Symphonion Music Box

LB has an 1898-1902 Symphonion crank-operated tabletop music box whose spinning, perforated 7 ½-inch steel discs play on a double-comb movement patented in Leipzig by Symphonion Musikwerke. The photograph shows a bound album beneath the player which originally contained twelve discs. It is the music played by these discs which tells the story of an era – a sentimental era of marches, waltzes, traditional hymns, and more!

Researching the titles of these discs, I find German folk songs, operatic melodies, and – astoundingly – American ragtime. What drove the manufacturer of this Leipzig music box to commercially market uniquely American ragtime, popularized by Black musicians centered in St. Louis and Missouri?

I was brought up by two parents with roots in Germany and could speak German as I learned English. I can still read the Gothic German script stamped upon these discs. My eyes widened when I read titles such as “I’se Gwine Back to Dixie,” “Plantation Song,” “Little Alabama Coon Dog,” “Oh Honey, My Honey,” “It’s a Great Big Shame,” “Smokey Joe’s Cakewalk,” and “Where Sweet Magnolias Bloom” (the latter two identified by ragtime scholars at the Library of Congress as dance music), alongside discs entitled “Von Herzen zu Herzen” (“From My Heart to Your Heart”) and “Klosterglocken” (“The Monastery Bells”).

Ragtime’s syncopated rhythms bound together with Strauss waltzes? Yes – because by the end of the nineteenth century ragtime had swept both Europe and America as a commercial sensation. The craze began in the mid-1890s with the booming market for ragtime sheet music, which in turn fueled sales of upright pianos. At first, ragtime was viewed with suspicion by many older Americans while enthusiastically embraced by younger audiences in both Europe and the United States. 

These tabletop music boxes sold for about $12 in 1900. In St. Louis, where three generations of my family were raised, a middle-class salary ranged from roughly $600 to $1,200 per year, while working-class families – our forebears were police officers – earned about $400 to $600. A music box was truly the jewel of the parlor.

Some of the discs in LB’s album contain ragtime melodies with the characteristic “ragged” or broken melody line played over an insistent rhythmic bass. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair bands, minstrel shows, cabarets, and popular performers introduced millions of visitors to what became known as the Missouri ragtime style, with its staggered foot-thumping beat. Nearly 27 million people attended the exposition.

When played today, these angelic-sounding steel discs still capture the energy of ragtime’s irresistible propulsion in 2/4 time, with a looseness founded on its “short-long-short” feel; I think of it as a limping rhythm. That swing became immensely popular in the high-stepping Cakewalk, often the finale of a minstrel show. Not every American paterfamilias wanted to see his daughters dancing to such rhythms! Young Americans danced in their parlors when their parents were safely out of the house.

The Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room reports that music boxes became vehicles through which families discovered music as diverse as German Lieder and Missouri ragtime. Once the box and discs had been purchased, additional discs could be ordered – although at thirty cents each in an era when a loaf of bread cost a cent, they were hardly inexpensive. The era delighted in attaching “time” to musical forms: Waltz Time, March Time – and, of course, Rag Time – underscoring a rhythmic beat as the marker of musical time; a signature whose heirs include jazz and eventually rock.

Conservative early 20th century listeners associated ragtime with saloons, brothels, minstrel shows, and the bustling “Gateway to the West,” St. Louis, where north-south river commerce fostered an extraordinary cultural melting pot. My St. Louis grandmother, who lived under Bevo Mill, regaled me with stories of shows along the levee. Some of America’s greatest ragtime composers emerged there, bringing with them a new rhythmic language that soon crossed the Atlantic. Listening to the delicate tinkling of LB’s music box today, it takes some imagination to hear the thumping syncopation of a ragtime piano. The Leipzig engineers captured its spirit on a spinning steel disc. 

Because LB’s Symphonion is a mechanical device; the steel discs are susceptible to rust; values vary considerably. A restored music box with 12 or fewer original discs generally commands between $350 and $1,500. Yet, to me, the real value lies in hearing German Romanticism and American Ragtime share the same music album – a reminder that when my grandmother was born in 1901 in St. Louis, music was becoming an international language.