Jimmy Wilcock said in 991125 MMDigest

> Hello,  I wonder if anyone could help me find any information
> on the pianists who played for the piano rolls: Frank Milne, Edgar
> Fairchild, Pauline Alpert, etc.  Also, as I am  a lover of the music
> of the player piano, is there any enthusiasts group I could join?

I imagine by now Jimmy has found the resources pages on the MMD web site
which will point him to the various books and also provide contact names
for the various UK player-piano interest groups.

Some of the latter are regional but the one you more or less have to
join is the Player Piano Group based in London, whose Bulletin editor
Julian Dyer contributes regularly here.  The Bulletin has progressed
from the days when people like me ran it like a parish magazine using
fuzzy Roneo'd sheets to a thoroughly crisp computer-set operation jam-
packed with information.

Higher printing quality still, offset by miserably infrequent
publication, is achieved by the Pianola Journal, the chief raison d'etre
of the Pianola Institute, founded 14 years ago by Rex Lawson to raise
mainstream musical consciousness of the player piano.  Rex manages to
inveigle the less unsympathetic musicologists to contribute on the
subject of special compositions for the player and episodes in
composers' lives when they took an interest in it.  To receive the PJ,
if you are not a library or organization, you have to join the Friends
of the Pianola Institute and will then also receive the FPI newsletter,
a very spare A4 sheet giving dates of forthcoming events.  One of the
ambitions of the FPI when it was founded was to commission special roll
sets for members but the great expense of roll-making in the UK has
stifled this and to compensate, Friends have been receiving free CDs of
PI-presented concerts and related music such as a recent one of Rex
playing some of his own roll arrangements which has received good
reviews.

Both the PPG and FPI hold recitals and social meetings, a very few
jointly presented, but the PPG far more, with a regular AGM and blow-out
dinner in the London area where (up until now, at least) yours truly and
Julian entertain on a plain pushup and there are other entertainments
and a quiz and everyone has to be helped carefully into their cars
afterwards.

If you are a really serious case you will need to join AMICA as well,
but as I just escape this category, others will need to tell you of the
benefits.

Dan Wilson, London
(not actually London at all, merely Dan Wilson Not NC !)