Introduction
By Walter Tenten
I am Walter Tenten, living in Germany in a small location in equal distance to Aachen, Cologne and Duesseldorf. Grown up during a period, where nobody was interested in music, and in a home which lacked any instrument apart from a radio receiver, my first encounter with automatic musical instruments was about 7 years ago, when I bought a pumper player piano made by Mehlin, N.Y. As usual I had to do some restoration on it prior to listening for the first time.
Looking for help, I came across the GSM, the German equivalent to AMICA and/or MBSI. In 1993 I met Horst Mohr, who had built an opto-electronic reader for piano-rolls. He introduced me to Juergen Hocker (president of GSM), who owns two Ampico pianos. The three of us joined in a project to make the first live performance of Nancarrows Study Nr. 40 for two reproduction pianos. This oeuvre had never been successfully played on two pneumatic pianos because of obvious synchronization problems. Horst Mohr was able to deliver a MIDI image of any piano roll and together we developed what was necessary to control the piano pneumatics by means of an electro-pneumatic controller. The result was presented to the public during the famous "Donaueschinger Musiktage" in Oktober 1994, where the above mentioned Nancarrow composition was put on stage.
As another result of this very enjoying and successful cooperation my interest for pneumatic pianos was extended to the line of reproduction pianos. With the kind intervention of Terry Smythe I could acquire a Haines Bros Ampico piano which is now the center of my living room in every respect. Once again my thanks to Terry for his share in this transaction!
As the owner of an Ampico piano and with a spare electro-pneumatic controller I had the idea to reproduce MIDI compositions of any origin on my piano as a sort of a supplement to the rolls which I have. Here I found some problems which I will post later in this group asking for advice and comments.
Meanwhile a lot of thanks and acknowledgement to Jody for moderating this group so efficiently and successfully and at the same time to Terry for his assistance in starting the group early this year.
Walter
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Dr.-Ing. Walter Tenten business address:
home address: Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH
(Research Center)
Bruchweg 13 Zentrallabor fuer Elektronik
D-52441 Linnich (Central Laboratory for Electronics)
D-52425 Juelich
Germany phone: **49-2461-61-6542
fax: **49-2461-61-3990
phone: **49-2462-6601 email: W.Tenten@kfa-juelich.de |
(Message sent Tue 5 Sep 1995, 18:55:11 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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