A player piano that hasn’t moved in decades has an almost eerie quality. The roll mechanism was silent, the pedals were motionless; the entire thing sat in a corner like a piece of furniture that had forgotten its purpose. If you visit enough old houses, you will come across one where nearly all of the owners will tell you the same tale: “It belonged to my grandmother”. It used to play beautifully. It would be wonderful to have it functioning once more. It is more difficult to determine whether that is truly feasible and what is actually needed than most…
Author: Karl Shane Karl
There’s something quietly disorienting about watching a piano play itself. The keys dip and rise without a single finger touching them, the tempo holds, the melody unfolds, and somewhere in the middle of it, you start to wonder who, exactly, is in the room with you. That feeling came back sharply after reading about a visit to an old manor house on a lake, where a host dug through dusty boxes and pulled out a roll of George Gershwin playing his “Rhapsody in Blue”. The mechanism was loaded, the tempo set within seconds, and the room was transformed. One person…
If you walk into the right antique store in London or a dusty auction house in the Midwest of the United States, you might come across a large, exquisite wooden cabinet that is waiting for someone to work its treadles while a roll of paper is loaded inside. “Oh, a pianola” is what most people think when they look at it. A few of them are correct. The majority of them aren’t. It makes sense that there would be confusion. From the outside, these three mechanical piano models the pianola, the player piano, the reproducing piano look sufficiently alike that…
A piece of paper making music has a subtly amazing quality. It’s not quite magic, but it’s close enough that most people never consider how those rolls were made. It makes sense to assume that a pianist sat down and performed flawlessly in order for the music to be recorded. For the most part, that assumption is incorrect. Around 1877, player piano rolls were first produced commercially in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, close to Boston, in a workshop that was leased from the Mason & Hamlin organ factory. The initial employees were skilled reed organ action builders who had a deep understanding…
Hearing Sergei Rachmaninov play the piano in 1925 has a subtle unnerving quality. The man died in 1943, yet here he is, pedaling through his own C-sharp minor prelude with that distinctive weight in the left hand and that specific pause before the melody lands. This is not because the performance is poor; rather, it is remarkable. It feels more like listening in than it does like history. The player piano roll, a punched paper ribbon that initially resembles the output of an old-fashioned adding machine, is the medium in charge of this. Notes are represented by holes. The piano…
A strip of perforated paper, somewhere in a climate-controlled archive, shows Sergei Rachmaninov performing a piece he recorded in New York circa 1926. Something more unusual and possibly more personal than a studio pressing or a phonograph reproduction. In addition to encoding the notes he played, the holes punched into that roll also approximate the weight behind each note. It’s difficult not to find that a little eerie. The American Piano Company, which was established in 1908 as a result of the merger of several significant manufacturers, including Chickering & Sons and William Knabe, created the Ampico reproducing piano system.…
If you’ve ever been in the right place at the right time, there’s a moment when the floor starts to vibrate before you hear anything at all. Then the sound rises from some hidden lung in the walls, full, warm, a little overwhelming. That’s a Wurlitzer theater organ performing its intended function; some of them continue to do so in defiance of all reasonable expectations. It’s worth taking a moment to consider how these instruments came to be in the UK. On December 1, 1924, the first Wurlitzer to be shipped here, a small six-rank device intended for the Picture…
If you’re fortunate enough to find a surviving British picture palace from the 1930s, you can’t help but imagine the sound that once filled those opulent auditoriums. Something much more dynamic than a movie score played over speakers. The sound of a theater organ fills two thousand seats as it rises from a pit or glides on a lift, its pipes concealed somewhere in the walls. A Wurlitzer or a Compton provided that sound for a large portion of Britain’s cinematic heyday; the debate over which was better has never really been resolved. There was a lot of American swagger…
A blurry, sepia-edged photo from about 1921 shows a Wurlitzer organ console inside a picture palace in Chicago. The auditorium’s entire corner is occupied by the instrument. Robert York, the organist, sits on the bench as if he owns the space. Because he did, in a very real sense. This is the portion of movie history that is overlooked. The flickering images, the intertitles, and the actors’ exaggerated gestures to make up for the lack of recorded sound are typically used to explain the silent era. The live musical apparatus that surrounds those movies is rarely given the attention it…
Visitors to a particular building on the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb in Brooklyn reportedly hear an unexpected sound: a rumbling, cascading wall of sound, and their first reaction is to search for the speakers. They don’t exist. They are listening to a Wurlitzer theater organ, which has two thousand pipes, seven thousand moving parts a blower that is half the size of a passenger jet engine. All of these components work together to fill a room in a way that no electronic device can ever quite match. It’s the type of thing that is difficult to fully comprehend until…