Did handplayed rolls kill the pianola?
The advent of the handplayed piano roll contributed to the demise of the player piano by making the performing of a roll less of an interactive experience. Note the instructions on a QRS handplayed roll leader: This roll is an exact reproduction of the music as interpreted and played by the virtuoso whose name appears on label. By starting roll at tempo indicated, no further use of the tempo lever is required. Discuss!

My reaction? There's no such thing as a hand-played roll! At least, not for popular music. They just called them that because it was the fashion to do so. The louder the claim about the degree of artistry the less likey the roll is to show any individualistic tendencies at all! Roll scanning shows this up very clearly - pop rolls are strictly metrical from start to finish. There are almost no exceptions: only the very earliest Metro-Arts, Hupfeld & Welte dance rolls, and the modern-era QRS 'Celebrity' rolls. Where rolls are truly hand-played (Hupfeld, 88-note issues of Duo-Art classical), it takes a good player to make them come out right. As well as understanding the basic musical structure, you also have to get to grips with what the pianist has done with it. Julian

I really wasn't intending this to be a debate about the legitimacy or otherwise of handplayed rolls. Most serious collectors know that quantization or other forms of manipulation took place after the handplayed master was created, to produce a roll that sounded acceptable. The question of whether the creation and marketing of the handplayed roll concept damaged the 'staying power' and interest in player pianos was more what I was interested in, particularly with statements such as the QRS one I quoted. My thoughts - as the industry gravitated more and more towards the 'personality cult' (ie, named artists, 'Autograph' rolls, etc.) their popularity meant that the wider capabilities of the player piano weren't really exploited as much as they could have been, and the consumer was discouraged from adding their own interpretation to the music, since that had already been done for them.

To expand on my thoughts.. Original, metronomic, faithful-to-the-sheet-music rolls = player piano sounded absolutely awful if you pedalled these rolls without expression. Marketed as a way to put your own interpretation on the music even if you couldn't play. Motivation to add dynamics and tempo control to make the roll sound like a real pianist, get caught up in the fun of it all, and end up being a decent pianolist and start putting your own individual stamp on things. 'New' style rolls that started off as handplayed - sound one-third decent even if pedalled flat as a board, marketed as 'just put it in and push play, don't bother altering the tempo, our pianist has interpreted it already for you to save you the hassle'. So the rolls were in fact, a lot of the time, actively discouraging you from taking part in the experience interactively. Pianolist loses interest in trying to change the interpretation, everything played with minimum of dynamics and phrasing, loses interest in pianola and turns on the wireless. Am I way off base here?

I think the situation was rather more that roll companies accepted and legitimised owners' lack of input by making out that the rolls were hand-played. They adapted their arranging styles to allow for the fact that no effort would be put into their execution. Having a name on them meant you didn't have to feel guilty about your lack of participation. Rather a lot - probably the majority - of "hand-played" rolls have zero input from a pianist. They aren't quantized hand-played, they are simply arranged! Some incorporate and adapt a players' input, but this was a pointless expense because most companies could get equally good results by paying the arranger to work from scratch. By salting the catalogue with some rolls that were moderately honest, the ersatz ones gained credence. It was probably even more straightforward than that - buyers expected to see names on rolls, so names were put on them. There was a musical reason for the new style in roll arranging, which was musical fashion. For dance rolls, only the arranged ones really work, because strictness of beat is the dominating factor. Rubato effects and sloppy beat-keeping are the bane of dancers! The massive rise of the fox-trot and domestic dancing at the end of WW1 must have been a strong influence on the new-style roll. The dates certainly fit. Julian

I think the situation was rather more that roll companies accepted and legitimised owners' lack of input by making out that the rolls were hand-played. They adapted their arranging styles to allow for the fact that no effort would be put into their execution. Having a name on them meant you didn't have to feel guilty about your lack of participation. Rather a lot - probably the majority - of "hand-played" rolls have zero input from a pianist. They aren't quantized hand-played, they are simply arranged! Some incorporate and adapt a players' input, but this was a pointless expense because most companies could get equally good results by paying the arranger to work from scratch. By salting the catalogue with some rolls that were moderately honest, the ersatz ones gained credence. It was probably even more straightforward than that - buyers expected to see names on rolls, so names were put on them. There was a musical reason for the new style in roll arranging, which was musical fashion. For dance rolls, only the arranged ones really work, because strictness of beat is the dominating factor. Rubato effects and sloppy beat-keeping are the bane of dancers! The massive rise of the fox-trot and domestic dancing at the end of WW1 must have been a strong influence on the new-style roll. The dates certainly fit. Julian

well, I agree, but then this is a topic I expanded upon in a recent article! As the years went by, yes, I do think that hand-played material took people away from the hand controls more and more. BUT! Despite all the musical interactive facility available to people I think very few people ever really got to grips with it. Most people were probably average / mediocre pianolists at best much to their own personal chagrin. As a reac tion to this obvious fact the industry re-invented itself a little, diversified and boosted sales by offering hand-played stuff and this sounded livlier at home with minimal effort far more than expecting people to breathe life into metronomic rolls.

The piano industry had, during the 19th century, increasingly become aware that owning a piano was often more to do with class and perceived status than musical output. The arrival of the player, largely thanks to Aeolian Co, marked the arrival of modern marketing techniques to exploit this. Look at the selection of advertisements in Roehl's Player Piano Treasury or Arthur Ord-Hume's Player Piano. Snobby or what? Mussolini's Weber - mein Gott! The industry must also have discovered quite early on that most purchasers were cloth eared, seldom straying beyond pumping out popular song rolls and, to impress friends, dreadful 'four-hand' arrangements of the 93rd Hungarian Rhapsody or other, 'as played by Eric von Nackerthasher'. The boxes of largely unutterably boring rolls that come up on eBay or local auctions provide some sad proof that this was true. So good then that the legacy of all this last century brouhaha remains available so cheaply today for anyone who is up for a truly wonderful interactive musical educative experience. Learning to interpret and understand music from rolls is empowering, just as much as restoring players, be they Triumph autos or Steinway Duo-Arts.

