3rd Global Piano Roll Meeting, 25-28 July 2024

On Saturday 27 July 2024, I was lucky enough to present a lecture-recital at the 3rd Global Piano Roll Meeting, held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 25–28 July. This was an international conference of experts, researchers and enthusiasts on all things related to player pianos, pianolas and piano rolls. I also attended the 2nd Global Piano Roll Meeting in 2022, which took place at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern, Switzerland, and you can read about my presentation at that conference here.

As was the case with the Swiss conference, the 2024 Global Piano Roll Meeting highlighted the broad scope of research that is happening in relation to piano rolls. For those who might not be familiar—piano rolls are a means of encoding and reproducing music, that flourished between about 1900 and 1930. Paper rolls were punched with holes which were read by specially-built mechanisms that allowed a piano to “play itself”. The technology is related to early forms of computing, which also used punched paper to store information. Piano rolls use a method of encoding that is similar to the modern digital standard known as MIDI. Occupying an important place in technological history, piano rolls and player pianos are fascinating as a machinery as much as a musical instrument. At the conference, we heard papers on many aspects related to the technology and its history. From an exploration of the history of the Australian piano roll industry, to the latest advancements in digitisation being made by the team at Stanford University. We also heard papers on piano roll conservation, archiving practices, and the challenges of holding piano rolls in museum collections.

The conference gave a much-needed opportunity to celebrate one of the heroes of the piano roll in the modern era, and an Australia national treasure—Dr Peter Phillips. Dr Phillips is an electronics engineer by training, passionately enthusiastic about piano rolls and player-pianos, who has dedicated much of his life to developing systems to digitise piano rolls. His purpose-built pneumatic roll reader transcodes piano rolls from their original paper format into the digital MIDI format, allowing not only for the information on rolls to be preserved, but also to be studied in greater detail, and made more widely accessible than possible ever before. The conference opened with a recital of famous historical pianists, who play again on a modern Yamaha Disklavier piano thanks to the wizardry of Dr Phillips. We also had a rare opportunity to hear Joseph Hofmann (1876–1957) brought back to life to play Chopin’s E minor Piano Concerto with a live string ensemble conducted by Glenn Amer. What a memorable experience! The conference closed with a keynote by Dr Phillips, in which he shared some archival footage of a machine he built in the 1970s to allow Percy Grainger (1882–1961) to play, posthumously, Grieg’s piano concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. You can purchase collections of Dr Phillips’ digitised rolls on his website.

Dr Phillips gave moving tribute to another of Australia’s piano roll heroes, Denis Condon (1933–2012), one of the most important collectors of piano rolls, who was immensely influential in inspiring generations of Australians, including Dr Phillips himself, to become interested in the technology. It is largely thanks to Condon’s life’s work in collecting rolls that Dr Phillips has been able to digitise and make available such a vast number of important rolls. We also heard a phone interview with Emeritus Professor Larry Sitsky, one of Australia’s most beloved musicians, whose work assembling the (still) most complete catalogue of classical piano roll recordings has been pivotal to much subsequent research—Sitsky was also a close friend of Condon. When the Condon Collection was acquired by Stanford University a decade ago, there was understandably considerable heartache felt by the Australian music community, as this internationally significant collection and important piece of Australian cultural heritage was shipped overseas. Yet this conference gave opportunity to witness the commitment that Stanford University has made, and is continuing to make, towards preserving and digitising this collection. While it is certainly a loss to Australia, one can’t help but feel that the collection is in safe and secure hands.

