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Middlemarch vocabulary
8 music terms, specific compositions and/or instruments
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barrel organ
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synonyms: roller organ, street organ ???
tags: [music]
► definition
Definition:a musical instrument on a cart with bellows operated via a hand-crank. The music itself is encoded onto a barrels (cylinders) turned by the same crank. The bellows blow into pipes as those in a church pipe organ to produce the sound.
photo: By Paweł Drozd, on Wiki Drozdp - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,sound file: by Peter Ellis at the English language Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
► uses
Uses:
This must have stirred the Curse up quite enough, but when they had gone, there came a man with a barrel organ, which was suffering from some complicated internal disorder, causing it to play its whole repertory at once, in maddening discords.
F. Anstey. The Black Poodle and Other Tales (1896)
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I had been apprised, by seeing a column of dust standing by itself in the air above the piano, and by hearing a barrel-organ playing, beneath the window, En revenant de la revue, that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant visit from a day of spring.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1]
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Poor Mrs. Cranch was bulky, and, breathing asthmatically, had the additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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A barrel organ plays Strauss waltzes on repeat.
Mark Haddon. The Pier Falls and Other Stories (2016)
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