Player Pianos and Their Significance In Understanding Modern

Piano Performance

Brian Liu

March 22, 2018

Piano or keyboard performance is an art that has existed since before the 1700s. The goal
of piano performance is to create a faithful reproduction of a piano composer’s work. For
years, piano performance was the only means by which a composer’s work could be replayed,
using mainly the composer’s original written score for musical direction. However, with the
recollection, rediscovery, and recirculation of player pianos and their rolls, the answer to
“What is a faithful interpretation of a musical work?” becomes much more complicated.
Through the lens of material culture studies and the history of the idea of piano performance,
we will examine the history and meaning of player pianos, then analyze the differences
between the composer’s recordings and piano performance practices of today.
In order to understand the significance of the rediscovery of these recordings, one must
understand what a player piano and a player piano roll is. For all intents and purposes, most
player pianos look and sound the same as a normal piano, but the main difference between
a normal piano and a player piano is that a player piano is fully automated and reproduces
mechanical key presses based on inscriptions marked on a sheet of paper, which is fed to the
player piano. This sheet of paper, typically in the form of a roll, is called a piano player roll,
or piano roll.1
With these definitions in mind, our first object is the keyboard-less Red Welte upright
Steinway player piano of the Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls.2
Although this keyboard is the main medium through which one can hear composers’ original
performances, it represents much more than just a listening tool. Player pianos like this Welte
represent three things: the first era of the mechanical automation of music, the redefinition
of what “authentic” music creation is, and the pushing of new boundaries for what aspects
of music can be preserved.3
Alhough the advent of technologies like robots, artificial intelligence, and automation
seems to be a new and ever-increasing threat to replacing humanity,4 the debut of the player
1. Stanford Department of Music & Archive of Recorded Sound, “The Player Piano Project,” 2014, http : / / library .
stanford.edu/projects/player-piano-project.
2. Jerry L. McBride, Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls, The Player Piano Project, 2014.
3. Thomas W. Patteson, “The Joy of Precision: Mechanical Instruments and the Aesthetics of Automation,” Oxford Hand-
books, 2014,
4. Scott A. Wolla, “Will Robots Take Our Jobs?,” Page One Economics, January 2018,
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piano in concert in Donaueschingen, Germany, on July 25, 1926, was an early harbinger of
the automation of human art, threatening to replace human performers.5 “A contemporary
account captured the strange scene as the music began:”

The hall was illuminated by unseen sources. It was absolutely quiet as Hindemith wound up the device.
[ . . . ] The piano began to play: music like an étude, toccatas with otherwise unplayable harmonic
progressions, with a speed that could never be approached even by the most virtuosic of players, with an
exactitude of which a human could never be capable, with a superhuman sonic force, with a geometrical
clarity of rhythm, tempo, dynamics, and phrasing, which only a machine can produce. [ . . . ] The
piano finished the composition and there was an uneasy pause. Should one applaud? There’s no one
sitting there. It’s only a machine. Finally a quiet applause, growing louder. Calls of “da capo.” And
sure enough, the piano played it again, without hesitation, as precisely as the first time.6

Player pianos marked the first time the “piano player” was taken out of “piano playing”
and replaced with a “player piano.”7 Indeed, two years before this concert, a young composer
and writer named Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt wrote a short article called “Mechanization
of Music” concerning the authenticity of human performance.8
In Stuckenschmidt’s view, the human performances that listeners most often affection-
ately refer to as “nuanced” and “unpredictable” could more accurately be characterized as
performances with nothing but defects. “The performer’s character, his momentary feelings,
his private opinions are quite irrelevant to the essence of the artwork,” he wrote. “The
more ‘objective’ the interpreter, the better the interpretation.”9 In fact, in his mind, the
ideal musician is not an interpreter at all, but rather an “administrator” of the composer’s
directions.10
Player pianos allowed this very philosophy to propagate, and laid the foundations for
materialism in the music industry today. Elise Fellows White sums up music materialism
perfectly in her piece Music versus Materialism:

