WORLD’S OLDEST TUNE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19840, 14 May 1927, Page 14 (Supplement)

WORLD’S OLDEST TUNE

MELODY FROM MOUTH ORGAN. A frail, blind old Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, with dark glasses over his sightless eyes, left his quiet home in Lancashire one day recently yml went to London, for tin* sake of old times, and played the “oldest tune in the world” on the mouth organ. It was the March of the Greek Athletes, taken from an ancient manuscript in Athens. Its strange, sweet, rhythms quavered through a room off Oxford Street, and a silent group of stalwart men—competitors in the mouth organ listened to it with a puzzled air. The old player was not a competitor. Mr. Alexander Alexander, F.R.G.S., traveller, author and pioneer of physical training—for that was his name—had come, at the age of 78, to “play an adoration at the throne of the mouth organ.’’ Those were his own words. He played it ever so faintly. “That tune?” he said, in low tones. “It was played three thousand years ago to my distinguished namesake, Alexander. Before I fell on happier times I used to tramp about the world. My mouth organ went with me. “Some folk look askance at the mouth organ,” he said. “But next to the violin it is the most harmonious instrument of them all. Gladstone heard me play it. twice. If our agitators would only take to the mouth organ instead of to the soap box we should have a more patriotic country.”