864. Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia:286.

Russo, J.P. (1994). From Italophilia to Italophobia: Representations of Italian Americans in the Early Gilded Age. Differentia: Review of Italian Thought6:7.

Vorachek, L. (2012). Playing Italian: cross-cultural dress and investigative journalism at the fin de siecle. Victorian Periodicals Review45:406–435.

Walkowitz, J.R. (1998). The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London. Victorian Studies42:3–46.