Still More on Metrostyle
By Dan Wilson
Coincidentally, the Bulletin of the (London) Player-Piano Group has just come out with this 1922 eye-witness account of the Hayes Metrostyling tower by Harry Ellingham, part of his book "How To Use a Player-Piano":-
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The expression marks on the face of the roll, the line guides for tempo, the coloured lines for loud and soft, are placed on the first finished roll by hand and then the remainder of the new rolls are marked by a clever kind of machine pen. This machine is roughly in the following form:-
There are ten or a dozen glass shelves in a case. The case is open at both ends and a dozen rolls travel flat over the shelves, one roll to a shelf, all travelling at the same pace and in perfect alignment one with the other. A dozen pen points or inked wheels, one for each glass shelf, lie on the paper as it travels over the shelf and at the top shelf stands the operator holding a lever with pointer attached. This lever operates all the dozen pens at once and is guided by the operator as he holds his pointer to the top roll (hand marked) and traces the pointer along the line of the master roll. In this way a dozen rolls are marked at once, instead of each having to be traced separately by hand, as was the case not very long ago.
It is significant that this pen machine and several others have been invented by members of the staff of the factory through which I was allowed to go.
---unquote
This account makes it clear that both dynamic lines were being applied by "tower", suggesting that the "Votey" loud/soft line (which is to say, the kind where "ff" is in the middle of the paper and not on the right, which the Orchestrelle Co started with in 1903) had been applied by stencil and the tower was an economy move. The Votey line allows words to be stencilled on simultaneously on the right of the roll, but song rolls with loud/soft lines were unknown in the UK after 1919 and the few musical directions ("Allegro" etc.) were rubber-stamped on. Mike Boyd in Rye still uses some of these rubber stamps, now very long in the tooth.
The Votey line was not entirely abandoned. I have several classical rolls from the early 20s which have it in grey rather than "tower" green.
Dan Wilson
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