Games, Ghosts, and Glamour:

The Player Piano in Domestic America, 1890-1930

Devanney Haruta

An honors thesis for the

Brown University Music Department

November 29, 2016

Primary Reader: Dana Gooley

Secondary Readers: Anne Searcy, Joshua Tucker 1

PRELUDE

Keyboards are all around us, on our cell phones and laptops, mediating our writing, our correspondence, our digital expression, and accompanying our communication with audible punctuations of sound. Alphanumeric keys read digital input and produce sound in digital and mechanical output. The player piano, a mechanical musical instrument from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, utilized a similar keyboard interface. With its humming pneumatics and predetermined sequence of musical pitches, the instrument can teach us about our modern interactions with technologies that produce sound both within and outside of our immediate control. How we interact with both modern digital and historic instrument technologies reveals the importance of physical objects in our lives, and can even teach us about our modes of interaction as well as about ourselves as humans.

The player piano is an instrument that became commercially widespread across the

United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The instrument walks a hazy boundary between interactive musical interface and independently controlled music player, simultaneously reinforcing and challenging the piano’s established identity in the American domestic space. The player piano is an intriguing historical object, but what is its relevance to contemporary musicology? Understanding the player piano’s identity as a musical interface, a body of control, and a cultural symbol sheds light on modern musicology, organology, and technology studies. According to musicologists John Tresch and Emily Dolan, technological inventions “reconfigure the relationship between machines, instruments, and their traditional functions.”1 Certainly the player piano as a musical technology can do the same. Research on interactions with various objects, musical and otherwise, gives us insight into our relationships

1 Tresch and Dolan, “Toward a New Organology,” 279. 2 with technology, and this insight is increasingly important to our modern digital lives. Recent innovations are already influencing how “humans understand themselves” as our technologies embed themselves ever deeper into our professional and personal lives.2 Shifting our focus toward a material culture of music can help us self-reflect on our own lives as humans and music makers.

Musicology and organology have acknowledged the player piano as an instrument of study, and much of this research has emerged during the past three decades. Perhaps the most thoroughly researched literature on the player piano comes from Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume in

1984, a player piano collector, historian, and repairer.3 His work investigates the intricate mechanics of the player piano and provides a detailed chronology and taxonomy of relevant patents, inventions, and innovative engineering design. Additionally, musicologist Brian Dolan published a book in 2009 that investigates the player piano’s history and current culture in the

United States through an ethnomusicologist’s lens. Dolan interviews current player piano collectors, visits factories where piano rolls were produced, and researches the history of the

American music industry to develop an understanding of the player piano’s social and cultural history. Most recently, Allison Wente’s 2016 dissertation explores the player piano as an object of digital reproduction in playing and storing music. Her connections to themes of labor, virtuosity, memory, and music composition maintain an object-centered perspective on the player piano.

My work contributes to and extends the established player piano literature with an investigation of the instrument as an interface, agent, and cultural symbol in everyday life. My

2 Tresch, Dolan, 283. 3 I draw primarily from Ord-Hume’s book Pianola in my research. I also reference his article “Cogs and Crochets” from 1983, which investigates other mechanical music instruments. 3 primary inspiration draws from research by Tresch and Dolan, who encourage musicology to bring instruments to the forefront of critical thought. Their goal of “overcoming the artificial divide” between musicology and organology is rooted in highlighting the influential agency of the material culture of instruments.4 This is especially relevant in the twenty-first century, as digital technologies become increasingly present and functional in our everyday lives. Tresch and Dolan encourage musicologists (and scientists) to take a closer look at our relationships to musical instruments and their effects on our thinking and actions, to “think about instruments as actors or tools with variable ranges of activity, with changing constructions and definitions, and with different locations in both technical and social formations.”5 Their emphasis on instruments not as passive bystanders in music history, but rather as active players that influence human thought, activity, and invention has greatly influenced the direction and focus of my research.

With a perspective that highlights the agency of musical instruments in music history, my research extends the existing player piano literature to develop new ideas about the instrument as an interactive object. Specifically, my work structures an investigation of the player piano as an instrument promoting play, conjuring the fantastic, and defining the domestic space. In each chapter, I maintain my focus on the player piano’s physical presence in the domestic space and its agency as a musical interface. Chapter 1 presents the player piano as a site of active play and interaction through an interface of pedals, levers, and piano rolls. Chapter 2 identifies phantom bodies and hands conjured at the player piano keyboard, which reflect a lack of control and loss of human agency. The third and final chapter identifies the player piano as a symbol of upward

4 Tresch, Dolan, 278. 5 Ibid, 281. 4 social mobility. It reveals a conflict between the player piano’s democratization of music, which promoted broad music accessibility, and the goal of aspiring to upper-class status, which promoted a narrowing, exclusive space for music.

