At the 1910 World’s Exhi­bi­tion in Brus­sels, Lud­wig Hupfeld unveiled the Phono­liszt-Vio­li­na, an instru­ment once dubbed “the eighth won­der of the world.” A lead­ing mak­er of auto­mat­ed instru­ments in Ger­many, Hupfeld built a com­pa­ny that pro­duced every­thing from phono­la push-up play­ers to play­er pianos. In 1907 he cre­at­ed his most famous inven­tion, the Phono­liszt-Vio­li­na. It fea­tured three ver­ti­cal­ly mount­ed vio­lins, each with a sin­gle active string, played by a rotat­ing bow of 1,300 horse­hairs. Mean­while, pneu­mat­ic bel­lows pressed the strings accord­ing to per­fo­rat­ed rolls. And a play­er piano could accom­pa­ny the vio­lins. Sold in upright home and com­mer­cial mod­els, the Phono­liszt-Vio­li­na enter­tained patrons of upscale hotels, restau­rants, and cafes, before grad­u­al­ly fad­ing into obso­les­cence. The Win­ter­gatan video above, along with the Wel­teMax video below, will give you a nice intro­duc­tion to one of the most com­plex music play­ers ever made.

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If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Karl­heinz Stock­hausen appears, among many oth­er cul­tur­al fig­ures, on the cov­er of Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band. His inclu­sion was more than a trendy ges­ture toward the Euro­pean avant-garde; any­one who knows that path­break­ing elec­tron­ic com­poser’s work will notice its influ­ence on the album at first lis­ten. Paul McCart­ney him­self went on record with his notion that assum­ing the alter egos of the title would allow him and his fel­low Bea­t­les to branch out both cul­tur­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly in their music, incor­po­rat­ing pas­tich­es of Ravi Shankar, B. B. King, Albert Ayler, the Doors, the Beach Boys, and indeed Stock­hausen, whose Gesang der Jünglinge had already inspired “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” on Revolver.

Lit­er­al­ly “Song of the Youths,” Gesang der Jünglinge was an ear­ly work for Stock­hausen, who com­posed it in 1954, when he was still a PhD stu­dent in com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bonn. Inspired by not just his tech­no­log­i­cal inter­ests but also his devout Catholi­cism, he decid­ed to cre­ate a mass for elec­tron­ic sounds and voic­es, with the intent to debut it at Cologne Cathe­dral. (Leg­end has it that he was rebuffed by reli­gious author­i­ties, who insist­ed that loud­speak­ers had no place in a house of wor­ship, but sources dis­agreed on whether he actu­al­ly sought their per­mis­sion in the first place.)

He drew its words from a pas­sage of the Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ry of three boys cast into the fire by King Neb­uchad­nez­zar for their refusal to wor­ship a gold­en idol and kept unharmed by the praise to God they sang amid the flames.

In Stock­hausen’s high-tech ren­der­ing, the boys are rep­re­sent­ed by the voice of twelve-year-old Josef Protsch­ka (who would grow up to become an acclaimed vocal­ist in his own right), and the fire by a col­lage of elec­tron­ic sounds. Though the com­poser’s manip­u­la­tions, part design and part chance, the human and mechan­i­cal halves of the piece become one: Protschka’s vocals break apart and reform into frag­ments of lan­guage nev­er before heard, and the arti­fi­cial­ly gen­er­at­ed tones bend uncan­ni­ly toward the sound of sung vow­els. All this, to say noth­ing of its play­back in five-chan­nel sound in a time when stereo was still a nov­el­ty, would have sound­ed deeply, even dis­turbing­ly unfa­mil­iar to the audi­ence at Gesang der Jünglinge’s pre­miere — and its impact prob­a­bly had­n’t been much dimin­ished by the time of the 2001 per­for­mance above. Stock­house­n’s music may have been after the shock of the new, but it also faced the eter­nal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Karl­heinz Stockhausen’s Great Heli­copter String Quar­tet, Star­ring 4 Musi­cians, 4 Cam­eras & 4 Copters

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Hear Karl­heinz Stockhausen’s Pio­neer­ing Com­po­si­tions for Music Box­es

A Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Brand­ed Car: A Play­ful Trib­ute to the Ground­break­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er

“Tomor­row Nev­er Knows”: How The Bea­t­les Invent­ed the Future With Stu­dio Mag­ic, Tape Loops & LSD

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The world’s most famous organ piece, played on the world’s largest ful­ly func­tion­ing pipe organ. That’s what you have above. Here, organ­ist Dylan David Shaw per­forms Bach’s Toc­ca­ta and Fugue in D minor on the famous Wana­mak­er organ.

