"Hand-Played" Music Rolls" by L. Douglas Henderson

Hello MMD readers,  With the beginning of the New Century there are some
myths which will still continue, if for no other reason than to make
movies, sell books or milk a topic for monetary purposes: among them,
the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and the ghost of
Elvis Presley.

To this list one should consider the aspect of 'recording' pianists on
perforated rolls, because -- when all is said and done -- this is a
technical impossibility if virtuoso musical performances are to be
achieved.

Recent issues of the MMD have featured texts about various methods used
to 'record' a keyboard pianist for the player roll medium, but I suspect
that the writers haven't really tried to accomplish this task in the
real world.  Back in the 'Fifties, I tried marking rolls, even coming up
with a 5-note method of inscribing them, while playing back a tape
recorder (in order to match the pitches to the desired notes, after-
wards).  Later, in the early 'Sixties, I had one of our museum pianists
play, and then 'notched' the measures (and occasionally the musical
beats) - working with the score as a springboard - but the results were
always as erratic as an old QRS-Autograph or Aeolian Uni-Record roll,
in my opinion.

I knew that the paper travel speed had to be faster than the norm for
player organs, which is what the Pianola adopted - starting in the
58-Note era of the Orchestrelle and Aeolian Grand.  The conclusion,
for me, was arranging from scratch, using musical analysis, as the way
to go, and not attempting to mark or otherwise patch up (through
arranging) some erratic material gleaned from a keyboard performance.
Since players were stuck with the lumbering 'sheet music transfer'
speed for organs of Tempo 60-90, for the most part half what a
pianist's 'recorded' performance should be, I opted for compression
perforating.  This is why I cut down to a 128th of a note, approxi-
mately, today, overlapping by a 1/4 perforation, at the time
of the initial arranging.

Tape recorders have been part of this equation, along with my memory of
"things heard" previously, so while I operated vintage Leabarjan
perforators, I was inching through open reel tapes on a Wilcox-Gay Tape
Recordio, then a Wollensak, followed by an Akai (Roberts), an Ampex,
a TEAC (still used on occasion!), a Revox and finally a string of
Tandbergs: open reel and cassette, plus a Sony-Marantz Cassette
recorder with a plus-minus speed correction of 20% and the ability
to drop down an octave for studying a musical passage.

With the later tape decks came the simplicity of the remote control and
programming, so that I can run a single measure again and again, trying
it on a player only a few steps away, or making a "test strip" which has
single punches for a measure or two and using that to gauge the compro-
mise in stepping, which will often affect, in a convincing manner, the
rubato of an actual artist.

Similarly, the graduated striking (quick agogic, for want of an
appropriate term here), especially in the staccato effects, removes the
Pianola's performance from that droning, organ-like playback of sheet
music and its note clusters, which are at home in the world of organ
playing but not the pianoforte.

Yes, Welte-Mignon in Germany played around with mercury troughs.
Jeff Morgan wrote a series of articles for the AMICA Magazine, when
I belonged to that player club, which laid out a series of what the
system could do, and what, based on his experience, it could not.
I agreed with all of the points.

Keeping in mind that the Welte is essentially a 6-step expression
system (all generalized, floating dynamic levels) with a stop pneumatic
for mid-travel, and that it's stuck with a lock-and-cancel system
for the two pedals (too slow for responding to what a pianist might
do in the striking operation), how would one interpret the stylus
smudges from the ink roller, after the 'recorded' roll was removed
from the machinery (and fixed through a developing technique)?  Would
a seldom played note have the same intensity of black (or gray) as a key
which was repeated again and again?  (An arranger, not a pianist, would
make this decision for volume, but it would be a 'guesstimate' based
on what the system could do within its sphere of possibilities.)

American Welte, the Kohler-built Licensee, claimed seismographs in
their 1927 catalogue, and a musically fraudulent "wavy line" example,
of the roll only, was illustrated in the opening pages.  At this point
the ultra-talented Howard Lutter had been making a few years' worth of
what are now called "brown box rolls", under his own name, pseudonyms
and those of real artists (who may or may not have gone through the
motions of playing a 'recording' piano for the Deluxe Music Roll
Corp.).  This doesn't matter, since the rolls were arrangements, pure
and simple, and moreover, they were vastly superior to the ratty,
erratic T-100 German Welte-Mignon rolls of earlier vintage and the
Welte-Mignon Original (standard player roll format) releases of the
'Twenties.