* * *

Before launching into a detailed discussion of the player piano, a brief overview will help to set the player piano in a context of a history of mechanical musical instruments.

Technologies with seeming agency have intrigued humans long before the player piano’s invention. Clocks operating with springs and toothed wheels have existed since 1300 in Europe, and their mechanical power was harnessed to create music.6 A pinned barrel inserted inside the body of the clock triggered notes by engaging a lever to open a valve. Meanwhile, a human hand or spring powered a bellows system to produce air pressure, and when the valve was released, air rushed through a pipe to produce a pitch.7 By the eighteenth century, clockwork music was common in churches and households, at least among upper-class aristocracy and those who could afford such luxury items.8 Pinned barrels were also a familiar compositional medium to composers such as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.9

Other mechanical instruments in all sorts of sizes and shapes also appeared around this time. The life-like automata of Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacques-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson were miniature dolls that moved their fingers and bodies to play, for example, a hammered

6 Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History, 577. 7 Loesser, 577. 8 Ord-Hume, “Cogs and Crochets,” 168. 9 Ibid. For an intriguing discussion about a particular piece by Mozart for musical clock, see Annette Richards “Mozart and the Musical Sublime.” 5 dulcimer, flute, or organ.10 On the other end of the scale, enormous orchestrions housed entire mechanical orchestras, and in the later half of the nineteenth-century they were often found in households of extreme wealth.11 From the precedent of a wide variety of mechanical musical inventions that served as both instruments and entertainment objects, the player piano emerged as a popular, commercially-produced instrument for the American household.

The first widely successful player piano in the United States was not actually a piano at all, but a sort of piano accessory. Sometimes referred to as a piano player, an often confusing nomenclature inversion, this cabinet-style device was pushed up to the front of a traditional piano so that its overhang covered the keyboard. A row of felt-padded wooden bars rested on individual piano keys, and when cued by the score they would depress and trigger their corresponding key, mimicking the action of human fingers. The Pianola, invented in 1896 by

Edwin Scott Votey, was the initial leading (in sales) cabinet-style player piano in the United

States. Though it had “fingers” for only 58, and later 65, notes, it was what Ord-Hume describes as “a cumbersome device… so large that it obscured even the largest and most grandiose of uprights.”12 Despite its awkward build, Arthur Loesser attributes the huge success of this cabinet player to “some unnamed poetic genius” who created its attractive and catchy name.13

The branding only helped Aeolian’s aggressive marketing scheme, which initiated a sharp rise in sales for the Pianola and other models: 2.5 million were sold between 1900 and 1930.14

10 Hirt, When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, 10-11. For a detailed investigation of a selection of fantastical android automata, see Adelheid Voskuhl’s book Androids in the Enlightenment. 11 Carli, “Living with Mechanical Music,” 378. Carli’s essay explores mechanical music in lives of American millionaires in 1872-1919. 12 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 26. This weighty volume gives a thorough and knowledgeable account of the history and technical background of the “self-playing piano.” 13 Loesser, 582 14 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 28. 6

But the Pianola was just the beginning. Cabinet player pianos were impractical for regular use: moving the large, heavy attachment was burdensome, and the instrument took up a decent amount of space in the living room. Soon other American piano makers marketed new and improved designs that incorporated the Pianola mechanism inside a regular piano.15

Manufacturers added and modified tempo and dynamic levers for expressive playing, improved the roll tracking, and eventually harnessed the power of electricity. The invention of a mechanism that could record instantaneous playing was the start of the reproducing piano, a player piano that was arguably the highest fidelity option for recorded music at the time.

The adaptation of technology from musical clocks into an interface associated with a piano keyboard changed people’s understanding of musical instruments, particularly the piano.

The player piano was widely contested as an instrument that hindered musical appreciation because of its mechanical nature.16 Indeed, the terminology for these types of musical instruments reflects the perception that mechanical instruments were independent agents in performance. Terms such as “self-acting” and “automatic” have been used to describe player pianos and other mechanical instruments with similar mechanisms. However, an investigation of the player piano’s interactive elements questions the accuracy of these terms and highlights a more complex interaction between instrument and performer. The player piano offered more to a musical experience than just “self-acting” or “automatic” music. When presented with an interactive interface, what else was there to do but play?

