Classics on Command

From 1900 to the late 1920s, when the quality of phonograph recordings was poor and radio not yet developed, player pianos were a popular source of music in homes and penny arcades. But the Depression halted the quickly growing industry; the much cheaper phonograph and the growth of radio eventually rendered the player piano obsolete.

The spotlight shone again on these forgotten instruments in October, when Stanford acquired the Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls, a private Australian collection of more than 7,500 rolls and 10 player pianos, and launched the Player Piano Project. Organized by the department of music and Stanford Libraries' archive of recorded sound, the project encourages study and research into all that relates to the player piano and organ. One goal is to evaluate how sound recording influences performance techniques.

The player piano captured performances from the late 19th and early 20th centuries almost perfectly. Advanced versions of the instrument allowed composers to play their work right onto a roll, replacing hand-punched sheets. The machine could create perforations as a work was played, achieving exact reproductions of nuanced tempo changes, chord progressions and strength of key strikes that a simple transcription from sheet music could never replicate. The new collection will provide the opportunity to analyze rolls played by the likes of Saint Saëns, Busoni, Bartók, Mahler, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Joplin.

First the collection must be catalogued. Faculty and staff are working alongside experts in the field to curate and set a documentation standard for the extensive holdings—Condon's collection brought Stanford's own from around 1,500 never-played rolls to just over 9,000.

Jonathan Manton, the project's roll master, says a preliminary inventory resulted in a list of data such as the compositions represented on each roll, the pianist involved and the roll number. He notes that "piano roll collections have not really received that level of description," since most are privately owned. "So we're actually devising some new standards as to how you catalog and describe rolls in terms of the library sense. We're having to set some precedents."

PLAY ON: Perforations on the piano roll are the equivalent of notes on sheet music. (Photo: Kurt Hickman)

Manton and other project members will be breaking new ground in other ways. They hope to create an effective scanning method for the medium so that they can digitize the rolls into an extensive archive of visual and audio reproductions, including a Musical Instrument Digital Interface link for each roll. "The great thing about being here at Stanford is pulling in all of these different resources: computer science, mechanical engineers, anyone and everyone we can tap into," Manton says.

Digital access would provide researchers with an extensive and accessible resource and help preserve the aging paper rolls. For now, the music department is playing it safe. Rolls are not to be played unless they have duplicates, both in good condition. A few of the pianos have been set up and calibration has begun to make sure the rolls—each made to be played on a specific company's instrument—can be heard.

While most rolls are in playable condition, the pianos are not all stage ready. One snag: A few of them were originally fitted with ivory keys but weren't old enough to qualify as antiques and be exempted from the strict ivory importation ban, so the ivories had to be removed and stay behind in Australia. This and a few other factors suggest that if the collection is ever to be fully functional, a huge restoration endeavor will be needed.

Despite this, the music department hopes to share these instruments with the community. Jerry McBride, head of the music library and archive of recorded sound and a key player in acquiring the Condon collection, sings the importance of experiencing these instruments firsthand. "Even though we're mainly listening to music [nowadays] through loudspeakers," he says, "to be able to hear the piano play it is really very amazing."

If all goes according to plan, on April 18 a concert in conjunction with Stanford Symphony will showcase some of the rolls and instruments from the collection, giving the audience a chance to hear music as it was played in the early 20th century. "Performers from around this time played with a lot more interpretive freedom of classical music than most modern interpreters do today," McBride explains. "You can hear how the pianist is doing a lot of speeding up and slowing down and slight hesitations, and things like that for expressive purposes. Not that people don't do that at all today, but not nearly to the degree that they do in these recordings."

Since Stanford acquired the Condon Collection, player piano enthusiasts have contributed two other sizable collections. Larry Sitsky, an Australian composer and scholar, donated more than 300 original piano rolls. Stanford also received the Richard David Pawlyn Collection of Organ Players and Rolls—more than 1,200 organ rolls along with Aeolienne and Duo-Art organ players.