Pianolists at Chicago AMICA Fest
By Dan Wilson
Eric Bergstrom said:
> My most current project is a 65/88 note Aeolian Pianola push up
> player, which was a complete tear down and reconstruction project.
> It is kind of special, as it will be used in the first week of April
> during a 'Birthday festival for the player piano" presented by the
> Chicago AMICA. It will feature Rex Lawson and Dennis Hall of London,
> who are internationally known pianolists. The festival will be a
> 5-day event presented in Aurora and Sugar Grove, Illinois. I will
> post full information as soon as I find out who the main contact is.
One amendment to the Festival details is that Denis Hall can't come for that week, so I am standing in for him. I am not an internationally known pianolist, but (Rex Lawson's blurb for the London recitals we've often done together says:) "a pianolist's pianolist". You'll have to work out what that means for yourselves.
My step-mother Eileen was an excellent pianist, was born in the era when "pianola" meant everything that was loud, coarse and unfeeling, and she execrated player pianos, especially if I could be present to hear her. Me and my upright 88-note 1927 Ibach were the downside of being married to my father. Fair enough, I was no musician.
But I tried. One weekend her grand-daughter Genevieve (insert French accents - she is Parisian), also an excellent pianist, came to stay. She liked the Ibach and would practise on it. One afternoon she had gone out for a stroll and Eileen was several doors away in the kitchen, so I thought I would sneak in a bit of borrowed time with the roll of Dvorak's "Humoresque". I was about halfway through this when the door burst open.
"Oh, Genevieve, that is absolutely *lovely!* ... Arrgh ! It's you !" and the door slammed shut just as fast as it opened. I had graduated.
These 65/88-note pushup players, in my view, are the key to roll-playing wonderland, because you can have them on any piano with a standard-width keyboard and they play feather-soft or trombone loud. I've played mine 'till the finger bearings rattle.
Considering they were no more than a stretched version of the (in Australia and UK, well-known) 65-note pushup with a double tracker-bar and a monster sliding change-over switch, they're a remarkably successful design and could probably have been sold in large numbers right through to the 1930s. Aeolian withdrew them in 1916, saying mendaciously that there was no demand for them (there are plenty of references in the 1920s trade press to customers asking in salesrooms for those "danged pushups"). What they meant was, the profit wasn't good enough.
There's a funny thing about these pushups: they all have hard plated bars where they fetch up against the keyboard lip. Were Aeolian trying to damage every piano they were used on ? The answer is not at all -- Aeolian were trying to _protect_ every piano they were used on. The kit of parts when new included two notched steel bars looking a bit like this (view with fixed-pitch font)
_______________________ which were screwed loosely, facing each
/ |__ other, to the underside of the keybed,
| O hole / such that when swung out against two
\________________________/ stop screws, they received the pushup
stop screw O | snugly and located the fingers exactly
underside of keybed | without any need for jockeying or
looking up | adjustments.
For hand playing, the bars were simply swung inboard, out of sight -- where, alas, they always were when the pushup was sold on, so that none have survived except, recently in London, on two old grands. I have exact dimensions for anyone interested -- but anything like this will work. (We use foam pads.)
Rex tells me Eric is short of the bits needed to work the sustaining pedal. In my time I've made two sets of these, so I must get onto him by email. ...
Dan Wilson
[ Your stories will be the hit of the AMICA festival, Dan ! -- Robbie |
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