Hi,  If any readers have the time, wade through my treatise about the
mythology of 'recording' artists for perforated music rolls, here at
http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/rollnews.htm

Pianola rolls are an _arranged_ music medium, laid out according to
mathematical principles and which 'create' an individual performance
via mechanical musical instruments.  For the astute listener even the
replays differ.

Audio is the realm of 'recorded' artists, and always will be.  This
business of "overdubbing" and "multitracking" seems to have originated
in the late 1980s, primarily through media-driven hacks promoting
solenoid players (playing MIDI files scanned from old music rolls).
They confused magnetic tape recording methods with perforating holes
in a music roll.

When real pianists showed up for a duet, the final results were
arranged in their names by a single person.  Sometimes, in recent years,
it was Rudy Martin doing "Ferrante and Teicher" (for "Tiger Rag").
Others, in the past, involved Howard Brockway expanding a piano solo
'marked in performance' by Marguerite Volavy into a "duet", featuring
their two names.  At QRS, Lewis Fuiks (a.k.a. Victor Arden) would write
the basic elements of the score, while Max Kortlander, in DeKalb,
Illinois, would augment this into an "Arden and Kortlander" duet using
the factory 'formula du jour' that year.

The reason for adding more notes (which ware not "dubbed in" later!)
was to make up for the lack of flexibility of the pneumatic strikers,
versus the human fingers, at the keyboard.  The arrangers of the past,
as do I today, would thicken the chords or add extra notes, to achieve
a little sparkle, in the final result.

Vee Lawnhurst, when interviewed a few years ago by Peter Mintun,
co-authored by Frederick Hodges, said that Howard Lutter "did
everything" at the Welte-Licensee studio.  When asked if she approved
of the many changes between her playing and the released roll (billed
as "The Master's Fingers On Your Piano"), she replied, "The whole idea
was to make a better-sounding music roll."  (If you want the exact
quotes, consult the AMICA Bulletins from the mid-1980s, which feature
the well-written text with her actual remarks.)

Books on the subject of players wisely focus on the pianos, the players
and the history of the instruments, since the whole sales topic of
'recorded' artists makes any musician queasy.

If the publications had been in the right state of focus back in the
late 1940s through the early 1970s, the arrangers -- not the pianists
on the box labels -- should have been consulted for historical
information.  These would be people like Ellis Linder, Frank C. Milne,
Rudy Erlebach, W. Creary Woods, J. Milton Delcamp, Max Kortlander,
Lewis Fuiks (Victor Arden), George Swift, Mary Allison, Percival van
Yorx and others, the musical artisans who "put the rolls together",
fitting everything into the stepping requirements of the factory
duplicating machinery of the time.

Unfortunately, the pianists who played a marking piano really didn't
know much about the roll making process, beyond going through the
motions and posing for publicity photographs.  Some never had to show
up, as in the case with Pauline Alpert, whose roll of "Pomponola",
the work of Frank Milne, was a composition she never heard about until
near the end of her life.  Aeolian just went ahead and made a roll,
possibly filling a contract for a certain number of titles.  Milne also
did that sterile Eddie Duchin roll, "Painting the Clouds With Sunshine",
and you wonder if the staccato-oriented pianist were around for that
final release; the connected notes and the absences of arpeggios make
it another formula Duo-Art arrangement, and not a 'recording' of the
popular pianist and band leader.

Enjoy the rolls, but skip the 'artists' on the box labels, I say!

Regards,
Douglas Henderson - Artcraft Music Rolls
Wiscasset, Maine
http://wiscasset.nnei.net/artcraft/