Why were Lutter's rolls so good?  (Excellent, that these completely-
arranged rolls were in Welte performance, they were no reflection of
the living artists on the labels, such as Vee Lawnhurst, Harry Perrella,
Johnny Johnson and others, since the 78s of these pianists are entirely
different in their musical information.)

The answer lies in the mathematical principles of arranging technique,
and perfect stepping within the measure (something which genuine
"hand-played" rolls never possess).  Besides this, Lutter gave his
alleged artists a 'style' so that they could be recognized from one
Licensee roll to the other; rarely, did these mirror what the artist
did at the keyboard.

Aeolian had experimented with a 'direct-cutting' machine back to the
58-Note days, and there are a few write-ups of demonstration concerts
in the late 1890's.  Reviews were, "It's interesting, but ..."  Later,
in 1915 when the first national ads for the Duo-Art Pianola began to
appear, Aeolian correctly said that they had been recording for seven-
teen years, waiting until that time to introduce their expression
player (based on the 88-Note scale, after the 65-Note one had been
passed, some six years earlier, approximately).  Anyone who tries a
Uni-Record roll by Aeolian, or some of the early Duo-Art releases in
the #1500 or #5500 series will quickly realize that their system of
using vibrating pneumatics to perforate "instant" rolls left a lot to
be desired.  Until Aeolian decided to place arranging at the forefront
of their activities in 1920, most of the early releases were highly
flawed if a metronome happened to be running as the rolls played.
(The Maelzel metronome is a staple in my studio!)

Melville Clark used a 'marking' piano for QRS Rolls, which still
exists today.  I have cut a couple of rolls 'recorded' on it, most
recently for the AMICA Convention exactly ten years ago, at this
writing.  A pianist from Cleveland went to Buffalo to 'record' a paper
strip, and this was sent to me in Maine for perforating.  I kept the
starting leader, which showed the delay in the pencils, and often
which perforations didn't stop rapidly enough, ending the note.  The
rhythm was as poor as anything Aeolian or Welte turned out in their
heyday of hand-played rolls.  As this was a dated project, tied to a
player club event, I merely cut the notes but soon had to add many of
my own devising, since the machinery skipped parts of trills or just
didn't register, for whatever reason, on some of the arpeggios.  That
the music notes were running plus-minus somewhere between a 32nd note
and a 16th note was yet another variable.  There were more, of course,
but these should be enough to indicate that the classical music
improvisations I was cutting were NOT anything like the actual pianist
whose playing operated the marking equipment.

At the Cleveland convention, a few months later, I was proven right.
Pianist Emily Rose performed, and she was light in touch, crisp in
staccato and perfect in meter.  The roll was heavy-handed (like a
QRS-Autograph Roll from the 'Teens!) and the arpeggios had that same,
overlapping ponderous characteristic as a Lee S. Roberts roll in the
Strains From - (e.g.: 'The Merry Widow') series.  Previously, I thought
that these sloppy extended notes were arranged-in, but they were
obviously part of the variables which the Melville Clark equipment was
imposing upon the music.  Robin Pratt, who hosted the player club
event, had added some superb bass octaves which the pianist didn't
play, but they certainly sounded grand on the Cable-Nelson upright used
for the presentation.

It should be noted that Miss Rose considered that this was a roll of
her playing.  Often, a pianist, good at the keyboard, doesn't really
"hear themselves" that much, so can be fooled by something playing
similar notes, but with the variables and striking completely different
-- as they were in this case.

I have also perforated some other music recorded on that instrument and
brought to Maine, also yielding similar results.

Part of the artist's performance is the ability of the fingers to
descend to the keyboard.  Pianolas can only play about 60-75% of the
dynamic range, at best, due to the limitation of their pneumatic
strikers ("fingers") resting on the keys, as it were.  This is where the
arranger enters the scene, to add extra material, often superhuman,
to spark up the perforated arrangement.

The more one examines the variables in music roll performance and the
absolute differences between the keyboard pianoforte and the pneumatic
Pianola, the sillier it seems to be claiming that something of the
artist is embodied in the perforated roll, usually several stages
beyond the material used for the initial 'recording'.  (Inter-masters
were common in the old production days.  I have some of these in my
possession.)

The sustaining pedal is used as part of the striking for many pianists,
a tap here and there in synchronization with the key depression.  The
pneumatic pedal is slow and full travel, while the Welte design
called for lock-and-cancel, beyond that characteristic.