15 For an extensive list, see page 269 of Ord-Hume’s Pianola, chapter 14: “List of Principal Makers, Patentees and Agents.” 16 See Sousa’s “Menace of Mechanical Music.” 7

CHAPTER 1: The Art of Player-Pianism

Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Play is a part of our everyday lives. Particularly in music where the word refers to the act of producing sound with an instrument, play is engaging, natural, and expected. Historian

Johan Huizinga proposes that play is a universal activity that exists independently, originating in a realm outside humanity. Play creates its own order, its own set of rules. It has the power to fully absorb participants so that they “[step] out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” Animals play, too, he notes, and thus play defies rational thinking and mechanical means; it “bursts the bounds of the physically existent.”17

Music, too, has long been considered to inhabit an intangible dimension of its own.

German romantics believed that music, especially instrumental music, was pure sound that transcended the physical, material world. Of all art, music was considered the highest, most ideal form. These concepts, as musicologist Carl Dahlhaus points out, remained the foundation for musical thought into the twentieth century.18 Music was thought to be so abstracted from anything physical and referential that it, “as pure ‘structure,’ represents itself.”19

However, Huizinga and Dahlhaus underestimate the significance and influence of the physical object in both play and music. Games often involve physical props that during play are manipulated and interacted with according to prescribed rules. Musical instruments have an

17 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 21. 18 Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 8. 19 Ibid., 7. 8 incredibly influential role in our production of and discourse on music and musical play. Even on the most basic level, sound is inextricably linked to material; without vibrating matter, sound waves cannot propagate. Musical instruments as physical mediating bodies are just as essential to music as sound itself. Through a study of the player piano in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American domestic household, I challenge the preconceptions that play and music are by definition disjoint from the material world.

The instrument’s name, player piano, presents an initial ambiguity of agency: who is the

“player”: the person or the instrument? It balances precariously on an identity border between musical instrument and playback device. At first glance it appears to be like any other piano, but it does more than simply present a keyboard interface. When powered by pneumatic bellows, an internal note-activating mechanism translates patterns of holes punched on a paper roll into keystrokes, providing the finger technique for whoever sits down in front of the keys to make music. Investigating this interaction between player piano and human performer revives an important conversation about the relationship between humans and machines, a long-standing source of wonder, innovation, criticism, fear, and pure enjoyment.

My object-focused view cuts against the grain of historic Romantic ideals, drawing inspiration from Tresch and Dolan’s theories of organology introduced in the Prelude. I apply their instrument-focused method to bring the player piano to the front and center of my studies and explore questions that challenge the idea that objects play passive roles in music making. What is the role of the human when the machine takes over certain techniques? How does the construction and design of the instrument lend itself to interaction? And how does the instrument contribute to the act of music making? 9

In unpacking the idea of play as it relates to the player piano, I draw from musicologist

Roger Moseley’s theories of ludomusicology, which concern music and play in the context of video games. According to Moseley, “ludomusicology recognizes that music and digital games are not merely to be read, seen, or heard, but played. Music, from this perspective, constitutes a set of cognitive, technological, and social affordances for behaving in certain ways, for playing in and with the world through the medium of sound and its representations.”20 Music is a medium for play; it unites sound with action. Moseley examines the musical video games

Guitar Hero and Rock Band as spaces where music becomes a played performance. In the games, players navigate an alternate reality that is simultaneously artificial and real, both physically and sonically. Ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller elaborates further on the concept of play, arguing that Guitar Hero gameplay is more than “‘just playing along;’” rather, it is “playing between — that is, playing in the gap between virtual and actual performance.”21

The relevance of an instrument-focused study becomes significant when we consider the historic implications and affordances of play at the traditional piano and how these ideas later transferred to the player piano. The piano in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a site of female “containment,” a term that musicologist Matthew Head uses to refer to the

“disciplinary effect of music upon female subjectivity and social position.”22 Music historian

Arthur Loesser efficiently describes the historically recurring image of a young woman at the piano as bound up with ideals of femininity, domesticity, social status, and morals: “There she could sit, gentle and genteel, and be an outward symbol of her family’s ability to pay for her

