“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said Paul, “not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue -or rather by vice -of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.
-John Philip Sousa, 1906
On Monday, we heard a sample of piano roll recordings made by famous composers in the early years of the twentieth century. In the days before radio and high fidelity recordings, the player piano (or pianola) brought mass-produced recorded music into homes.
A number of composers wrote music specifically for the pianola. Perhaps the most prolific and daring was the American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997). In the late 1930s, just as radio and phonograph were driving it to obsolescence, Nancarrow began composing almost exclusively for the Ampico reproducing player piano. The music which emerged was so rhythmically complex and dense that it could only be played by a machine. Listening to Nancarrow’s music, I’m reminded of the free-wheeling, experimental spirit of Henry Cowell. Studies for Player Piano, Vol. I and II is built on the blues. The 20th study seems to anticipate the early minimalism of Terry Riley’s In C.
https://youtu.be/1GENsMqIDT0
In 1917, the Aeolian Company commissioned Igor Stravinsky to write Étude pour Pianola. The company wanted to showcase the new dynamic possibilities of the player piano:
A diabolical fugue takes over in Paul Hindemith’s 1926 Toccata for Player Piano. This exhilarating music might give you the sense of a runaway, unstoppable technology:
John Adams’ Homage to Conlon Nancarrow
John Adams’ 1997 piano concerto, Century Rolls, recalls the sounds of the pianola. Adams writes,
The germinating idea behind Century Rolls was an experience I had late one night listening to a recording of old piano roll music from the 1920s. I was struck in an unexpected way by the fact that, regardless of the performer or the repertoire–be it Gershwin or Rachmaninoff, Jelly Roll Morton or Paderewski–the technology of the piano roll transformed the music into a realm that could not have been anticipated before what Walter Benjaman called the “age of mechanical reproduction.”…The last movement, “Hail Bop” (so named in honor of my misapprehension of the name of last year’s comet, Hale-Bopp) is a kind of homage to Nancarrow’s peculiarly whimsical way of wedding American vernacular music to a spiky, disjunct rhythmic texture.
Here is that frenetic and exhilarating final movement, performed by Emanuel Ax:
Disappointment Lake
In some ways, the player piano is the direct descendant of today’s MIDI sequencers and electronic music. John Adams’ 1992 album, Hoodoo Zephyr, celebrates this technology with great relish. The album’s second track, Disappointment Lake, evokes a haunting Western landscape- perhaps the desolate stillness of a long-abandoned mining town. Suddenly, the silence is broken by the strident sounds of a saloon player piano:
Recordings
- Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano iTunes
- Stravinsky: Étude pour Pianola (The Aeolian Company: Original Compositions & Arrangements for Pianola) iTunes
- Hindemith: Toccata for Player Piano iTunes
- Adams: Century Rolls, Emanuel Ax, Christoph von Dohnányi, Cleveland Orchestra iTunes
- Adams: Hoodoo Zephyr iTunes
Why is it that folk from across the pond have this obsession with the Pianola as a purveyor of mechanical sounding music? I have loads of rolls of the most delicate music, and I don’t mean reproducing piano rolls, either. I have played the Pianola since the early 1970s, I’ve performed in concertos with orchestra, including the Rachmaninoff 3rd Concerto, with the Brussels Philharmonic (for which I made my own rolls), the Carnaval des Animaux with another Pianola friend, for the CIty of Birmingham Orchestra, for the Last Night of their Proms. I have hundred year old rolls of Debussy’s “La Mer”, “Jeux”, “Printemps”, and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloë”, the complete Mozart Requiem, some wonderful Mozart piano concertos, the entire Bach 48, a good sprinkling of Scarlatti, and so on – I don’t want to bore you! Then there are the rolls I’ve made myself, which have included Stravinsky’s 1919 version of “Les Noces”, which most conductors play rigidly, obviously fixated on the idea of mechanism. I first played that with Pierre Boulez at a radio concert in Paris in 1981, and subsequently in concert halls in London, Switzerland and at the Philharmonie in Berlin. Dear old deceased Igor introduced me to my wife at Les Noces in Belgium! Conductors like large choirs, because it looks good for them, but on the whole it ruins that version of “Les Noces”, which was entitled “Les Noces Villageoises”. The accompaniment calls for a Pianola, two Hungarian cymbaloms and a good helping of percussion, but a large choir drowns all that. I\m 76 now, and it may be that my days of Pianola playing are coming to an end, at which point that version of Les Noces will never be played in the way that Igor intended. Computers have taken over, with conductors listening to a click track on headphones. The reason they need a click track is because there is no-one else in the world who can play the Pianola and follow a conductor, unless the music is specially written to be easy to synchronise, and the bells at the end of “Noces” take some doing, for all the accompanimental musicians.
