A Brief History of Re-Performance
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A Brief History of Re-performance by Nicholas Patrick Seaver B.A. Literature Yale University, 2007 SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2010 © 2010 Nicholas Patrick Seaver. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: ____________________________________________________________ Program in Comparative Media Studies 11 May 2010 Certified by: __________________________________________________________________ William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies Director, Comparative Media Studies Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: _________________________________________________________________ William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies Director, Comparative Media Studies A Brief History of Re-performance by Nicholas Patrick Seaver Submitted to the Program in Comparative Media Studies on May 11, 2010, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies Abstract Discussions of music reproduction technology have generally focused on what Jonathan Sterne calls “tympanic” reproduction: the recording and playback of sounds through microphones and speakers. While tympanic reproduction has been very successful, its success has limited the ways in which music reproduction is popularly imagined and discussed. This thesis explores the history of “re-performance,” an alternative mode of reproduction epitomized by the early twentieth-century player piano. It begins with a discussion of nineteenth-century piano recorders and the historical role of material representation in the production of music. It continues with the advent of player pianos in the early twentieth century that allowed users to “interpret” prerecorded material, blurring the line between performance and reproduction and inspiring popular reflection on the role of the mechanical in music. It concludes with the founding of the American Piano Company laboratory in 1924 and the establishment of a mechanically founded rhetoric of fidelity. Bookending this history is an account of a performance and recording session organized by Zenph Studios, a company that processes historical tympanic recordings to produce high-resolution data files for modern player pianos. Zenphʼs project appears futuristic from the perspective of tympanic reproduction, but is more readily understood in terms of the history of re-performance, suggesting a need for renewing critical attention on re-performative technologies. Contemporary developments in music reproduction such as music video games and sampling may make new sense considered in the context of re-performance. This alternative history aims to provide a ground on which such analyses could be built. Thesis Supervisor: William Uricchio Title: Professor of Comparative Media Studies Table of Contents Figures"_______________________________________________________________7 Acknowledgments" ______________________________________________________9 “The past is not surpassed”: Making Pianistic History!_________________11 Tympanic reproduction"__________________________________________________14 Re-performance" _______________________________________________________15 Pianistic reproduction"___________________________________________________17 A brief history"_________________________________________________________18 1. Representation: Reading, Writing, and Recording Performance!_______23 Musical writing" ________________________________________________________25 Werktreue"____________________________________________________________27 Virtuosi" ______________________________________________________________28 Translations and natural language"_________________________________________30 Geist"________________________________________________________________35 Situated legibilities and musical reading"_____________________________________36 Hybrid legibility"________________________________________________________40 2. Reconfiguration: Machines to Play for Them!_______________________45 Locating pianism"_______________________________________________________46 Redistributing pianism"___________________________________________________48 Pianolism" ____________________________________________________________50 Interpretive expertise" ___________________________________________________54 Skill"_________________________________________________________________57 Towards re-performance"_________________________________________________61 3. Mechanical Fidelity: Materiality, Piano Science, and the Perfect Copy!__63 Finding touch" _________________________________________________________65 Piano science"_________________________________________________________67 Mechanical objectivity" __________________________________________________69 Quantification"_________________________________________________________70 Mechanical fidelity" _____________________________________________________72 Calibration"____________________________________________________________76 Mechanical identities" ___________________________________________________77 “We make data”: Futures of Re-performance!_________________________81 Representations, data, and excess" ________________________________________83 Reconfigurations, binding, and rendering devices"_____________________________85 Mechanical fidelity, voicing, and mapping"____________________________________88 Futures of re-performance"_______________________________________________90 Bibliography!____________________________________________________93 !!Figures 1. Pinned cylinders"___________________________________23 2. Ornamental expression"______________________________24 3. Hybrid notation"____________________________________26 4. Mechanical translation"_______________________________31 5. Pianolist literacy"___________________________________40 6. Interface reconfiguration"_____________________________49 7. Player players"_____________________________________52 8. Expressive traces"__________________________________55 9. Vertical displacement"_______________________________68 10. Spark chronography "_______________________________71 11. Mechanical equivalency "____________________________72 12. Rhetorical dynamics"_______________________________78 7 Acknowledgments Thanks to Stefan Helmreich and William Uricchio, my thesis committee, for their generous and thorough feedback on an unseemly number of drafts; for entertaining pneumatic flights of fancy that took me as far afield as Hedy Lamarr!s missile guidance patent; and for countless provocative, edifying discussions. Thanks to Bill Koenigsberg for inviting me into his home and to the other members of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors! Association, Boston Area Chapter for teaching me so much about these fascinating machines. Thanks as well to the posters of the Mechanical Music Digest. They shared more information about player pianos than I could possibly include here, but I hope that some of their commitment to detail and the physical realities of historical objects has rubbed off on me. Thanks to John Q. Walker, Anatoly Larkin, and the other members of the Zenph team for welcoming me into their studio, helpfully answering my incessant questions, and showing me their vision of the musical future. Thanks to Vin Novara, Leahkim Gannett, and Donald Manildi at the Performing Arts Library and International Piano Archive at UMD College Park for their help during my research visit. For their correspondence and chats that surely benefited me more than them, thanks to Lisa Gitelman, Morgan O!Hara, Nick Montfort, Wayne Marshall, Chris Ariza, Michael Cuthbert, and Mark Katz. Thanks to Doris Rusch for her generous guidance, metaphors to work by, and a steady perspective. Thanks to my officemates, Sheila Seles, Hillary Kolos, and Michelle Moon Lee, for feedback, sanity, interventions, humor, and pretzels. And of course, thanks to Christina Agapakis, whose patience, proofreading, and company made a difficult project doable. In memory of Stuart G. Berggren. 9 “The past is not surpassed”: Making Pianistic History “I was totally wowed,” a woman in the audience told CBC News. “The only thing missing was a hologram of Gould actually playing.”1 In 2006, on what would have been Glenn Gould!s 74th birthday, in the studio named after him at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, Zenph Studios produced a concert featuring his performance of the work that launched his career when he recorded it for Columbia Masterworks 50 years previous: Bach!s Goldberg Variations. The Variations, published in 1741, had been considered esoteric harpsichord music until Gould!s interpretation on the piano revived them for a modern audience—an aria and 30 short contrapuntal variations on its bass theme. Zenph!s concert was unusual in many respects, but two facts suggested that it should not have happened at all: Gould famously abandoned live performance at the age of 31, and he died at 51. The bench in front of the 9-foot grand piano was empty, as was an adjustable wooden chair upstage—a replica of the chair Gould always sat on when he played. Atop another piano bench downstage was a small computer with a glowing green LCD screen—a cable running from it to the underside of the piano. A