Just had a phone call from Robbie Rhodes who is here in England with
his band.  He has a schedule I wouldn't give to a convict.

The call was from roll arranger John Farrell's house, to ask about an
instrument John has just obtained, which is a piano-player ("pushup")
called the Claviola.

This sounded to me very like Clavitist, which was Ludwig Hupfeld's
coin-operated cafe piano, and the likeness was confirmed when John
told me it has 73 large striker pneumatics, driven from a massive
double-valve stack. There's only one standard for that - Hupfeld's
73-note "Phonola" with the roll playing inside-out and the "theme"
perforations in the middle.  Unfortunately someone has wrenched the
original tracker bar out to try and convert it to 88-note, so it's a
major disaster area. Patent dates on the machine stop at 1909.

Question: Why wasn't Hupfeld's pushup (vorsetzer) called Phonola like
the pianos ? Anyone ? Or is the Claviola a Hupfeld "clone" made by
someone else ?

Robbie has been trying some of my Mechanical Music addresses, which
I plead not guilty to, as I only got them off a list. He says "The
Nickelodeon House is ... strange." No doubt we shall hear more on
his return.

Dan Wilson