Part 2: 112 Key Mortier Dance Organ Dansorgel plays Urbain van Wichelen

[mortierfreak]

the composer is louis marischal-as per credits on Ronnex 20070-78 rpm record featuring the Decap organ from the famous dance hall/café "In de 14 Billekens"

Urbain Van Wichelen also built organs and is buried in my hometown.

Keep up the good work!

[oldbear52]

This is a Big one with big sounds!!!

Great video, Nick!

[perleeman]

Mortier books with numbers are not restricted to Peersman arrangements. In fact I believe this organ has many Mortier books from the 30s which will actually be Bartier arrangements as he was Mortier's staff arranger then. Peersman took over from Bartier in 1941.

[nickn5nl]

@perleeman Hi, thanks for your comment! Useful to know that information - of course the organ also does have one or two 'proper' Bartier books, I did video some of these, and some of the 'generic' Mortier books too.

[geetarxist]

crazy

[petermackett37]

The first tune is on both the Mortiers in the Hine collection in Shaftesbury,Dorset,both being Schollaert arrangements.,i see you found Woody Woodpecker,i couldn't find this book when i was there a few years ago!,the titles are always notoriously hard to read on these old books,they are mostly in Flemish!

[nickn5nl]

@petermackett37 Hi Peter - that's interesting that Schollaert also arranged the tune for Mortier - and yet this one is a Wichelen book. I suppose that did happen now and again. And yes, I can hardly ever find the books I want without a very long search.

[petermackett37]

@nickn5nl Many of the Belgian arrangers did their own versions of the popular tunes of the time,they also worked freelance as well as for Mortier and others so that is why you will find several different arrangements of the same tune!,there are many books on this organ with a Mortier cover and you will find that if they have a number inside they will be Eugene Peersman arrangements.

[nickn5nl]

@petermackett37 Thanks for that :) After my Wichelen videos I will have one featuring several of those Mortier books - they don't tend to play as well because they use the accordion as solo, which is too quiet really - but they are still fun books with good arranging.

[bietebouwer]

@nickn5nl @petermackett37 It would be interesting to see the handwriting in which the book number was written. Peersman's writing was quite 'large' and careless. I've found that there is no consistecy in the numbering of the books - sometimes a book was numbered, sometimes not.

[bietebouwer]

The first tune is "Aai moeke, aai vake" (Pierre Dedeken) - Peter Craig has an arrangement by Louis Somers on his 84-key Mortier of this tune, where it is also labeled as "De lievekenspolka". (I don't think that the last tune has anything to do with Ramses Shaffy, but alas ... I don't know the original composer or performer).

Those old arrangers surely were enormously versatile!

[nickn5nl]

@bietebouwer That's a big help, thank you! It's amazingly hard to understand the handwriting on the inside front cover of the old music books - and Google doesn't always help very much with finding out possible spellings. There's plenty more Wichelen books still to come :)