GHOSTS in the MACHINE
  Technology, History, and Aesthetics of the Player-Piano
  Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, May 4-6, 2017

Player-pianos, those amazing instruments able to play "by themselves"
via the incorporation of means of complex mechanisms inside acoustic
pianos, had their heyday in the early twentieth century.  Their sounds
were ubiquitous across public and private realms, from theatres to
domestic parlors.

In the early days of mechanical reproduction and the music entertainment
industry, these machines helped shape the contours of the modern
experience and revolutionized how people made and listened to music.
Yet, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, player-pianos lost their
cultural prominence.

While phonograph records, and eventually LPs, CDs and iPods, defined
the trajectory of recorded sound, player-pianos became the preserve of
the odd collector, mechanic, or avant-garde composer.  Recently, however,
the player-piano has begun to re-emerge as an object of scholarly
inquiry that can offer significant insights into histories of technology,
mediation, digitization, computation, globalization, and modernism.

The Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies and the Cornell
University Department of Music will host a conference on player-pianos
to take place May 4-6, 2017.  The conference will feature keynote
presentations by Professor Georgina Born (University of Oxford) and
Rex Lawson, director of the Pianola Institute.

It will also include workshops and scholarly panels ranging across
multiple disciplines and perspectives, including: technological,
cultural and trade histories; cultural and musical mediations; the
analog/digital dichotomy; computational technology; media storage;
reproducibility and inscription; sound archives and the preservation
of instruments.

In addition to hands-on engagement with historical instruments, the
conference will offer a special concert with newly-commissioned music
for player-piano and piano, as well as solo and ensemble works for
pianola.

Call for Papers

The conference committee welcomes papers and other proposals in
relation to the topics mentioned above.  Please send an email with your
name, institution, and an abstract of no more than 500 words, for
presentations no longer than 30 minutes (including Q&A), by January 31,
2017, to info@westfield.org.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply].

The conference is organized by a interdisciplinary team that includes
Professors Roger Moseley, Trevor Pinch, Annette Richards, Alejandro
Madrid, Benjamin Piekut, and Marianthi Papalexandri Alexandri, as well
as Ph.D student Sergio Ospina-Romero.  Please direct all inquiries to
sdo29@cornell.edu.geentroep [ remove .geentroep to use this address ]

 [ More information at https://westfield.org/conferences/pianola