Pat DeWitt wrote in 011119 MMDigest:

> I am looking for an 88-note push up player, unrestored.  For anyone who
> does not know, this instrument (sometimes called a Vorsetzer) preceded
> the self-contained or "inner player" mechanism and was literally pushed
> up to the piano where its fingers were positioned over the keys.  There
> are more of them available in the 65 note variety but I enjoy "pumping"
> a good old 88-note roll and want to do it without adding another piano.

Smoothly done, this request -- very innocent.  I think Pat should start
again on an antique dealers' list, innocently mentioning that he only
wants a machine "with 88 or 90 holes in the brass thing where the roll
goes".  He would then have a fighting chance of securing an 88-note
pushup on the quiet while the rest of us thrash uselessly around in the
dust!

Because, in the player-piano world, 88-note pushups are rare gold.
Since it became generally known that such things had survived at all
(I recall Rex Lawson having to make his own, circa 1982), not more than
around 28 have turned up worldwide, most of them in the UK, when maybe
the Aeolian Company built some 2500 of them between 1909 and 1916, at
which date they were arbitrarily discontinued.

The European ones are nearly all 65/88-note convertibles with the
massive sliding switch at the rear of the tracker bar, but 88-note-only
ones were built for the home market and a slimmed-down modern version
called the Model U was designed at the Hayes factory to meet demand in
the UK after WW1.  This occasioned an argument with the parent company
who wanted a united front (pushups were less profitable than pianos),
but a very few were made and one is thought to exist in France.

The main production machines are basically stretched 65-note pushups
with dual standard tracker bars, so they play 65-note rolls considerably
more smoothly than 88-note rolls.  But in other respects they have
proved to be a very, very good design, albeit somewhat bulky, with a
triple bank of large pneumatics suitable for playing in large halls if
necessary.

The leg height adjustment mechanism is clunky and prone to strip its
phosphor-bronze worm gears, and there are a number of supplementary
items that nearly always get lost, notably the sustaining pedal linkage
and the leg adjustment crank handle.  These pushups, like the 65-note
ones, were intended to engage with two stout steel bars screwed to the
underside of the piano's keybed, which swing together and under when
not in use.  No case of a pushup turning up together with these is
known -- they're only found on old grand pianos which have had almost
no use.

I have costed the manufacture of a reasonable number of new pushups and
feel they could retail at =L= 3500, or US$ 5000.  This matches the
auction price for a fair one, which has been established as =L= 2800 to
=L= 3300, though as I say, on the antiques market one can do a lot
better, especially if the pushup is seized up and non-operative, when
some perfectly legitimate sky-high costs of rebuilding can be mentioned
when bargaining.

Michael Broadway in London started an antiques trade trawl for them
some 11 years ago and, by following up every single lot marked with
the word "pianola" in the catalogues, he ended up with two 65/88 note
models, both in complete but poor condition, in very good cases.
I will guess that he paid =L= 800 for one and about twice that for
the other, which he has now restored beautifully.

The Hupfeld company in Germany made a famous and possibly even better
Vorsetzer called the Phonola, but apart from its very early days when
it took 65-note rolls, it mostly played the company's unique 73-note
rolls with the theme perforations up the middle -- "up" because the
rolls played upwards.  These were usually in japanned black cases with
slightly bulboid tops.

They are pictured crowding the company's showrooms in the recently
published book "Im Aufnahmesalon Hupfeld" (Verlag Janos Stekovics,
Halle an der Saale, ISBN 3-932863-34-8), which is principally concerned
with high-quality publicity photos of DEA recording artists taken
between 1907 and 1910.  (The DEA was a commercially unsuccessful
reproducing piano system which was superseded by the Triphonola in
1919.)

There was a trading-round marque called the Claviola, to be sold by
non-Hupfeld dealers.  Towards the end of the company's life, Phonolas
had 88-note stacks and changeover tracker bars added; Rex now has one
formerly owned by Wolfgang Heisig and the quality of its workmanship
is superlative.

Dan Wilson