Dance hall organs, a brief summary

Dance hall organs

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a growing demand for automatic musical instruments in public places. Especially in the cities in Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands an increasing amount of huge dance halls were rising. In the beginning the same organs were used as on the contemporary fairs, but soon these instruments were accomodated to the use in these halls, under influence of the local life-style and culture. Because these were listened to for hours at a time the builders sought variation in sound by building a lot of solo voices into the organs.

A classic example of a dance hall organ by Mortier, built before 1913. This organ was amputated in the fifties to be used as a street organ.

The Belgian city of Antwerp became the center of the dance hall organ business. The biggest firm was Mortier, followed by a big amount of smaller factories and trading companies like van Steenput, Decap, Bursens en Hooghuys.

After a drawback in WW I the Belgian organ industry went into a booming business. The prosceniums grew to sizes up to 8 by 6 metres and the organs often were covering the whole back wall of the dance halls. When they were ordered the organ builder had taken measurements of the wall before he started building the organ, so it would fit the rear wall of the dance hall exactly!

In the thirties the new phenomenon of the traveling dance halls arose. The owners of these traveling premises were the most important customers of the organ builders then. The organs, as big as they were, were towed from one place to another to play in all kinds of places where something had to be celebrated, and to villages on the occasion that the local fair arrived.

Mortier dance hall organ from the thirties with a low proscenium in order to fit into a travelling dance hall.

The second World War put an end to these activities. The last pipe organs were built around 1947. There was still some demand for smaller organs, so organ builders like Bursens en Decap kept working in the fifties. The dance hall organs changed both musically and technically when the electronics arrived in the sixties and seventies. Instruments with built-in Hammond organs had a temporary upsweep, mainly in the Belgian and Dutch parts of Brabant. Nowadays new dance hall organs are still being built for collectors.

During the sixties dance hall organs were replaced massively by other means of music-making, like juke-boxes and sound installations. The prices for which they were offered sank to beneath the price of demolition wood. Gigantic numbers of these colossal organs were demolished, thrown away or simply put outside to deteriorate in short time. The majority of the surviving instruments found its way to collectors all over the world.
Many surviving instruments were amputated to act as street organs in the Netherlands.