20 Moseley, “Playing Games with Music (and Vice Versa),” 283. Italics in original. 21 Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance, 16. 22 Head, “‘If the Pretty Little Hand Won’t Stretch’: Music For the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” 204. 10 education and her decorativeness, of its striving for culture and the graces of life, of its pride in the fact that she did not have to work and that she did not “run after” men.”23

But why was the piano, of all musical instruments, the familiar site of female containment? In addition to societal expectations, the piano, like any physical object, has a set of affordances. According to psychologist James Gibson, these affordances are certain characteristics that suggest a purpose for the object to an agent.24 In the case of the piano, the affordances of its physical construction reinforced containment ideals. A performer was instructed to sit on a flat, backless bench that, in combination with posture regulation, resulted in a straight spine and the elbows in at the sides. Vertical finger movement was restricted to the few centimeters required to depress a piano key. Women’s clothing also reinforced these expectations; consider corsets, for example, which restricted a woman’s range of motion, as well as her capacity to breathe.25 As a result, there were limitations on facial expressions: slight smiles or concentrated gazes were acceptable, as long as they were not too impassioned.26

Appropriate piano music was docile, familiar, and never virtuosic or experimental. Friends and family would often request pieces of one another, with the understanding that there was a certain repertoire of music that a respectable woman was expected to learn. A woman’s social confinements were defined by the physical limitations of and societal expectations around the piano.

23 Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, 65. Even earlier images of women at keyboard instruments are portrayed in automata from the 18th-century, such as David Roentgen’s dulcimer player or Jacquet-Droz’s organ player. In the form of automatic, mechanical dolls, these women are literally crafted by men’s hands, portrayed in their ideal form. 24 Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127. 25 In searching for advertisements and articles on player pianos in newspaper archives, I have also come across many advertisements for women’s corsets, which were in fashion at the time. 26 Loesser, 65. 11

The player piano broke, though unintentionally, from the theme of female containment and offered a new approach to domestic music making through its newly implemented interface that afforded new interactions. Manufacturers initially intended for the player piano to directly replace the traditional piano in the household, and it would seem that the development of the instrument’s automatic technique would demand even less physical exertion of already contained women. Advertisements for player pianos pictured performers with the same distant expressions and delicate, graceful hands of typical of piano playing.

In reality, however, player pianos required more physical exertion and a wider range of motion from the performer. The concept of foot pedals on a domestic instrument was not a new idea (consider Singer’s popular sewing machine, for example), but on a player piano, a performer needed a decent amount of force to pump the pneumatics.27 The rushing air and spinning gears of the inner mechanics were much noisier and more active than in a traditional piano. To have a woman making so much noise at a musical instrument must have been initially shocking. The repertoire, too, expanded to include popular music and ragtime, with its

African-American origins standing in stark contrast to the classical canon of white, male,

European composers.28 The player piano’s new modes of interaction disrupted the narrative of containment, opening opportunities for agency, play, and active music making.

Considering the player piano through ludomusicological and organological lenses challenges the view of instrumental play as a passive activity and reconsiders the Romantic ideal of music as pure sound contained within and referring only to itself. Music and play in my

27 The player piano has also been cited as a form of exercise, a healthy practice for both the mind and body: see Dolan, Inventing Entertainment, 109. 28 For a longer discussion of the player piano repertoire and its influence on domestic culture, see chapter 3, section 4. 12 study on the player piano are no longer “absolute” but rather intricately intertwined with the relationships among humans, instrument, and performance. In this chapter, I argue that the player piano actively engages the performer in a field of play that is both physical and mental through the use of pedals, levers, and music rolls. There is no room for passivity in this context, from either the performer or the instrument. The performer must play the interactive game with the player piano in order to produce musical sound in performance.

1. Capturing “Touch” with Pedals and Levers

From the initial cabinet-style players to the later reproducing models, the player piano in all forms was an interactive device. Musicologist Mark Katz recognizes its capacity for interaction, and observes that player piano owners did not passively consume music, but were instead “co-performers” with the instrument.29 Katz mentions how the performer operated the pedals and levers to control the output of the music. In a comprehensive extension of Katz’s observation, this section carefully details the physical components of the player piano that contributed to active play.