I agree about empowering Solophonola. I think about the only bit of the original Pianola advertising hype that is reasonably accurate is that interpreting rolls can increase your understanding and enjoyment of music. What a shame that the current popular perception of player pianos is simply as a playback device. Whenever I get the opportunity to bore people about my pianola, they inevitably respond with something about listening to Gershwin, Paderewski etc. When I explain that I play and interpret the rolls myself they usually look totally baffled. Only when I get a chance to show people do they understand and begin to appreciate just what fun it is. And it really is fun - I sometimes end up laughing out loud when it goes well (which isn't always), and it does help you to understand the music, OK not as much as actually finger playing it - but a lot more than passive listening. For example, when you first try 'playing' (from the roll I mean) the first variation from the slow movement of the Appassionata sonata it just sounds like a series of boring almost unrelated chords, but after a while you learn to articulate it based on the melody of the theme, and it just takes off - wonderful :) Most of my hand played (read Hupfeld) rolls - fine as they are, are languishing in a box in my attic, while I bash away at the ordinary 88 note rolls. Ironically, I benefit from the popular prejudice as these rolls are a lot cheaper (on the other hand, there are few new ones) And whilst Adam is probably right about the ability of pianolists 80 or 90 yeras ago, it is much easier for us, as we can listen to real pianists playing the pieces time and time again with little or no effort. For this reason I am totally convinced that anyone who likes the piano (and why else would you want a pianola?) can get a convincing performance of most types of music from metronomic rolls. As for the effect of handplayed rolls on the history and ultimate demise of the pianola, I suspect there are many factors involved, and this is just one of many. That some people believed it to be significant is clear from Cyril Joads 1951 article, when commenting on Hand Played and Duo Art rolls he says:- 'The pianola, it was obvious, couldn't survive on these terms as a musical instrument. As mechanical as a gramophone and much more restricted in its range, the pianola rapidly subsided into a machine for the rendering of dance music. It is from this last phase that the common notion of the pianola as a utterly soulless instrument derives. And utterly soulless it was.' I wonder what he would think of the DisKlavier? Neil

Joads 1951 article, when commenting on Hand Played and Duo Art rolls he says:- 'The pianola, it was obvious, couldn't survive on these terms as a musical instrument. As mechanical as a gramophone and much more restricted in its range, the pianola rapidly subsided into a machine for the rendering of dance music. It is from this last phase that the common notion of the pianola as a utterly soulless instrument derives. And utterly soulless it was.' I suppose, by analogy, what Joad is saying is that the pianola becoming a mere music machine was a bit like having 3D virtual reality then reverting back to old fashioned 6x4 color print photos instead...

In my opinion, nothing sounds as bland as a player piano if its pumped only. it is up to the pianolist to impart his own style into the piece being played. If you don't use the controls, I think you would get very bored with the machine. I guess in some way this contributed to the extinction of the player in the old style. However, I really believe that the true killer was the great depression and WW2. Labour was directed elsewhere and the cost of producing so complicated an instrument became prohibitive after WW2 when the world started to regain it's feet. In addition, the weight and space requirements, particularly in cities like NY in comparison to radio must have had a devastating effect on production. All in all, I agree with all the insights in this post, but I think that times and circumstance conspired to end the day of the player piano....until now.... :) Paul

the Great Depression and WW2 did nothing assist the player but it was demonstrably long dead before either of those two occurences. Aeolian suffered the withdrawl of a major backer in 1924 - just at the moment wireless was introduced and only a moment immediately before electrical gramophone recording made the gramophone about 10 times more realistic and desirable than it was before. Other company difficulties hit other companies and often the fact that a lot of these things all coincide in the later 20s lead people to make assumptions but, sometimes, companies just went bust like they do today. In trying to keep up with wireless and the gramophone consumer demand at the time had a thirst for dance music and, as Joad said, this killed off the player as a primarily interactive experience all of which no doubt hastened its demise. But, it was almost dead in the water by that time anyhow - it'd been marketed as an interactive musical experience for over two whole decades by the time the dance music bug really bit and two decades is a good run for any product in the marketplace even today! Go to the old Jerome Kern musical "The Beauty Prize" and there you will find a tune called "The Non-Stop Dancing Craze" which really sums up the early 20s fad for basically non-stop dancing - pianola dance rolls perfectly fitted in with all this and the piano style of 1923 went bananas in indulging this (listen to the Fred Elizalde "History of Jazz" recordings) In "Non Stop Dancing" you will even hear the line "...pianola playing non-stop, everybody's non-stop dancing now" No doubt the real reason for those double-tune Universal rolls issued in the UK fits into this somewhere...

Indeed, the depression hit long after the player piano had started to fade. It's generally considered that radio was the biggest single cause, being quicker on the mark with new music and much cheaper than buying rolls (as well as being novel and better at exploiting the "consumer goods" market than pianos, which were a one-off purchase). Instrument sales had declined by about 95% before the Wall Street crash. The depression probably prevented any major revival in instruments because there were so many nearly-new ones available from defaulted hire-purchase agreements. Roll sales continued a little better into the later 1930s - the last new UK (ex-)Aeolian issues were in March 1939, for instance. WW2 on the other hand probably stopped the decline, because there was a new call for communal music from Army mess halls and the like. The rise in sales kept QRS in business, and their 1940s rolls are surprisingly plentiful. Julian