Again, Lutter worked around this by note elongation to "buy time" to
recalibrate the sustaining pedal, something I do in my arrangements.
I carried it a little farther by teaching myself to play the foot pedal
at the same slow speed of the pneumatic device, and marking the roll in
that fashion.  (This takes practice!)  My rolls use the dampers for a
generalized tonality while the critical pedal effects are in the
arrangement already, usually the taps in the form of subtle overlap
cutting.  It's an illusion, but it works.

With the 21st Century here, I hope that more people purchase audio
reissues of old 78s, many featuring the same pianists listed on music
rolls.  (Pearl CDs are a good starting point.)  After auditioning these,
and absorbing the content, now is the time to try the music rolls made
in the pianists' names.  Approaching the music from the roll itself more
than the player action design (or brand) is a helpful concept as well.

Soon, it will be apparent that the player-piano is not the same as the
instrument operated by the keyboard, even though encased in a single
piano.  The Pianola piano is two instruments in one, two completely
different designs each with their own performance characteristics.  It
takes an arranger to work around the limitations and augment the techni-
cal aspects of the medium.  After all, a pianist has nothing to do
with lock-and-cancel, squeezing Pianola controls on the Duo-Art or
scoring a crescendo for an instrument which is orchestral and not
pianistic (and generally slower than the keyboard artist dynamic
increase anyway).

Many of the developers of 'hand-played' rolls and player actions were
mechanical tinkers, most with minimal musical intellect.  They were good
at designing and building products, so more was spent in that sphere
than in the development of virtuoso player rolls for their pneumatic
actions.  The industry was geared to ballads, simple Fox Trots, Waltzes
and what's called background music today, not Liszt, Tatum, Gershwin,
J. P. Johnson or Horowitz -- all with specific performance techniques of
their own.  While we have game shows and sitcoms on broadcast TV today,
our ancestors had Whispering Hope, Liberty Bell March and Dinner Music
on their players, both a common denominator type of market.

This is readily apparent when one encounters some of the factory
demonstration rolls, especially the ones with no documented serial
numbers and which were designed for concert hall use.  Among the
examples in my collection are Duo-Art rolls used at the California
Theatre on Market St. in San Francisco and The Palace of Fine Arts,
in 1921: a Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (which sounds like the composer-
pianist, but has no name on it!) from Aeolian Hall, and some 88-note
compilations designed to show off a retail store player instrument,
all with attributes well beyond what appeared in the catalogues of the
time.  Clearly, these rolls were arranged for better-than-average
Pianolas, since staccato effects abound in them, not "marimba style"
overlap cutting in the tradition of the QRS Bluebird Ballad series.

Those who are interested in reading some of the hype which Ampico
dealers were supposed to unload upon the prospects can visit this
web page, which contains an article I devoted to the subject of
'recorded' roll marketing:
http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/rollnews.htm

As we commence Year 2000, let's hope that more people listen to the
music on their rolls, and modify them (up to a point) through
interpretation, given the tools of the particular instrument.  The
arranger is still ahead of the Pianolist here, since you can't play a
staccato note or a crisp trill if it isn't perforated in that fashion.

As Aeolian once said (reported in a Moeller Organ Co. in-house memo),
"Let's keep the artists away from the players."  And then, if one
were told that the music roll didn't sound like the actual performer,
they were to stress the publicity which the rolls bring, long before
the artist's concert tour began.

Most pianists merely played, were paid and the rolls were made.  Few
auditioned them when the music was fresh, and even more really didn't
want to talk about the subject.  It was a modest income, for the most
part, and not something which was discussed in the elitist musical
circles of the pre-World War II era.

The piano factories got a "name" while piano sales, via players and
rolls, fueled the industry.

Players like Hammond organs and The Mighty Wurlitzer (in its many
forms) were part "art" and part commercial compromise.  They were sold
in an era of unregulated advertising, some of which is being aped by a
few of the solenoid players of today, in my opinion.

Somehow this whole subject of an "artist legacy" is so 20th Century,
when all is said and done.

Enjoy the rolls whether they've got a logotype pedigree or not, I say!

Regards from Maine,

L. Douglas Henderson
Artcraft Music Rolls, Wiscasset, Maine 04578
http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft

PS: For those who believe in the recent term "piano roll style" to
explain why the original audio and the commercial rolls didn't sound
the same, check out my article on this subject:
http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/oldnews6.htm