[ Ref. 141118, 151116 & 160807 MMDigests ]

My recent posting requesting help in locating Aeolian pipe organ
rolls proved to be successful.  Of the six rolls I sought, one astute
collector has provided me with three as a loan.  I am most grateful
as those rolls were in near mint condition and I successfully copied
them into MIDI files.  That process continues as I now carefully check
each file for any errors in the copy process.

Nine rolls are available in the Madame Butterfly series of Duo-Art pipe
organ rolls, not counting the two "Fantasie" rolls.  I have successfully
established six of those rolls in my MIDI library.  Additionally, the
"Marriage" scene roll, 1081, which never made it from 116-note into
176-note Duo-Art, has been successfully recorded and converted with
necessary coding to be a full Duo-Art rendition.

Many, if not all, of these rolls will be recorded in audio format.
This opens up the possibility for a wide audience of listeners who
might appreciate the art of Aeolian's orchestral organs' rendering
opera music.  Renderings of this nature give us a glimpse of how in
the early twentieth century, the power of the opera orchestra could be
heard without going to the opera house.  Aeolian pipe organs brought
the opera into homes in a manner no other devises could.

Recording the 116-note rolls and then coding them correctly presents
challenges.  Factory workers in the roll department were tasked to mark
the rolls in a very precise manner.  Much like word rolls, organ rolls
are stamped with instructions for stop settings, expression settings,
tempo changes, and crescendo pedal placement.

The markers were color coded, red for the great division, green for
the swell division.  The exact placement of stop changes is critical,
which meant hand-stamping was the only option to get it right.  No one
today seems to know how it was done, but the person placing the stamped
information on the roll had to follow some kind of guide with extreme
precision.

Errors were made.  We see instructions to turn off the red (Great)
Diapason half way through the roll when it had never been turned on
anywhere previously.  Perhaps the off command was meant to be green.
At 4 in the afternoon, the factory worker may have lost his/her edge;
who knows...

In my effort to correctly code the "Marriage" roll, number 1081,
numerous large tempo changes are marked on the roll.  One section of
that roll has repeated notes as accompaniment to the melody.  Using the
marked tempo, those notes exceed the firing rate of a machine gun, and
the organ pipes blur into a blob of sound.  Something is wrong.  Perhaps
the factory worker failed to put the slow tempo marking on that section
of the roll.  Maybe the instructions that worker followed was wrong.

In an effort to make the Duo-Art version of that roll correct, I've
found another section of the roll with similar repetitions and matched
that tempo.  It sounds okay, but how can I be sure?

More updates on this effort will follow, but I still need roll numbers
3321, 3255, and 3257.

Bob Taylor
Missouri