[A]s books have become common with the invention of printing, so has music with the invention of the
player-machines; and the best books and the best music must now share the same careless fate. Always
will there be someone to value them, yet the dust gathers thick to-day on Dante, and Milton; while the
young folks laugh and chatter through heavenly records of Galli Curci or of Heifetz, without so much as
a pretense at listening. To them it is but a diversion, associated with social hours and the amusements
of idleness. In choosing his life-work the boy turns his serious attention to electricity or chemistry; the
girl to problems of domestic science, nursing, or the like. . . Our coming generation has planted its feet
5. Patteson, “The Joy of Precision: Mechanical Instruments and the Aesthetics of Automation.”
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
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all too firmly upon the solid earth. It has learned to fly physically, but not spiritually. My own personal
belief is that the era of great musical invention is past. That the tunes have all been played or sung.
That the accumulated material of past years is better worth while than all our feeble attempts to create
a music of the future.11

Despite this foreboding prophecy of music, the player piano could nevertheless nearly
perfectly preserve a composer’s ideas and intentions. Even today, the most coveted perfor-
mance of a song is that of the composer or songwriter. Why should one listen to a cover
of a song—the entire basis of piano performance itself—when a performance of the original
exists? Although the answer to this question was relatively straightforward when a record-
ing of a composer’s original performance did not exist, the perfect player piano recordings
complicate the answer to this question.
With a history and background of player pianos and player piano rolls, we now turn to the
remaining four objects in our collection—three piano roll recordings of composers’ original
performances, and one piano roll performance of a highly respected, modern performer.
A common theme among each of these piano roll recordings is the ability to observe the
history of piano performance ideas—how modern performances, or even performances of the
composer’s contemporaries, have strayed from the composer’s original, written intentions.
Today, in the most prestigious international piano competitions in which thousands of dollars
in prize money and career opportunities are at stake,12 modern piano performance judging
standards compel the performer to stay as faithful as possible to those very original, written
intentions.13 However, in listening to these original recordings, one finds that the composers
themselves often did not follow their own score. This observation leads to the following
question: What is a composer’s “original intentions?” Is it the score, the so-called “Word
of God” from which performers today strive so painstakingly never to stray? Or should a
composer’s own performance of his piece weigh more heavily when evaluating “intention?”
The answers to these questions underscore the analysis of this essay, and, like the field of
psychology,14 potentially undermine the very foundations of modern piano performance.
11. Elise Fellows White, “Music versus Materialism,” The Musical Quarterly 8, no. 1 (January 1922).
12. Andrea Ahles, “For Cliburn Amateur competitors, it’s not about the prize money,” Star Telegram, June 2016,
13. Israela Margalit, “I, The Jury,” Full Grown People, November 2017,
14. Monya Baker, “Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test,” Nature, August 2015,
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In order to understand the largely philosophical differences between piano playing then
and now, we must define some terms used in describing piano technique. When describing
a series of consecutive notes written with equal value or equal time spent playing each note,
the execution of how equal the time the player gives each note is called evenness. That is,
if the time spent on each consecutive note is exactly the same, the piano player is playing
the notes evenly. This evenness is a main characteristic of someone with proficient technical
ability or technical soundness. In this context, if a pianist is lazy, he or she is not playing
to the best of his or her technical ability. Similarly, even if several notes are written to be
the same length, the composer may choose to make them sound connected or not connected.
This general difference between connectedness and not-connectedness is called articulation.
15

