Julian Dyer wrote in 071202 MMDigest:

> I was struck by the recent posting bemoaning the way that folks got
> YouTube contributions wrong by playing the instruments with their
> cases on, which is truly absurd!  Playing instruments as they were
> meant to be played is exactly what should be done when showing them
> off to others.

Yes, but...  If you're showing a player piano off to someone in your
home, that's one thing.  But if you're showing your instrument in a fair
or a museum where your audience is distracted, fairly disinterested,
and may have small children, then you'd better have something for
people to see as well as hear.  The same is true of YouTube, where the
sound is poor and the next video is but a click away -- most people
aren't going to listen through to the end of a slow aria.

In museum work you have maybe ten seconds to grab them and another
ten seconds to make your pitch -- simultaneously visual and aural --
to convince them to stay around.  It's probably similar at an outdoor
fair, and probably even harder on YouTube.

> Clearly, many of us love messing around with mechanisms, but those who
> focus on mechanical musical devices surely have an underlying interest
> in the music, or else why not choose some other form of machine?

They often do.  YouTube is filled with steam-engine videos, for example.

> We were told yesterday that folks kept playing a player piano while
> the normal keyboard instruments sat idle, as if this proves that people
> like mechanical music.  Hardly!  It's the music that keeps them playing,
> not the mechanism.  If you took the hammers off so that it made no
> sound, I suspect that attention would last a few seconds and no more.

On the other hand, a lot of the parlor music from the great days of
player pianos is awfully tedious to the modern ear.  They arranged
music differently then, as I once discovered when I found some 1920s
recordings of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos.  They were simply awful:
apparently someone decided that old music ought to sound slow, lush,
and romantic, and that's how they played 'em.

Musical tastes vary widely, of course, but styles of machinery do not.
A bunch of guys will gather around any interesting mechanism even if
it's playing selections that vaudeville mercifully forgot.

One of the first things I noticed about this list, MMDigest, is how
the many computer professionals here tend to describe the workings of
the rolls in terms I learned when I took digital electronics courses.
There is definitely a love of machinery here.

> The mechanism is doing its job of providing access to music that non
> keyboard-players otherwise cannot make.  That's what the instrument
> was meant to do, and it does it well.

But now, of course, the competition is a lot stiffer, and has been
ramping up for a century.  My collection of reproduction Sears catalogs
tell the story.  In 1908 there were six pages of mandolins.  By 1927,
there were six pages of radios and two pages of player pianos, also
reluctantly offered without the player mechanism.  Phonographs had
improved a lot as well.

Eighty years later, we've got iPods.  The question, of course, is
whether a player piano can stand on its own as a musical instrument:
i.e., would you listen to a player piano instead of the radio or mp3's.
People here would choose the player piano, but in my working-class
neighborhood on East Mulberry Street in Lancaster, Ohio, I believe my
neighbors would choose differently.  They would, however, be fascinated
with the machine itself.

> What comes over to me from YouTube entries is how poorly many of the
> instruments work, or how poorly they are operated.  Clearly, there's
> little expectation from their owners of achieving anything better than
> dull and genuinely mechanical performances, which is a real pity.

I think everyone does their best.  YouTube's audio is generally quite
poor, and the audio in your average digital camcorder isn't so great
either.  Under the best of circumstances, the piano is the toughest
instrument to record.

Mark Kinsler
Lancaster, Ohio, USA
http://www.mkinsler.com/