Music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano
A player piano roll being playedMastertouch Australian Dance Gems piano roll with lyrics printed to side
A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music rolls, are continuous rolls of paper with holes punched into them. These perforations represent note control data. The roll moves over a reading system known as a tracker bar; the playing cycle for each musical note is triggered when a perforation crosses the bar.
Piano rolls have been in continuous production since at least 1896,[1][2] and are still being manufactured today; QRS Music offers 45,000 titles with "new titles being added on a regular basis",[3] although they are no longer mass-produced. MIDI files have generally supplanted piano rolls in storing and playing back performance data, accomplishing digitally and electronically what piano rolls do mechanically. MIDI editing software often features the ability to represent the music graphically as a piano roll.
The Musical Museum in Brentford, London, England houses one of the world's largest collections of piano rolls, with over 20,000 rolls as well as an extensive collection of instruments which may be seen and heard.
Buffalo Convention
A stack of piano rolls, some in boxesFirst part of a piano roll for Welte-Mignon, about 1919, with lines for a pianolist, according to the Buffalo Convention
In the early years of player pianos, piano rolls were produced in varying dimensions and formats. Most rolls used one of three musical scales. The 65-note format, with a playing range of A1 to C♯7, was introduced in 1896 in the United States, specifically for piano music. In 1900, an American format playing all 88 notes of the standard piano scale (A0 to C8) was introduced. In 1902, a German 72-note scale (F1, G1 to E7) was introduced.
On December 10, 1908, a group representing most of the largest U.S. manufacturers of player pianos gathered in Buffalo, New York, to try to agree on some standards.[6] The group settled on a width of 11+1⁄4 inches (286mm) and perforation standards for 65-note rolls of 6 holes to the inch, and for 88-note rolls of 9 holes to the inch. That left margins at both ends for future developments. Any pianos built to those standards could play rolls made to them, albeit sometimes with a loss of special functionality. The formats became a loose world standard.
Metronomic or arranged rolls are rolls produced by positioning the music slots without real-time input from a performing musician. The music, when played back, is typically purely metronomical. Metronomically arranged music rolls are deliberately left metronomic so as to enable a player-pianist to create their own musical performance (such as varying the dynamics, tempo, and phrasing) via the hand controls that are a feature of all player pianos.
Hand played rolls are created by capturing in real time the hand-played performance of one or more pianists upon a piano connected to a recording machine. The production roll reproduced the real-time performance of the original recording when played back at a constant speed. (It became industry convention for recordings of music intended to be used for dancing to be regularized into strict tempo despite the original performance having the slight tempo fluctuations of all human performances, as due to the recording and production process, any fluctuations would be magnified/exaggerated in the finished production copy and result in an uneven rhythm.)
Reproducing rolls are the same as hand-played rolls but have additional control codes to operate the dynamic modifying systems specific to whichever brand of reproducing piano it is designed to be played back on, producing an approximation of the original recording pianist's dynamics. Reproducing pianos were beyond the reach of the average home in the original era of popularity of these instruments and were heavily marketed as reproducing the 'soul' of the performer – slogans such as "The Master's Fingers On Your Piano" or "Paderewski will play for you in your own house!" were common.
Compositions for pianola and reproducing piano
The player piano gives the opportunity to create music that is impossible for humans to play, or, more correctly, music that was not conceived in terms of performance by hand. Over one hundred composers wrote music specially for the player piano during the course of the 20th century. Many mainstream composers experimented with its possibilities, including Igor Stravinsky, Alfredo Casella, and Paul Hindemith; others, including Conlon Nancarrow, made it their primary milieu.
The Duo-Art, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon brands were known as "reproducing" piano rolls, as they could accurately reproduce the touch and dynamics of the artist as well as the notes struck, when played back on capable pianos.
Reproducing pianos
Tracker bar of a Welte-Mignon
Rolls for the reproducing piano were generally made from the recorded performances of famous musicians. Typically, a pianist would sit at a specially designed recording piano, and the pitch and duration of any notes played would be either marked or perforated on a blank roll, together with the duration of the sustaining and soft pedal. In Australia Edith and Laurel Pardey were employed as "nine to five" pianola pianists. They were not famous when they started in the 1920s but they became well known for their playing.[7]
Reproducing pianos can also re-create the dynamics of a pianist's performance by means of specially encoded control perforations placed towards the edges of a music roll. Different companies had different ways of notating dynamics, some technically advanced, some secret, and some dependent entirely on a recording producer's handwritten notes, but in all cases these dynamic hieroglyphics had to be skillfully converted into the specialized perforated codes needed by the different types of instrument.
