2nd Global Piano Roll Meeting, 17-20 June 2022

I had lots of fun presenting at the Global Piano Roll Meeting this week! I gave a paper on Arthur Friedheim and piano roll advertisements, and also had the chance to play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.11 on a beautiful late nineteenth century Bechstein concert grand. The conference was incredible, I learnt so much from the many wonderful and passionate piano roll enthusiasts who have presented. It's been great to put faces to names that I've so often read about!

Within the many subdisciplines of musicology, the area of Piano Rolls may well attract the most diverse range of specialisations. This was perhaps the most obvious takeaway from the “2nd Global Piano Roll Meeting” this week at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern, Switzerland.

A Piano Roll is an encoding of a performance of piano music on paper in the form of punched holes. Designed for playback with some form of self-playing piano, this fascinating technology enjoyed its vogue from approximately 1905 until its sudden death in about 1930. Within this period, self-playing pianos came to be known in two broad types: Pianola, which had to be operated and controlled by a human, and Reproducing Pianos, which were automated and run by electricity. Both types of instruments are pneumatic, that is, air pressure is directed through the punched holes of the piano roll, which in turn operates a mechanism to “play” the piano keys. These self-playing mechanisms may be either built directly into the piano or built as a free-standing unit that plays an ordinary piano with “mechanical fingers.” The latter type is known as a Vorsetzer.
The principal difference between the two types of instruments is how they provide “expression” to the performance. The Pianola, being human-operated, requires human input to direct the expression—while the Reproducing Piano automates this process by encoding expression data on the roll, which is then read by the machine. Both kinds of instrument, when operating well, produce performances that are convincingly expressive. In the case of the Pianola, it requires a human who really knows how to operate it. Being directly engaged in the music-making, the fine level of control and musical understanding required to produce a convincing and expressive performance makes Pianola playing an artform akin to piano playing itself. While the Pianolist (as the skilled pianola player became known) does not himself play the keys, he must sensitively respond to the piano, the music and the acoustics of the room, in much the same way any good pianist does.

The Pianolist pumps foot pedals that supply airflow. The amount of airflow regulates the dynamics and thus may be sensitively controlled by the speed of one’s foot-pumping. A series of levers, operated by the hands, allow the pianolist to subtly manipulate voicings, direct tempo changes and use the sustain pedal. The operation of the Pianola one might compare to playing a bicycle-powered accordion while simultaneously using a pinball machine to conduct an orchestra. Its use became a fine art.

Attendees of the piano roll symposium in Bern were treated to papers on a wide array of topics related to piano rolls, from archiving rolls themselves, to historical overviews of roll catalogues, to methods of digitising them for dissemination in the modern world.

My paper was entitled "Arthur Friedheim: A Case-Study in the Marketing of Piano Rolls". Read the abstract below:

Arthur Friedheim (1859-1932) was one of the great pianists active in the early twentieth-century. Famous as one of Liszt’s favourite pupils, a virtuoso of the highest order, with an extensive repertoire of some of the most difficult music written for the instrument—Friedheim was among the first group of artists to put down recordings for the reproducing piano roll system, his first rolls appearing in 1905. Over the course of his career, Friedheim would produce (according to Larry Sitsky’s catalogue) a total of 70 individual rolls for the major labels: Welte, Triphonola, Duo-Art and Philipps-Duca. From the earliest days of his involvement with the piano-roll industry, Friedheim’s name was used by these companies frequently in advertising and for promotional purposes. His rolls were played at live demonstration concerts in New York. He was drafted to provide testimonials and his picture and signature were included in printed advertisements, alongside those of other great pianists, to lend prestige and credibility to this emerging technology. With the approach of the 1920s, and as the player piano became more widely adopted, we see the tone of these advertisements change—from pure technological amusement to a form of escapist high-art, where the “splendidly and movingly poetical, as well as authoritative” playing of Arthur Friedheim, “one of the great Franz Liszt’s most famous pupils,” could be brought into one’s own home. Long after Friedheim himself had retired from the concert platform, Friedheim’s rolls were being used in concerts alongside live orchestras and singers—and his performa[]()nces became the subject of review by specialised piano-roll critics, highlighting some of the issues of contemporary reception of piano rolls. By the late 1920s, his recordings of Liszt were even being repurposed as “audio-graphic” rolls, featuring printed illustrations and descriptive text, marketed towards children. By following the piano-roll journey of Arthur Friedheim, through a series of documents and anecdotes, this paper seeks to explore the many and multifarious uses and marketing tactics invented by piano roll companies to sell their products.

You can watch my paper here: