Carousel Organ Association of America returns to Riverside Park for the Riverside Band Organ Festival.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fairground organ (or band organ (U.S.)) is a pipe organ designed for use in a commercial public fairground setting to provide loud music to accompany fairground rides and attractions. Unlike organs intended for indoor use they are designed to produce a large volume of sound to be heard over and above the noise of crowds of people and fairground machinery. As fairgrounds became more mechanised at the end of the nineteenth century, their musical needs grew. The period of greatest activity of fairground organ manufacture and development is from the later 1880s through to the introduction of effective electrical sound amplification in the mid 1920s. The organ chassis was typically provided with an ornate and florid decorative case facade designed to be a further fairground attraction in its own right as with all fairground equipment.

The organs were constructed so as to be able to produce the popular music of the period. Organs were designed to mimic the musical capabilities of a typical human band. For this reason they are known as band organs in the US. Consequently the pipes and percussion and their divisions were chosen specifically to fulfil this concept.