Consumers expressed a desire for musical agency over their music, and when the initial models provided limited dynamic capabilities, for example, in the uniform volume of melody and accompaniment, people demanded more from the instruments. No sooner were the instruments out of the warehouse “than there was an immediate demand, at least on the part of those who possessed the so-called musical ear, for some means of playing the solo, melody, or theme with a stronger emphasis than the accompaniment.”30 Ostensibly to please the “musical

29 Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” 6. 30 “Emphasizing the Theme in a Player Piano,” Scientific American, 20 May 1916, 533. 13 ear” of their customers, manufacturers were intent on devising interfaces through which the performers could add their own musicality with dynamic and tempo changes. The development of the foot pedals was a necessary aspect of the player piano, primarily for a pneumatic power source for the pre-electric instruments, but also as a means to control volume. The addition of the hand levers also enabled the performer to directly manipulate the tempo and dynamics.

Through these two interfaces, the performer could influence their personal “touch” on the music. A performer’s touch was a demonstration of active engagement, an element of musical control that demonstrated that they were not just listening or passively operating, but playing.

Before they harnessed electricity, player pianos were powered pneumatically by the use of large rectangular pedals at the base of the instrument. The pedals created a means for the performer to engage in play with the player piano. Applying Gibson’s theory of affordances, pedals afford pressing: they are located at the feet of the seated performer and are hinged in alignment with the performer’s ankles. These pedals were vital to the instrument’s functionality, primarily providing a source of power by operating the interior bellows to maintain the airflow.31 Their secondary function served to directly influence dynamics. On a traditional piano, the force with which the levers hit the strings determined the volume and accenting of notes, and the soft pedal shortened the distance between the levers and the strings, making it possible to play at a lower volume.32 To mimic the accenting and dynamic capabilities of the traditional piano, manufacturers devised similar systems for the player piano. Ord-Hume cites what he believes to be the “first ‘expression’ device”: a pneumatic

31 For a rigorous tour of the player piano’s inner mechanisms, see Ord-Hume’s Pianola, chapter 5: “How the Pneumatic Player Piano Works,” 127-154. 32 Loesser, 173. 14 system invented by C. A. Custer of New York in 1887 that “graduated the power of touch and operated the piano pedals” from a pinned barrel or perforated roll.33

By 1910, performers were manipulating the player piano’s pedals to create more dramatic dynamic effects. An instructional guide by William Blake White informs, “variation of foot pressure on the pedals enables the performer, with the utmost delicacy, to vary the power of the touch on the keys or other significant part of the piano action.”34 The emphasis on control and precision appealed to a performer’s desire for musical autonomy. The pedals were not merely a source of power, but also a means and command of musical expression. Another user’s manual from 1925 by Percy A. Scholes on proper Pianola technique emphasizes that the

“‘touch’ of the Pianola is controlled by the feet.” The feet act “in somewhat the same way as a pianist’s hands are trained” to provide the necessary “touch” to the music, an element that is here emphasized as entirely a contribution of the performer.35

In drawing a similar parallel between the feet and hands, a cartoon in the Saturday

Evening Post from 1925 simultaneously satirizes and highlights the use of the pedals for expression (figure 1): “Yes, My Daughter Has a Great Foot for Music,” boasts Mrs. Neurich as she and a friend sip tea and admire the young woman’s foot-technique at the player piano.36

The cartoon pokes fun at the player piano’s unusual use of the feet, and not the hands, for musical production at a piano. But it also reinforces the notion that the player piano was a site for passivity: the daughter is pictured leaning away from the instrument with both hands on

33 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 91. 34 White, The Player-Pianist, 49. Note the choice of the word “delicacy”: the image of women at the piano was a relevant theme. William Braid White’s guide to the player piano, The Player-Pianist, is an entertaining read, if not for his proposition that the player piano is an instrument that requires technique and practiced skill, than for his unparalleled enthusiasm for the instrument. 35 Scholes, The Appreciation of Music by Means of the ‘Pianola’ and ‘Duo-Art,’ 138. 36 Reproduced in Roehl, Player Piano Treasury, 15. Original from the Saturday Evening Post, 1925. 15 the bench behind her. The daughter is relaxed and the tilt of her head might even suggest boredom. Herein lies the cartoon’s comedy. The woman, whose high social class expects her to have keyboard proficiency, can achieve the same effect at the player piano with no apparent effort.

Figure 1: Cartoon from the Saturday Morning Post, 1925.

Reality, however, contradicts the appearance of passivity with the emphasis on the daughter’s “Great Foot for Music.” Pedaling required significantly more exertion than pressing keys with the fingers. The emphasis on the pedals also implies that the feet were thought to adopt the musical function of the hands, contributing the element of “touch” that is so 16 essential to a traditional pianist’s technique and necessary for active music making.37 Engaging in play at the player piano necessitated that performers interacted with the instrument by actively contributing musical expression or “touch” with their feet.

