Like many others here, no doubt, I have spent the best part of a day
avidly reading the English text of 'Im Aufnahmesalon Hupfeld', which
Albert Petrak has so public-spiritedly had printed.

For new readers, this is a magnificent book, put out jointly by Leipzig
University and Verlag Janos Stekovics, of the 52 plate photographs
taken by Ludwig Hupfeld AG of famous pianists when recording for the
Phonoliszt, Phonola, and as it turned out, DEA systems between 1907 and
1910 which have survived to the present day.

The authors have done a pretty fair job of scouring the edges of the
photos for clues about the Phonola recording process so I will not
enter into that debate, but one item caught my eye; it's on page 19
of the English language appendix:-

--

  The Origin of the Artistic Music Rolls

  In early September 1904, the Leipzig Autumn Trade Fair witnessed
  first-hand a turning point in the quality of piano music reproduction
  by means of music rolls.  The Ludwig Hupfeld AG Phonola, with its
  manual volume control and 73-note range, had already been on the
  market for three years.  It was now complemented by the 72-note
  Phonoliszt Piano, which was driven by an electric motor instead of
  foot pedals and automatically regulated the dynamic shadings by
  holes in the music roll.

  The stamping machines at Hupfeld were running day and night to
  expand the music-roll repertoire and to cope with all the incoming
  orders.  The rolls, however, were still limited to recording only
  the metrical pattern of notes, while the other major Leipzig
  company at the show, Popper & Co., presented an 80-ton mechanical
  player called the _Artist_ at the trade fair on Reichstrasse, which
  "brought 'Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words' to the ear with
  complete perfection".  The _Artist_ was most likely the prototype
  of the Welte-Mignon, which recorded a pianist's performance and
  transferred it onto music rolls with all its subtle dynamic
  shadings.

  Nor was this all the Autumn Trade Fair had to offer.  Employees of
  of the New York Aeolian Co. and their sales representatives from
  Berlin had appeared in Leipzig with a "most wonderful device, whose
  ...  mechanism allows it to record pieces played on the piano with
  exact tempo, interpretation and ornamentation, and soon after to
  transfer them to the pianola."  Aeolian had Carl Reinecke, aged 80
  and living in Leipzig, record the complete Mozart sonatas for the
  benefit of future generations.  Although Aeolian's recording
  mechanism was later to vanish into oblivion and Reinecke's "Mozart
  package" never to appear, Hupfeld took these presentations by their
  two great competitors quite seriously ...  At the next Autumn Fair
  in 1905, they announced the debut of the _Artistic Hand-Played
  Music Roll_ for the Phonola and Phonoliszt playback instruments.

-- end quote

Why would the new Welte-Mignon itself not have spurred this development?
What happened to the Aeolian recording machine and indeed, the towering
achievement of getting the veteran Reinecke to record the entire Mozart
sonatas?  Why did Aeolian never mention this event in their own
literature?  The questions pile up, even if one reluctantly puts to one
side that tantalizing locomotive-sized Popper machine.

Well, now!  As I have mentioned here before, I'm a professional dowser,
which is to say a sensor of information not available by orthodox
means.  I don't find water and try not to be asked to find missing
people (although I have); I try and keep within areas of search where
I know I am thoroughly reliable and in consequence feel relaxed about
the process.

One of these is past and present businesses and their unreached
successes and avoidable failures.  The only occasions I have been wrong
about the month and year a piano left the factory have been when it was
taken back in again for modification or repair.  It is quite common for
pianos not to have sold for several years and to have been returned to
be overhauled and have the finish updated.  I have dated the production
years of obscure piano companies mentioned on Usenet of which I've
never heard before and been right many times.  Usually when the
"production" has consisted of putting a pretty stencil on the
fallboard, I can trace the actual maker.

It's not infallible.  On the whole, I would say that the background
situation of a company and the style of its management can be assessed
to a very high degree of accuracy.

Dates are usually right too.  I once did a job on why Gulbransen
changed from unrepairable glued stacks to repairable screwed ones
(the new Works Manager had an eye to the future and saw business in
rebuilding) and, while that judgement was never verifiable, I did home
in on the month the change occurred.  It's muddied in practice because
Gulbransen had huge stocks of old parts which took some time to "wash
out" into pianos along with the new models.