You are an orchestral violinist, so you will be used to chamber music as well. I’ve played the Mendelssohn D minor trio with musicians from the London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern. Before we started to rehearse in Germany, the violinist said that we might rehearse half a minute or so, obviously fearing the worst, but I’m pleased to say that both the string players ended up smiling and digging into their parts. As you will probably know, the cello begins the first movement, and he was innocently worried about how we would fit together if he had to start! He wouldn’t have thought that if I had been playing the piano. I simply listened to his first beat and came in as appropriate, and the same applied to the rest of the piece. Chamber music is a co-operative venture, and sensible musicians respond to the give and take of the music. That’s what I do, and the notion that the Pianola is rigid and inexorable only came about because the Aeolian Company, which manufactured it and effectively led the US player industry, could not countenance the notion of expert Pianolists, which in their judgment would get in the way of advertisements emphasising that ANYONE could play it, which was better for profit.
Neither of the videos that you shared, of Stravinsky’s “Étude pour Pianola” and Hindemith’s “Toccata für mechanisches Klavier” were played on the instruments for which the compositions were written. The Youtube videos were recorded on a Bösendorfer Ampico grand, belonging to a man called Jürgen Hocker, who was absolutely desperate to make his name, so he used a reproducing piano, and a man called Francis Bowdery dreamed up the dynamic coding, but you won’t find Francis credited. There are frequent dynamic markings in the EpP score, and it’s up to the Pianolist to make what he can of them, just as any musician would respond to such instructions. Probably no-one will ever have bothered to explain to you how much sensitivity is required on the foot pedals. Admittedly, Stravinsky was hardly looking for elegant phrasing, but at the very least there is a certain humour in his work, and it needs coaxing out. In addition the Pianola is designed with a wonderfully subtle tempo lever, so that one can shape phrases, and give a little hesitation before an accented note or chord. I often say to musicians that in certain circumstances a conductor’s arm is very similar. Imagine that you are accompanying an opera, and that the soprano or tenor has decided to hold back a bit more than usual. If you are in a decent opera house, you, as one of the violinists, can probably hear exactly what is going on, but you still need the conductor to raise his arm a bit more, if for no other reason than that it reassures you that he is concentrating properly. That movement of his arm upwards is very similar to the Pianolist moving the tempo lever to the left, and just as with the conductor, it becomes second nature, no doubt after many years of practice.
There were a number of good Pianolists who were employed by the US Aeolian Company to organise concerts in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, but on the whole they didn’t last long, and my guess is that they found the insistence on keeping their names a secret a rather depressing enterprise. You are obviously near to Rochester, and East Rochester is where the Aeolian-American Corporation ended up. I have one of their No Parking signs, which was the very devil to cram into my suitcase! I’m about to start on a long article on Public Concerts with Pianolas, of which there were many tens of thousands, all over the USA and other parts of the Western World.
I’m not so well at the moment, so I’ll stop meandering on and go and have my dinner. If you want to know more about Pianolas, do by all means get in touch, and you’ll find a detailed page on Stravinsky and the Pianola if you look for it on the website that I run. https://www.pianola.org
All the best,
Rex Lawson