Though Mrs. Neurich mocks the absence of hands from performance at the player piano, hands did play an important role in their manipulation of levers that controlled volume and tempo. The addition of levers seems to have occurred at least by 1899 but perhaps not much earlier, for a Pianola advertisement explains the function of the “little lever” as if it were new to customers at the time, comparing it to an organ stop “(i.e. the ‘touch stop’)” and drawing a familiar instrumental parallel.38 The Angelus, manufactured by the Wilcox and White Company, managed tempo control via a “rocking tablet.”39 In 1914, Aeolian improved on their lever system (the ergonomic ignorance of which Ord-Hume bemoans) by adding additional tempo buttons called the Metrograde.40 There was quite a diversity styles for the manual controls, which gave each player piano model a unique mark but also made it difficult to switch back and forth between different and potentially unfamiliar models. Whatever the manufacturers’ intentions, each mechanism was outfitted with the necessary interface, allowing the performer to engage in play by manipulating the sound of the music in real-time.

As we saw in the discussion on pedals, a performer’s touch was key to their interactive play experience. It was vital that the player piano was an instrument as opposed to an automatic machine. The term “touch” indicated human agency, signifying that the performer could exercise control when playing. This advertisement for the Aeolian Company’s Pianola from an

37 For a discussion of the importance of hands in piano playing, see chapter 2 and for further reading, James Q. Davies’ book Romantic Anatomies of Performance. 38 Aeolian Company, “The Touch of the Pianola,” New York Times, 29 October 1899. 39 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 161. 40 Ibid., 160. 17

October 1899 print of the New York Times reflects the desire for “touch” and promises that their product fulfills this need:

The Touch of the Pianola is subject to the slightest variation at the will of the player….. “Touch to the pianist is what voice is to the singer.” It has always been considered ‘a something innate,’ and heretofore all piano attachments have been so devoid of this “human element” as to appear almost grotesque in comparison with hand playing.

On the Pianola, by means of a little lever (i.e. the “touch stop”), all possible grades of touch from the lightest and most delicate to the heaviest and most ponderous may be instantaneously controlled by the operator, thus creating almost a paradox in the minds of many musicians who have hitherto maintained that, while it was possible to obtain excellent execution by means of an automatic attachment, to control touch was impossible.41

As the language of the advertisement indicates, “touch” as a human action had a wide range, from delicate to heavy, light to ponderous. Consider other machines of the early twentieth century that had the ability to both magnify force and to be very precise; for example, the horsepower equivalent of the automobile and the consistently even stitches of the sewing machine. Humans, however, could vary their applied precision and force at will. In the context of the piano, delicacy was a defining aspect of human touch. The tempo lever, instructs

White,

is more than a mere throttle-lever. Judicious control of the tempo by this lever makes possible every refinement of phrasing, every variety of touch. A masterly control in regulating and varying the speed of the motor, and thus of the music roll, enables one to obtain delicacies of phrasing and attack that are almost unbelievable.42

The pressing emphasis on precision and nuance seen here is similar to the earlier instruction on pedal usage from White’s manual. The performer can produce “refinement,”

“variety,” and “delicacies” in their music, possible through the “judicious” and “masterly control” of the levers. The language, too, reflects the historical social expectations of players.

Musical “delicacies” and “refinement” associate femininity with the sound of the instrument,

41 Aeolian Company, “The Touch of the Pianola.” Italics in original. 42 White, 50. 18 while a “judicious” and “masterly control” suggests a masculine presence that controls the feminine sound.

That both men and women played the player piano was a newly evolving trend in domestic pianism, but there were still references to the narrative of female containment, implying that play was a matter of navigating what was ultimately a male-dominated sphere from machine design to music composition. Regardless of differences in gender expectations, the possibilities for play through the use of pedals and levers inspire both mental and physical spheres of play. Musical decisions are drawn from the performer’s mental creativity, while their foot-pumping and lever-pressing motions challenge the physical body. The playing of and with the music lies in the literal hands (and feet) of the performer.

Over the course of the player piano’s mechanical evolution, not all expression devices were manual. Some inventions that allowed the player piano to emphasize melodies and themes were designed to function independently of human manipulation, signifying the instrument’s progression toward further independence with diminishing human agency. A 1916 edition of the Scientific American identifies “some very ingenious devices [that] have been tried out and placed upon the market with more or less gratifying results.”43 These fixed mechanical solutions varied the size of the holes in the tracker bar or the perforation size in the music sheet in order to control the air pressure and the motion of the hammers.