The first piano roll recording in our collection is the George Gershwin recording. Having
recorded this song between the years 1916 and 1927, Gershwin plays his own Novelette in
Fourths.16 Novelette in Fourths is a leisurely piece that could be played as a backdrop to
a movie sequence depicting a whimsical Sunday afternoon stroll in the forest backyard of
someone’s countryside home.
In this example, “evenness” or “technical ability” as a standard is completely different.
Gershwin is not wholly technically “sound” or “articulation-discriminatory” by today’s stan-
dards, but in fact much more relaxed, or even “lazy.” This philosophical difference in what
Gershwin emphasizes in his playing sheds a new light on how his music might and should be
played today. In particular, the emphasis, or rather, lack of emphasis on what he wrote on
his own score in his performance gives an idea as to the whole purpose of even writing his
music—relaxed enjoyment. Modern piano performance standards demand strict evenness,
perfect articulation, and flawless execution, whereas these performance ideas that are so
coveted today are almost missing in George Gershwin’s performance.
Next is Alexander Scriabin’s Prelude Op. 11, No. 1.17 Once again, we must define some
15. A true presentation of this essay would include a live piano demonstration of all techniques, performed and explained by
me, but as of the time of submission, time does not allow for such luxuries.
16. George Gershwin, Novelette in Fourths (Salon Selections), Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls, 1993.
17. Alexander Scriabin, Prelude Op. 11, No. 1, The Player Piano Project, 1910.
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musical terms in order to understand the peculiarities of this performance. In music and
music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the
mensural level (or beat level). The tempo or tempo marking is simply the speed at which
the music is played, typically measured in beats per minute.
Now that we have some additional background and tools to tackle this analysis, we will
directly make some observations about this recording.
The technology of piano rolls already allowed edits, so variables like “live performance
mistakes” or “jitters” are not necessarily a factor. Scriabin could have edited his own tech-
nical errors or mistakes in interpretation.
With the common theme of “then vs. now,” the distinction here is how liberally Scriabin
plays around with the tempo. Performers today like Mikhail Pletnev studiously follow the
tempo marking of sixty-three to seventy-six beats per minute and the placement and time to
start the accelerando and crescendo that Scriabin himself wrote,18 but Scriabin himself gives
in to his primal instincts: Although he plays only slightly faster than his written tempo
marking, Scriabin starts both his accelerando and crescendo much earlier than he wrote
himself.19 It almost sounds like Scriabin was in a hurry to finish playing the song.
The original interpretation again sprouts this question: Because so much emphasis in
piano performance is on “the composer’s original intentions,” is it “more correct” to follow
the written score, or should a performer look to the composer’s own recording? Mikhail
Pletnev answers through his playing: he prefers the former.20
The fourth object of this collection is the piano roll recording of Debussy playing his own
Children’s Corner No. 1.21 Debussy’s first Children’s Corner is a day in the adventurous
playtime of a young child. He starts with an exposition into the outside, open world, fol-
lowed by an interlude of the dreams of the child’s deep sleep (more accurately, a nap), and
concluding with an awakening and realization of continued exploration of the world.
Major differences between his written score and his performance are scattered throughout
18. Mikhail Pletnev, Scriabin: 24 Preludes - Piano Sonatas 4 & 10, 1996.
19. Alexander Scriabin, Prelude Op. 11, No. 1, 1897.
20. Pletnev, Scriabin: 24 Preludes - Piano Sonatas 4 & 10.
21. Claude Debussy, Children’s Corner No. 1, The Player Piano Project, 1913.
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Debussy’s recording. On a purely technical level, by today’s standards, the notes are quite
uneven, and even rushed. Rushing means that the tempo, or the speed of the music, is
constantly increasing. Similar to Scriabin’s interpretation of his own song, the performance
almost sounds like Debussy was in a hurry to finish playing the song, especially towards the
end.
Such a “rushed” style of playing is not necessarily out of line with the trending styles of
art at the time. Debussy was a pioneer of what we now call the “Impressionist era of piano
music.” He had a different goal in mind than his predecessors did: the music is not about
“upstanding, perfect music,” but its purpose is to leave the listener with an “impression”
of the image the composer is trying to convey. This general philosophy is similar to that of
Impressionist painting.
The final object in this collection is Vladimir Horowitz’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s
famous Prelude in G minor.22 Although Rachmaninoff’s original piano roll recording of
his piece was not in Stanford’s piano roll collection at the time of this essay’s submission,
Stanford’s library still had an audio CD of his performance.23 The roll recording of Vladimir
Horowitz—a highly respected authority on all matters Rachmaninoff—serves as a starting
point for directly comparing a composer’s original “intentions” and a modern performance.
In his original recording, Rachmaninoff remains calm, disciplined, and almost metronom-
ical in many parts.24 In contrast, Horowitz accelerates where there is no acceleration written,
and sacrifices note accuracy for sheer power and strength.25 Both do slow down right before
the lyrical interlude, but both perform the ending quite differently. Horowitz ends the final
flourish with what could be described as a soft, quick whisper, whereas Rachmaninoff adds
notes to the song (he is the composer, after all) with two ending ”Hoorah!” notes. Although
Horowitz’s technique is by no means flawed, it is worth noting how incredible Rachmani-
noff’s technique was: In certain passages, Rachmaninoff articulates his notes so well that it
sounds as if he were playing five times slower. In stark contrast, Horowitz simply sacrifices
22. Vladimir Horowitz, Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, The Player Piano Project, 1926.
23. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, Edison, 1919.
24. Ibid.
25. Horowitz, Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5.
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the accuracy for the sheer power and anger that the piece demands.
So what, then, do these performances tell us about how to play these pieces? Well,
nothing, really. The idea that every year, judges reward thousands of dollars of prize money
to the most faithful (or perhaps, most robotic) performer seems inane when considering that
no one—not even the composer himself—truly knows what the composer intended when
he wrote the music. Perhaps we should rethink our criteria for judging the authenticity
and faithfulness of classical music. Perhaps we should throw it out completely. All that
this criteria produces is an endless stream young, inhuman, robotic prodigies, faithfully
reproducing what “should” be played, what feelings “should” be felt, and what the composer
“truly intended,” according to the whims of a small selection of indignant elitists (of which
I am unfortunately a likely member).
In this essay, we saw how the emergence of the player piano poised the question of what an
authentic piano performance really is. We also compared composers’ original performances to
today’s standards, and even compared it with one performance of the modern day. Although
the question of whether to weigh a composer’s written score or his own performance more
heavily in playing a piano piece remains an open question, the piano roll recordings still
greatly inform and give the modern performer deep insight into the mind of the composer.

