A player piano is a self-playing piano with a pneumatic or electromechanical mechanism that operates the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls. Modern versions use MIDI. The player piano gained popularity as mass-produced home pianos increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sales peaked in 1924 and subsequently declined with improvements in electrical phonograph recordings in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction, brought by radios, contributed to a decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production.
History The first practical pneumatic piano player, manufactured by the Aeolian Company and called the "Pianola", was invented in 1896 by Edwin S. Votey, and came into widespread use in the 20th century. The name "pianola", sometimes used as a generic name for any player piano, came from this invention. The mechanism of this player piano was all-pneumatic: foot-operated bellows provided a vacuum to operate a pneumatic motor and drive the take-up spool, while each small inrush of air through a hole in the paper roll was amplified in two stages to sufficient strength to strike a note.
1900–1910
Votey advertised the Pianola widely, making unprecedented use of full-page color advertisements. It was sold initially for $250, and then other, cheaper makes were launched. A standard 65-note format evolved, with 11+1⁄4-inch-wide (290 mm) rolls and holes spaced 6 to the inch, although several player manufacturers used their own form of roll incompatible with other makes. By 1903, the Aeolian Company had more than 9,000 roll titles in their catalog, adding 200 titles per month. Many companies' catalogs ran to thousands of rolls, mainly consisting of light, religious, or classical music. Ragtime music also featured. Melville Clark introduced two important features to the player piano: the full-scale roll which could play every note on the piano keyboard, and the internal player as standard. By the end of the decade, the piano player device and the 65-note format became obsolete. This caused problems for many small manufacturers, who had already invested in 65-note player operations, ultimately resulting in rapid consolidation in the industry. A new, full-scale roll format, playing all 88 notes, was agreed at an industry conference in Buffalo, New York in 1908 at the so-called Buffalo Convention. This kept the 111⁄4-inch roll, but now had smaller holes spaced at 9 to the inch. This meant that any player piano could now play any make of roll. This consensus was crucial for avoiding a costly format war, which plagued almost every other form of entertainment medium that followed roll music. While the player piano matured in America, an inventor in Germany, Edwin Welte, was working on a player which would reproduce all aspects of a performance automatically, so that the machine would play back a recorded performance exactly as if the original pianist were sitting at the piano keyboard. Known as a Reproducing Piano, this device, the Welte-Mignon, was launched in 1904. It created new marketing opportunities, as manufacturers could now get the foremost pianists and composers of the day to record their performances on a piano roll. This allowed owners of player pianos to experience a professional performance in their own homes on their own instruments, exactly as the original pianist had played it. Aeolian introduced Metrostyle in 1901 and the Themodist in 1904, the Themodist being an invention which was said to bring out the melody clearly above the accompaniment. Sales grew rapidly, and with the instruments now relatively mature, in this decade a wider variety of rolls became available. Two major advances were the introduction of the hand-played roll, both classical and popular, and the word roll.
Hand-played rolls introduced musical phrasing into the rolls, so that player pianists did not have to introduce it through the use of tempo controls or expression levers/buttons, which few felt inclined to do. Word rolls featured printed lyrics in the margins, making it simple to use players to accompany singing in the home, a popular activity before radio and disc recordings became widely available. The other major advance was the arrival in America of two commercial rivals for the Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano: the Ampico (from 1911 but fully 're-enacting' by 1916) and the Duo-Art (1914). Artrio-Angelus also introduced a reproducing player from 1916. When World War I came in 1914, German patents were seized in the US. In England, Aeolian had a huge factory and sales network and easily outsold the Ampico. Other makers of Reproducing systems, Hupfeld Meisterspiel DEA (1907) and Philipps Duca (c 1909), were successful in Europe. Hupfeld perfected an 88 note reproducing system, the Triphonola, in 1919, and around 5% of players sold were Reproducing Pianos. In America by the end of the decade, the new 'jazz age' and the rise of the fox-trot confirmed the player piano as the instrument of popular music, with classical music increasingly relegated to the reproducing piano. Most American roll companies stopped offering large classical catalogs before 1920, and abandoned 'instrumental' rolls (those without words) within a few years. In England, the Aeolian Company continued to sell classical material, and customers remained willing to contribute to performances by following directions printed on the rolls and operate the hand and foot controls themselves. Sydney Grew, in his manual The Art of the Piano Player, published in London in 1922, said that "it takes about three years to make a good player-pianist of a man or woman of average musical intelligence. It takes about seven years to make a good pianist, or organist, or singer". Word rolls never became popular in England, as they cost 20% more than non-word rolls. As a result, post-World War I American and British roll collections looked very different.
1950–present
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