Recorded rolls play at a specific, marked speed, where for example, 70 signifies 7 feet (2.1m) of paper travel in one minute, at the start of the roll. On all pneumatic player pianos, the paper is pulled on to a take-up spool, and as more paper winds on, so the effective diameter of the spool increases, and with it the paper speed. Player piano engineers were well aware of this, as can be seen from many patents of the time, but since reproducing piano recordings were generally made with a similar take-up spool drive, the tempo of the recorded performance is faithfully reproduced, despite the gradually increasing paper speed.
There were hundreds of companies worldwide producing rolls during the peak period of their popularity (1900–1927). Some other non-reproducing rolls makers of live performances are listed below together with their most memorable recording artistes.
This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, protecting them and introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.
In digital audio workstations
DAW piano roll
In most modern digital audio workstation software, the term "piano roll" is used to refer to a graphical display of, and means of editing, MIDI note data. Piano rolls allow the user to enter the pitch, length and velocity of notes manually, instead of recording the output of a keyboard or other device for entering note data. Usually a means of manually editing other aspects of the MIDI data, such as pitch bend or modulation, is also present, although not strictly part of the piano roll itself.
From the mid 1980s, music software started to include grid-based graphical editors inspired by piano rolls, with the two axes representing pitch and time, and the notes displayed as bars on the grid. MacroMind's MusicWorks (1984) utilized the Macintosh's high resolution WIMP graphical user interface to implement a piano roll-style editor with a keyboard aligned vertically on the left of a grid.[8][9] Other early examples of piano roll-inspired editors include Southworth's Total Music (1986),[10]Iconix (1987) by System Exclusive, which used a vertical scrolling piano roll with the keyboard aligned horizontally at the top of the editing window,[11] and Master Tracks Pro (1987) by Passport Designs.[12]
With the release of Cubase and its Key Edit window in 1989, the piano roll format introduced by MusicWorks was established as a standard MIDI editing feature in modern digital audio workstations.[13][14]
A player piano is a self-playing piano with a pneumatic or electro-mechanical 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.
Pete Wendling was an American composer and pianist, born in New York City to German immigrants. He often collaborated with fellow QRS pianist and composer, Max Kortlander.
Josef Lhévinne was a Russian pianist and piano teacher. Lhévinne wrote a short book in 1924 that is considered a classic: Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest it was lay-VEEN.
Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke was a German composer, conductor, and pianist in the mid-Romantic era.
M. Welte & Sons, Freiburg and New York was a manufacturer of orchestrions, organs and reproducing pianos, established in Vöhrenbach by Michael Welte (1807–1880) in 1832.
Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler was an Austrian-born American pianist.
Emil Paur was an Austrian orchestra conductor.
QRS Music Technologies, Inc. is an American company that makes modern player pianos. It was founded as Q•R•S Music Company in 1900 to make piano rolls, the perforated rolls of paper read by player pianos to reproduce music. The company also produced shellac records in the 1920s and 1930s and radios beginning in the 1920s. Today, it makes modern, digital variations on the player piano and the recordings to drive them.
A music roll is a storage medium used to operate a mechanical musical instrument. They are used for the player piano, mechanical organ, electronic carillon and various types of orchestrion. The vast majority of music rolls are made of paper. Other materials that have been utilized include thin card (Imhof-system), thin sheet brass (Telektra-system), composite multi-layered electro-conductive aluminium and paper roll (Triste-system) and, in the modern era, thin plastic or PET film.
American Piano Company (Ampico) was an American piano manufacturer formed in 1908 through the merger of Wm. Knabe & Co., Chickering & Sons, Marshall & Wendell, and Foster-Armstrong. They later purchased the Mason & Hamlin piano company as their flagship piano. The merger created one of the largest American piano manufacturers. In 1932, it was merged with the Aeolian Company to form Aeolian-American Co.