Of course, piano rolls are more than mere technological marvel—they are a means of creating music. The most advanced type of piano roll, known as the reproducing piano roll, was a means of accurately recording and encoding performances of live pianists, and many of history’s greatest pianists were enticed into the recording studios of the piano roll firms. This allows musicians of today to hear and study these performances in minute detail in a way that is often not practicable with early sound recordings. As the reproducing piano roll flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, a large portion of the pianists who made recordings were in fact trained in the nineteenth century, meaning that rolls by-and-large represent a corpus of how the piano was played in the nineteenth century, as much as the early twentieth. Carl Reinecke (1824–1910) is one of the most cherished artists to have recorded on roll—born when Beethoven and Schubert were still alive, and friends with many of our favourite nineteenth century composers, not to mention a highly respected pianist, composer and teacher in his own right—Reinecke’s playing is startling to modern ears, so different from modern assumptions as to how the music of his time should sound. The reproducing piano roll represents a mind-boggling legacy. Today, there are a number of pianists around the world who not only research piano rolls, but also find in them a source of inspiration for their own playing.

The conference gave a fantastic opportunity to hear lecture-recitals given by several of these scholar-musicians who combine research with artistic and sincere music-making. Australian audiences are familiar with the work of Professor Neal Peres Da Costa, highly-respected as a scholar of historical performance, and well-loved as a musician. Peres Da Costa presented a lecture-recital on Schubert performance practice, discussing some of the evidence from rolls and other historical sources including, interestingly, Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s lieder. What do these might tell us about how Schubert was played and sung in the past? There are many findings that challenge modern assumptions. Neal was joined on stage by soprano Anna Fraser and together they presented some truly evocative performances of Schubert.

Joyce Tang, from London, presented a lecture-recital on how musicians of today can collaborate with musicians of the past through the medium of piano rolls. Tang has curated a series of concerts at the Musical Museum in London, in which she invited musicians to play with accompaniment rolls, that is, rolls of the piano parts of chamber works that were designed for musicians to play along with at home. Sometimes these rolls represent a startling performance style, compared with modern expectations, and can be a challenging experience for the modern player. Tang demonstrated her own artistry in collaboration with the ghosts of two historical pianists in two-piano works by Saint-Saëns.

It was wonderful to welcome back to Australia two of the most prominent names in piano roll and historical performance research, Laura Granero and Sebastian Bausch. Granero and Bausch co-presented a lecture-recital on piano duets on piano roll. Piano duets were of course a very popular pastime in the nineteenth century, and continued into the era of piano rolls. We had a window into the home of Carl Reinecke, playing together with his wife Margarethe—and heard, as well, some professional piano duet ensembles who played together on concert stages as well as recorded on rolls. Granero and Bausch demonstrated how with the magic of MIDI, one can use these rolls to bring to life a mechanical duet partner. They also shared fascinating insights into duet performance practice, an area under-represented in research due to the lack of written sources related to this culturally significant music-making that was often confined to the domestic setting. Piano rolls thus offer a unique source of information. Granero and Bausch concluded by playing a short recital of duets, inspired in various ways by their research. Charming and inspired playing by both artists!

My own humble contribution to the conference was also a lecture-recital, entitled "Arthur Friedheim and Liszt's Two Legends". Presenting a few findings from my PhD research on Arthur Friedheim (1859–1932), I talked about Friedheim's performances of these favourite Liszt pieces, which he recorded on Duo-Art piano roll in 1916 and 1919. Friedheim first played the two Legends in concert in Weimar in 1881, not long after he began his studies with Liszt. They retained a place in his repertoire throughout his life, and he was still playing them when he gave a series of live radio recitals in Los Angeles in 1931. I talked about some of Friedheim’s ideas about Liszt performance, and compared his roll recordings with those by another Liszt pupil, Bernhard Stavenhagen (1862–1914). Friedheim almost always played the two Legends as a pair when he played them in concerts, and I was interested to try doing that myself. And so, I concluded my presentation by playing the two Legends, as a pair, in an interpretation inspired by my research. It was a wonderfully rewarding experience to play before such a warm and receptive audience.

One of the highlights of the conference was an excursion to Fairground Follies, a truly fabulous museum of vintage mechanical organs and other musical instruments. This will be the subject of another blog post—stay tuned!