References
Ahles, Andrea. “For Cliburn Amateur competitors, it’s not about the prize money.” Star Telegram, June
2016.
Baker, Monya. “Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test.” Nature, August 2015.
Debussy, Claude. Children’s Corner No. 1. The Player Piano Project, 1913.
Gershwin, George. Novelette in Fourths (Salon Selections). Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls, 1993.
Horowitz, Vladimir. Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5. The Player Piano Project, 1926.
Margalit, Israela. “I, The Jury.” Full Grown People, November 2017.
McBride, Jerry L. Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls. The Player Piano Project,
2014.
Music & Archive of Recorded Sound, Stanford Department of. “The Player Piano Project,” 2014. http:
//library.stanford.edu/projects/player-piano-project.
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Patteson, Thomas W. “The Joy of Precision: Mechanical Instruments and the Aesthetics of Automation.”
Oxford Handbooks, 2014.
Pletnev, Mikhail. Scriabin: 24 Preludes - Piano Sonatas 4 & 10, 1996.
Rachmaninoff, Sergei. Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5. Edison, 1919.
Scriabin, Alexander. Prelude Op. 11, No. 1, 1897.
. Prelude Op. 11, No. 1. The Player Piano Project, 1910.
White, Elise Fellows. “Music versus Materialism.” The Musical Quarterly 8, no. 1 (January 1922).
Wolla, Scott A. “Will Robots Take Our Jobs?” Page One Economics, January 2018.