Duo-Art was one of the leading reproducing piano technologies of the early 20th century, the others being American Piano Company (Ampico), introduced in 1913 too, and Welte-Mignon in 1905. These technologies flourished at that time because of the poor quality of the early Phonograph. Between 1913 and 1925 a number of distinguished classical and popular pianists, such as Ignace Paderewski, Josef Hofmann, Percy Grainger, Teresa Carreño, Aurelio Giorni, Robert Armbruster and Vladimir Horowitz, recorded for Duo-Art, and their rolls are a legacy of 19th-century and early 20th-century aesthetic and musical practice. The recording process – using a piano wired to a perforating machine – was unable to capture the pianist's dynamics automatically. These were added by a recording technician, who manipulated hand controls to notate the dynamics onto the recording 'master'. Thus, post-recording editing was required to produce the finished performance – usually a joint effort by the recording technician and the actual pianist, who approved the final product. Thus, these recordings do represent the overall style of these great artists and are a good representation of their live performances.
Silvio Vittore Alberto Scionti was an Italian-born American pianist and teacher. Born in Acireale, Sicily, he trained at the Royal Conservatory in Naples. He eventually settled in the United States, teaching at the American Conservatory of Music, the Chicago Musical College, and North Texas State College from 1942 to 1953, and privately in the Dallas area. He performed as a soloist numerous times with the Chicago and Minneapolis orchestras, and frequently gave recitals. In the 1920s, he toured the United States performing piano duos with former student Stell Andersen. After 1935, he and his wife Isabel toured Europe, Mexico, and the United States. He also recorded a handful of piano rolls.
The Aeolian Company was a musical-instrument making firm whose products included player organs, pianos, sheet music, records and phonographs. Founded in 1887, it was at one point the world's largest such firm. During the mid 20th century, it surpassed Kimball to become the largest supplier of pianos in the United States, having contracts with Steinway & Sons due to its Duo-Art system of player pianos. It went out of business in 1985.
The Vocalstyle Music Company of Cincinnati, Ohio was one of the foremost manufacturers of piano rolls. Founded around 1906, they were the first company to conceive of the idea of printing song lyrics on the piano roll so they could be viewed and sung as the music played. They patented this idea and collected royalties from all other music roll companies that printed lyrics.
Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls is an album of piano rolls recorded by George Gershwin. It was released by Nonesuch Records in 1993.
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music.
Theodora Sturkow-Ryder was an American concert pianist, composer, music critic and piano teacher, based in Chicago.
Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel was the first pianist to record all of Ludwig van Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. The recordings were made in Abbey Road Studios in London on a C. Bechstein grand piano from 1932 to 1935, seven years after electrical recording was invented. Originally recorded on 78 rpm phonograph records for the His Master's Voice (HMV) label, they have been reissued numerous times on LP and CD.
Hanna van Vollenhoven Vories was a Dutch composer and pianist who moved to America in 1916. She is best remembered today for composing and performing music for player piano rolls, and for New York University's annual Hanna van Vollenhollen Fories Memorial Prize in Music. Her music was published under the name "Hanna Vollenhoven.
Marguerite Volavy, also known as MadameVolavy, was a pianist known for her recordings of Czech music and composers.
↑ Music Trade Review, New York, NY, Vol. 47, No. 24, p. 31 from December 12, 1908.
↑ Brownrigg, Jeff, "Edith Emma Pardey (1896–1963)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, retrieved 2024-02-15
Smith, Charles David; Howe, Richard James (1994). The Welte-Mignon, its music and musicians; complete catalogue of Welte-Mignon reproducing piano recordings 1905–1932. Vestal, NY: Vestal Press. ISBN1-879511-17-7. historical overview of companies and individuals, biographical essays on the recording artists and composers. (out of print).
Dangel, Gerhard; Schmitz, Hans-W. (2006). Welte-Mignon-Reproduktionen: Gesamtkatalog der Aufnahmen für das Welte-Mignon Reproduktions-Piano 1905–1932[Welte-Mignon Reproductions: Complete Library of Recordings for the Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano 1905–1932] (in German). Stuttgart: Rombach Druck. ISBN3-00-017110-X.
Bryner, Barbara (2002). The piano roll: a valuable recording medium of the twentieth century (Thesis). Department of Music, University of Utah. OCLC50482085.
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