second wind

[calimac]

Yeah, more about my SFCV article on the Stanford historical performances symposium, because a week has passed since publication, which means it's Letters to the Editor time!

My editors asked me to keep my article well under 2000 words. Why? Because people don't like to read stuff longer than that on the web. I think that says a lot about the web, but anyway ... So there was a lot said at the symposium that got left out of the article*, and sure enough the three published letters, all apparently from non-attendees, zero in on exactly those things. So I got to write a reply (in extreme haste, owing to odd editorial customs) trying to fill in the holes a little.

The first writer was shocked to learn that musicologists are actually giving historical credence to player piano rolls, which he claims are totally unreliable. In my reply I may have shown a little testiness at his having taken an 1800-word journalistic article as a full analysis of a complex musicological problem. But his complaints all came up at the time; some were accepted and some were considered and denied. The correspondent doubts the validity of piano rolls because sometimes they differ from sound recordings by the same person. Indeed they do, but the possibility was raised at the symposium that maybe it's the sound recordings which don't accurately represent the performer's concert style.

So who knows? Certainly not I. The third writer seems to mistake me for an expert on the subject. But I'm actually just a reporter and music-lover who was there to listen and learn, and only tentatively to offer a few opinions of my own, and those more on my personal taste than on musical or historical issues.

*as those of you who asked for my full notes now know; you did all get them, yes?

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Yes, I got the notes. Then I promptly went out of town, so I haven't been at the same computer they were on. I look forward to reading them when I've caught up with LJ and some blogs. I expect to mark some blogs as read.

Small world; my teacher in Colorado was also a pupil of Olga Samaroff (as was one of the letter writers).

QRS and Duo-Art were the two reproducing pianos I knew of (with some dynamics). One of the processes, I don't know which, apparently recorded dynamics along with the note information... years ago, I heard something about mercury switches and marks on the roll... after which, I believe, an expert roll cutter had to translate those marks to the rolls themselves. I could see Scriabin not recognizing himself after such a two-part process with human judgment intervening. Nonetheless, I love some of those piano roll recordings, suspicious absence of warts and all.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The player piano we had at home was QRS.

I now vaguely remember a string of intermittent holes running along one margin of the piano rolls that may have had something to do with adjusting dynamics. Also, some of the note holes, instead of being continuous, were dotted. This may have had the effect of decreasing the air pressure and consequently lowering the dynamics, but I'm not sure. I certainly don't recall the sound volume on the player piano being affected by much other than the amount of pressure applied to the activation pedals.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I wish we'd had a player piano at home. In the 70s, I wanted a Pianocorder, and now they have pianos that record to a computer. I can do that with what I have, but the keys don't go up and down when it plays back, so where's the fun in that? (VanBasco's Karaoke Player is a freeware program that simulates a player piano on a PC. I use it for playing with the piano rolls that Terry Smythe scans and puts up on his page.) Grandma Babbit's old piano had been a player piano, but around 1950, Dad removed the player mechanisms for reasons that were probably sound, but which seemed vastly unfair to me. The Steck grand piano in his studio at Colorado State University was formerly a Duo-Art piano, and some of the tubes could still be seen. At least I did get to play with player pianos at the music store Dad worked at for years. I'm still looking for that version of "Hindustan."

It's possible that the dynamic adjustment on your QRS piano was shut off or had lost some function over the years. Player pianos are rather temperamental. Tubes and bellows get stiff and cracky (which I expect is why Dad took the works out of Grandma's old piano), and after a while the things just hiss a lot.

Smythe, incidentally, scans a number of QRS and Duo-Art rolls along with non-expressive ones. There are even organ rolls. No orchestrions or Violinolas, though, that I know of. I think he's gotten more than 5,000 rolls available for download now in about 20 zip files.