Perforetur and Southport Music Rolls
By Dan Wilson
John Phillips said:
> Thomas Henden asks if there are any modern companies that cut
> Themodist rolls. There are at least two in the U.K., Thomas:
> Southport Music Rolls and Perforetur Rolls. The latter company
> even put a Metrostyle line on the rolls I bought from them.
> These rolls are not cheap but many of them are pieces of music
> never transcribed to music roll before. I don't have
> their addresses here at work but I can find them at home if
> necessary. I bet Dan Wilson replies to Thomas' query too, with
> much better information than I have provided!
Well, I will if you say so, John, but Southport is Malcolm Robinson and a single machine in a bedroom who makes one roll a night and is very picky about issuing rolls that aren't totally right; and Perforetur is Rex Lawson's own classical marque. I think the Metrostyled rolls were actually a series of accurate replicas made by Southport of a 1920s Aeolian UK special series of pieces composed for the Pianola, for which the country was scoured for originals. I had two originals but I didn't like the music on any of the others so never bought any.
Southport is available from Frances Broadway and Perforetur from Mike Boyd; the addresses were been given in (let me check) MMD 960801:
Frances Broadway ("Roll Bid Enterprise" - postal auction)
39 Sydner Road (NB Sydner not Sydney)
Stoke Newington
LONDON
N16 7UF tel +44 171 254 6145
fax +44 171 249 0130 (dedicated line)
Michael Boyd
Universal Music Co
18 Cinque Ports Street
Rye
East Sussex TN31 7AD tel +44 1797 223688
Southport rolls are mostly new medleys in hotel-lounge or cocktail-bar soft jazz style recorded by pianists in the vicinity of Blackpool, the great seaside resort on the Irish Sea. The paper is slightly hygroscopic so a damp liver like me needs to bag them with silica-gel sachets to keep them the right width - in the USA they'd be fine.
[ Try dry wine for a damp liver. ;) -- Robbie
Perforetur is an idiosyncratic list of classical pieces ranging from Mozart to Nancarrow but including some seminal Rachmaninov never done by the old companies - notably the two-piano Suite No 2 Op 17 of which a superb recording was made in the 70s by Ashkenazy and Previn, and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini which wasn't composed until 1934, 4 and 3 rolls respectively. I have mentioned the Pineapple Poll suite by Sullivan here before. These are not "hand-played" but cut from score so you have to know how they go to get real enjoyment from them.
There aren't more than about twenty avid classical buyers so Perforetur is in a bit of a lull at present. Mike Boyd does do some more popular titles, some of them excellent 88-note Themodist versions of Ampico dance music and some transcribed onto computer disk from score. He just calls these "88-Note" and hates doing any promotion so you more or less have to go to Rye and break the door down. Usually he's busy rebuilding pianos, the perforator is cold and still and it's a matter of seeing what he has in stock. A lot of Perforetur titles exist on disk but not in actual rolls. (He owes me half a Rachmaninov 3rd concerto movement and a prototype from a disk by me of Brahms's Op 9 Schumann Variations from three years ago, so he's not going to get a better notice than this until he delivers !)
Rex Lawson's first Perforetur list was actually cut by QRS on their Duo-Art machine. He is now designing a computer interface for Keystone and hopes to be able to get a regular subscription list going with their aid. He can be contacted directly at:
64A Honor Oak Park
LONDON
SE23 1DY and phone messages can be passed via Denis Hall,
+44 (0)181 462 3384
Incidentally, I have some rolls here on the Hot Piano Classics label (issued by Paul Johnson who is a MMD subscriber) which are effectively Themodist rolls: maybe Robbie can tell us more about these as he is cited as the pianist !
Dan Wilson
[ Noteurs comment:
[
[ The first Themodist roll I made was chopped with the knife and,
[ regarding the snakebites, I resolved "never again." Subsequent
[ rolls were assisted by the computer; I wrote a program to generate
[ the snakebite accents according to the accented notes in the
[ Midi file.
[
[ This proved especially effective on a roll of the novelty xylophone
[ piece, "Triplets". With the Themodist operating the solo part
[ distinctly stands above the piano accompaniment. As indicated by the
[ composer, the piano plays a different syncopation from the solo (57%
[ vs. 75%), thus authorizing the slight time differential between piano
[ and solo notes. Note that the xylophone solo and the piano accompani-
[ ment _both_ receive accents independently, as in a live performance.
[
[ Robbie Rhodes |
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