Some inventions were more successful than others. Regulating the air from the tracker bar emphasized a fixed set of notes that usually belonged to the theme in the soprano, though there was no way to avoid accenting “such notes of the accompaniment as also happen to lie in

43 “Emphasizing the Theme in a Player Piano,” Scientific American, 20 May 1916, 533. 19 that section.”44 Regulating the air through the sheet music was the most effective solution, since individual notes could be selected as “theme” notes.45 Aeolian’s patent in 1910 allowed the placement of “theming holes” on the sides of the music roll to be added directly to the score, which acted with precision on individual notes.

With an emphasis on the roll instead of the performer as the agent of dynamics, it may appear that the technology limited the range of active participation from the performer, thereby closing off the field of play and reducing the performer to a passive observer. However, as the Scientific American article reminds us, the role of the pedals was still an effective way to manually control dynamics: “in addition to this automatic selection and emphasizing of the solo, the tonal power of the notes may be varied by varying the vigor of the pumping and thus changing the air-pressure in the player action.”46

In fact, White encourages players to liberate themselves from the expression devices, implying that a performer’s range of skill extended beyond simple lever operations: “[the devices] are very useful for beginners in the art of player-pianism, but the fully matured performer will often be able to do without any extraneous assistance of this sort.” And even though the rolls encoded increasingly more “extraneous assistance” beyond the simple execution of notes, they were also used to teach the performer about the “essential inner structure of unfamiliar compositions,” actively engaging the performer in an educator-student field of play that extended beyond musical technique.47

44 Ibid. 45 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 162-3. 46 “Emphasizing the Theme in a Player Piano,” Scientific American. 47 White, 52, 53. 20

2. Reading the Roll: Instructions for Play

With levers and pedals at the performer’s fingers and toes, there was potential for infinite variation in tempo and dynamics when playing a piano roll. There was also, as we saw at the end of section 1, an equal amount of regulation from the roll itself with the addition of theming holes that accented individual notes in the score. The agency of the rolls extended beyond their execution of notes, however. Rolls acted as instructors and teachers, engaging performers in play with the music through text, pictures, and music notation.

The paper roll was revolutionary in the history of the player piano. The pinned barrel or cylinder, as used for earlier mechanical instruments such as the barrel piano, was an initial method for encoding a binary musical notation. However, their large size made them cumbersome and difficult to store. In some cases for the larger orchestrions, “the barrels reached such prodigious proportions that it required two men to change the music.”48 This was certainly not ideal for the average household. Perforated cardboard sheets inspired from

Jacquard’s pattern cards for weaving looms soon found their way into use for mechanical instruments, but they too had limitations. The cardboard, as it passed through the mechanism, would collect in a pile next to the machine. Its thick material necessitated folding rather than rolling, which made it bulky and hard to manage.

The switch to paper emerged simultaneously with the change to pneumatic motors. The sheet music no longer needed to activate the mechanism by physical contact. Instead, the air was regulated by the perforated roll, and by means of sliding valves, it controlled the triggering of the notes by air pressure.49 Thus, the roll material could be thinner and the notation smaller.

48 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 51, 79. 49 Ibid., 24. 21

Storage ability improved and cost of production decreased. The Aeolian Company, along with three other manufacturers, standardized their piano roll perforations in 1905 so that the same roll was playable on multiple player piano models.50 With a new freedom of interchangeability, the piano roll became an object for consumption and collection.

Once the piano roll had become an object to purchase in quantity and frequency, the notation needed to be familiar and easy to read, so that someone obtaining rolls from various manufacturers could easily transition among the songs without learning an entirely new notation for each one. To the average person today, a piano roll could easily be mistaken for a piece of modern art, rather than recognized as a familiar music notation. Wavy red lines weave in and around perforations seemingly scattered along the paper, while a dotted green trail marches steadily back and forth across the page. Held horizontally, we might imagine the roll as a miniature abstract mural hanging in an art museum. Once we notice the occasional “P”s and “F”s of dynamic markings and the text of the piece title announced at the beginning of the roll, we see that the roll actually progresses vertically, unfurling gradually over time (figure 2).