About individual design changes, the faculty is sometimes wrong by a
small margin.  One is looking into the minds of people long dead and
sometimes a finished prototype in the designer's mind is a distinct
trial effort from the Sales Manager's viewpoint.  One great curiosity
for me about the Phonola is that the "Solodant" (similar to Themodist)
system seems to me to have been implicit in its design from its
inception in 1900, yet "themed" rolls only appeared in quantity 3 years
later.  Why?  Needs more work.

So, let us look at the news "Im Aufnahmesalon Hupfeld" has brought us.
I don't think the Aeolian machine disappeared from view at all: it was
the prototype for, or even actually, the Metro-Art (65-note hand-played)
recording piano which we know must have existed 2 years later.  It
would have been 65-note, of course, without provision for theme
perforations, which would have to await the delicate negotiations
between Aeolian and Hupfeld around 1906/7.  The machine displayed at
Leipzig was certainly not a domestic offering: the pitfalls of allowing
the ordinary public to drag Aeolian's name into the mud with their
pitiful attempts at editing are obvious enough.

The real imponderable is the set of Reinecke rolls.  None, I believe,
were issued on Metro-Art.  Dowsing says this has nothing to do with
the relative unpopularity of Mozart compared to our own times, but is
because except for three rolls, the project failed.  Herr Reinecke was
told that unfortunately, because of a serious malfunction, Aeolian
would have to bring the machine from Berlin at a later date and
complete the set.

What was the malfunction?  This has taken me some time to sort out,
but it seems that the Leipzig machine was one sent from New York to
the Choralion Co in Berlin for use there.  So it had been designed for
static installation.  Unaware of this, the Berlin sales manager thought
it would stuff a nice surprise up Hupfeld's nose if it was shown
working at the Leipzig trade fair, so it was bundled onto a horse dray
and taken the 120 km or so.

The setup comprised an upright piano with electrical contacts under
the keys, which operated an organ-style solenoid/pouch board on one end
acting as primaries for the pneumatically-operated punch a few feet
away.  This machine punched a single sheet of paper with slotted notes
to match those keys being depressed, and the low power needed enabled
the punches to be driven direct by motor pneumatics.

You and I would naturally connect the two halves of this twentieth-
century marvel with a bunch of rubber tubes connecting the piano pouch
board to the pneumatic secondaries.  But -- designed for permanent
installation as it was -- the connection was in fact provided by
a rectangular trunk cast in plaster-of-Paris with cloth round the
outside, like a leg plaster.  This was designed to be coupled rigidly
to the punch stack, pass through a wall which took its weight, and have
a multiple rubber-tube connection to the piano pouch board, allowing
for lively playing and movement of the piano.  Why not take the tubes
all the way?  Maybe the designer thought that a trunk looked neater.
In a building it wouldn't have mattered.

At the trade show, the trunk was supported by a folding table which
failed to take its weight adequately.  Fairly early in the proceedings
it started to hang from the punch stack, enduring strain which it
wasn't designed for.  During Reinecke's first few rolls it began to
break up, fragmenting inside so that no repair would be possible
without getting a new trunk from America.  The chaps from the Choralion
weren't improvisers so a rapid job with rubber tubes wasn't in the
frame.

At the rather glum post-mortem in Berlin it was agreed that the trick
wasn't worth repeating and the financial go-ahead they had received for
the Reinecke project had expired.  I don't have a clear sense of where
the three completed rolls ended up, except that the whole exercise was
so associated with bungling and failure that no-one had the heart to
include them in the first Metro-Art issues.  This is, therefore, not
a thing you would read about in the Aeolian histories.

This is presented in good faith, but of course, there may be nothing
in any of it ...

Dan Wilson, London

 [ A very interesting article about the history and uses of dowsing is
 [ found at http://www.accessnewage.com/articles/mystic/DOWSING1.HTM
 [ Author Margaret Ball says: "Intuition (usually associated with women),
 [ having a 'hunch' or feeling are other forms of divination (dowsing)."
 [ "The use of dowsing in the last 20-30 years has broadened from the
 [ very important locating of water and minerals and oil to encompass
 [ so called esoteric areas."  -- Robbie