Orig­i­nal­ly built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ end­ed up in Philadel­phi­a’s Wana­mak­er’s depart­ment store in 1911. More than a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the organ still resides in the same store. But Macy’s even­tu­al­ly took over Wanamaker’s, and Macy’s now plans to close the store, leav­ing the fate of the organ unknown. Where will the 28,000-pipe organ find a new home? That’s still TBD, some­thing that’s like­ly to get resolved in the months to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Played on the Pipe Organ

The “All of Bach” Project Is Mak­ing Per­for­mances of Every Bach Piece Avail­able Online: Watch 346 High-Qual­i­ty Record­ings

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

In Toron­to, 7,000 singers par­tic­i­pat­ed in Choir Choir Choir’s trib­ute to Ozzy Osbourne, all tak­ing part in a giant sing-along of “Para­noid.”  The first sin­gle on Black Sab­bath’s sec­ond album (1970), “Para­noid” reached #4 in the UK mar­ket and put Sab­bath on the map. The song also became an ear­ly heavy met­al clas­sic. Watch Sab­bath per­form the song live in 1970 here; or watch them per­form it for the very last time on July 5, 2025 here. Then enjoy the Choir Choir Choir trib­ute above.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Free Doc­u­men­tary on the Heavy Met­al Pio­neer (RIP)

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Kids Orches­tra Plays Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Zeppelin’s “Kash­mir”

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

In 1942, John Cage com­posed a short piece of music adapt­ed from the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Titled “The Won­der­ful Wid­ow of Eigh­teen Springs,” the piece was orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned and per­formed by ama­teur sopra­no and socialite Jus­tine Fair­bank, and while we don’t have a record­ing of her per­for­mance, we do have Cage’s sheet music (see first page above, or view the entire book here). It is—as one might expect—an unusu­al piece. It sounds like song, yet isn’t. As the Library of Con­gress descrip­tion of the piece has it:

This essen­tial­ly rhyth­mic speech set against a pat­terned per­cus­sive accom­pa­ni­ment can­not be con­sid­ered a song in the usu­al sense. Cage, how­ev­er, is such an inno­va­tor that one often los­es sight of the fact that if one does not expect con­ven­tion­al sounds, his music is often very well con­struct­ed. Here, for exam­ple, the com­pos­er weaves a hyp­not­i­cal­ly com­pelling pat­tern of rhyth­mic ten­sion and relax­ation, akin to cer­tain non-West­ern music, which is very appro­pri­ate for Joyce’s moody prose.

Cage’s own instruc­tions “for the singer” state: “sing with­out vibra­to, as in folk-singing. Make any trans­po­si­tion nec­es­sary in order to employ a low and com­fort­able range.”

This flex­i­ble arrange­ment allows any­one to pick up the piece, and so we have, direct­ly below, an unlike­ly inter­preter of Cage’s exper­i­men­tal art, the late Ramones singer Joey Ramone. Ramone’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the piece is enthralling sim­ply as a piece of record­ed music.  But it’s also a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, rep­re­sent­ing a con­flu­ence of the fore­most fig­ures in ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music, and late cen­tu­ry punk rock.

The record­ing comes from a whole album of Cage inter­pre­ta­tions by New York punk and new- and no-wave art-rock­ers, includ­ing David Byrne, Arto Lind­say, John Zorn, Deb­bie Har­ry, and Lou Reed. The album, enti­tled Caged/Uncaged—A Rock/Experimental Homage to John Cage, was record­ed in Italy in 1993 and pro­duced by John Cale. You can lis­ten to tracks at Ubuweb.

It’s more than just a trib­ute record; it’s a seri­ous engage­ment with the music of a com­pos­er whose work—like the flu­id prose-poet­ry of Finnegans Wake—seems infi­nite­ly mal­leable and adapt­able to the present. Forty years after com­pos­ing the song Joey Ramone per­forms, Cage said, “we live, in a very deep sense, in the time of Finnegans Wake.” Per­haps we still live in the time of Joyce, and also of John Cage.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Hear a Read­ing of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Set to Music: Fea­tures 100+ Musi­cians and Read­ers from Across the World

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Man­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.