Part 18.  Player Piano Playing vs Piano Player Playing, Confused much?

There’s a very good chance that you’ve heard of the Pianola.

There’s also a very good chance that when you think of the Pianola you think of the upright piano with a window in the middle containing a scroll with holes in the paper. This is because that this was by the far the most popular and well marketed Brand of player piano’s, but the Pianola actually started life as a different device altogether a piano player (and an automatic one at that). Confused yet?

Just to make it a little more confusing, Pioanola is a brand created by the Aeolian Company, there also other brands of Piano Players created by other companies such as The Apollo, The Angelus, the Pleyela and the Simplex which had one of my favorite slogans, “anyone can play anything”

Ok, now that Ive turned a perfectly good introduction into a confusing heap of information let me attempt to get a shovel and dig my way out..

A Piano Player is an automatic device that is separate to the piano or organ. It sits in front and above the keyboard, it reads a perforated scroll and then depresses the keys using small fingers made of wood and metal covered in felt

A Player Piano is a Piano that reads scrolls as part of the inner workings and then strikes the different notes from inside the piano think of it as an all in one device.

The First published Piano Player seems to have been invented around 1879 by Merrit Gally.

Aeolian’s first Pianola was released in 1895, the Pianola Institute describes this as the first truly musical Piano Player.

Even though Piano Players were at first more successful than Player Piano’s it should be noted that, the latter were released onto the market first.
(I’m not making this any less confusing am i???)

The player piano had the edge initially because many of those interested in the technology already had a piano and were loath to throw it out to replace it with what at the beginning was an unproven product.

The Piano Players were a less expensive addition.

The Pianola was a huge hit, and were shipped all round the world, Queen Victoria was even known to have one!

The Pianola stayed as Piano Player until 1903 when the now very successful Aeolian Company bought the well very respected Weber Piano Company.
This meant for the first time the Aoelian Company could build both pianos and piano players, the result was the release of  Pianola as a Player Piano.
Now The Aoeloan Company and Player Pianos had the two factors they needed to become popular:
1) It had been around and was a proven technology
2) It could be installed into a piano with a good reputation.

This was improved further,  after January 1909, when The Aeolian Company signed an exclusive deal with Steinway to be able to install a foot operated Pianola mechanism into their Pianos.

To give you an idea just how seriously these instruments were taken; in 1908 the piano industry got together and worked out a universal standard (like mp3, or midi today) that they could all agree on that got rid of the biggest weakness of both Player Pianos and Piano Players.
Previously the maximum range of notes that could be played from the scrolls were 65, now thanks to advancements in hole punching technology (heh what a funny statement) they could read and play the full piano scale of 88 notes.

For some the other major flaw of the scrolling music players were it’s lack of automatic tempo. I say for some, because many players believed and still believe today, that controlling the tempo, interpreting the flow of the music, much like a conductor does, is the art of playing these instruments.
This is an important point. Even though many would see the pumping of pedals and slight adjustments by hand as a passive interaction to music, for Pianola Players of then and now it’s anything but.

Player Piano players and Piano Player players (another great statement) were all seen as musicians of sorts. These technologies were still active – they required interaction, there was a human performer between the instrument and the audience.

These magic playing pianos effectively increased the distribution of music throughout the western world, and much of the rest.

Like all inventions in this series it changed the way we relate to music, it changed what we heard, and how we heard it.

It wasn’t until the decline in popularity of this technology, that the phonograph and radio emerged to change our relationship with sound even more permanently.

But we’re not finished with these automatic keyboards players yet. There is one more important step to cover with these Majestic Music Roll machines.

Find out what in PART 19  CLICK HERE

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CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music