Much has been written about the disturbing demise of interest in
mechanical musical instruments.  A player piano in good condition,
which could have been sold for two or three thousand dollars twenty-
five years ago, would be hard to even give away today.

This isn't the first time the market has tanked.  The sale of player
pianos peaked in 1925.  Five years later, in 1930, the industry had
collapsed.  The Great Depression was one cause, of course, but so were
advancements in the quality of radio and record players.  For the next
quarter century mechanical instruments were considered obsolete. Band
organs sat silently on carousels, while scratchy 78-rpm records played
the "music."  Old player pianos sat silently in parlors or basements,
battered relics from another era.

But in the mid 50's there was a renewed interest.  Johnny Maddox's 1955
rollicking medley of German pieces, "The Crazy Otto," became the most
popular piano solo in recording history.  In 1960 Max Morath introduced
ragtime piano and mechanical instruments to television audiences.
While demonstrating a particularly complicated machine, he proclaimed
that in its day it represented a "new high in technology and a new low
in music."  Meanwhile, barrelhouse piano players like Joe "Fingers"
Carr, Ace O'Donnell, and "Knuckles" O'Toole issued several 33-rpm
recordings of old-time piano music.  Lawrence Welk got into the act by
including in each show "Big Tiny" Little, and later Jo Ann Castle,
pounding out ragtime/honkytonk music on an old open-faced upright.

With all this going on, player pianos became interesting again.  Those
who owned them hired technicians to restore them to playing condition
or attempted the feat themselves.  This made sense, since those who had
grown up during the heyday of mechanical music were now middle-aged and
had the funds to get the old pianos playing again "for old time sake."
For those who were not fortunate enough to own a player piano, a
Palisades Park, N.J., piano store issued several recordings of "Player
Piano Gems."

In the early 70's pianist Joshua Rifkin issued several recordings of
Scott Joplin's rags, and the 1972 movie "The Sting" was scored with
ragtime piano music.  But by that time, it seems, the public's
interests were moving on, and the popularity of mechanical music,
lasting almost two decades, began to fade again.  Today the younger
generation has no grounding in mechanical music, and it is hard to
imagine that such intense interest will ever rise again.  But we can
hope.

Peter Vander Veld