These markings were “more or less of a mystery” at first and certainly needed to be learned, but for the benefits of the consumer market and the customer, it was necessary to have a notation that was easy to learn and easy to reproduce.51

In fact, the notation has been repurposed for other technologies today. Moseley notes the similarity of music notation in current music video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band to player piano rolls.52 Music notation software such as Rosegarden and Composer’s Sketchpad also

50 Taylor, “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music,’” 286. A section of this essay explores the rise of the player piano as a commodity in the American industrial sphere. 51 White, 81. 52 Moseley, “Playing Games with Music (and Vice Versa),” 297. 22 reinterpret the player piano roll for their digital interfaces.53 Even early computer punch cards resemble player piano notation, with binary selections within a rectangular grid. Whether reading notation electronically or on paper, the performer engages mentally with the music to follow its progression over time. And in actively following the lyrics, expression notation, or educational text, the performer is not just listening or reading, but playing.

Figure 2: A sample player piano roll, viewed horizontally: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in C minor, op. 67, mvt. 5. Aeolian Company, circa 1910. Image from the Deutsches Museum Notensammlung Online Collection

The performer was encouraged to engage with the music by adjusting the dynamics and tempo during play. Nearly all piano rolls by 1910 had expression markings suggesting dynamics

53 Visit http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ and http://composerssketchpad.com/ for more details. 23 and tempo.54 Manufacturers promoted these markings as valuable musical rules that would help performers navigate the music. For example, Artistyle rolls “give definite direction as to how their music should be played.”55 The Automatic Music Roll Co. produced a line of rolls for motion picture theater. These rolls came with a chart that recommended tempos for each genre of music, emphasizing the “wonderful results” that “can be obtained by the regulation of the tempo lever.”56 Here, we see a range of possibilities: the performer can follow the instructions exactly or can use their own creative judgment.

White, however, saw the markings as restrictions on freedom of expression, rather than creative opportunities. He writes, “the dotted line is useful to the novice but should be abandoned by the seasoned performer, as it represents simply an attempt to condense the numerous expressive indications written on their scores by composers into a rigid and unyielding form.”57 Such “arbitrary and fixed limits to emotional expression” were to White barriers, not bridges, to musicality. Ord-Hume agrees with White, though to less extreme ends:

“Those lines on piano rolls put there to guide you in your tempo and expression should not be relied on as gospel.” Instead, they are to be read critically, leaving the performer to “use your own skill (or whim) to make the interpretation yours within this framework.”58 Perhaps the expression markings are valuable, perhaps they should be taken only as guidelines. Whichever the case, a pun is inevitable as we consider the role of the rolls in musical play. The player piano rolls required the performer’s physical and mental participation in play, through guided

(or free) expression.

54 White, 101. 55 Roehl, 138. 56 Ibid., 148. 57 White, 101. 58 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 261. 24

The most recognizable and familiar markings were song lyrics, which helped to put popular music in print and on the market. Ord-Hume humorously notes that the words were

“rather disconcertingly printed” alongside the corresponding notes in the score: since the roll scrolled downward, this “necessitated their being read virtually from bottom to top and the music-roll songster had to become adept at reading one line above the other – not so simple as it at first seems, particularly with hyphenated words,” which happened frequently with multi- syllabic text (see figure 3).59

Figure 3: A player piano roll for the Duo-Art Aeolian Player Piano: “Singin’ in the Rain.” Notice the lyrics printed on both sides of the roll; on the left, in French, and on the right, in English. From the John Hay Library, Brown University. Photo by the author.

59 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 117. 25

Thousands of popular music rolls were produced and marketed to people of all ages;

Roehl notes that everyone from “oldsters, adults, and teen-agers” was targeted as a potential customer, including toddlers.60 Already by July 1905, the Aeolian Company’s catalog of music, which represents just a sample of the available rolls, lists pieces ranging from arrangements of

Wagner operas to nursery rhymes to the Star Spangled Banner.61 The wide selection of rolls appealed to people of any and all ages (within, of course, the target audience of the white, upper-class), but it was nevertheless broadening the traditional image of the domestic pianist beyond young females.62 The player piano, though a wide variety of roll repertoire, encouraged

Americans to engage in a playing “between,” to borrow Miller’s term; singing along to a technically-prepared accompaniment.63

No matter their age, Americans of the early twentieth-century were encouraged to use the player piano as a means of socializing. The Manualo, a 1920s player piano model by the

Baldwin Piano Co., was an instrument that “keeps the young folks entertained,” according to one advertisement (figure 4). The text flatters the performer and promises a machine that is

“all but human,” one that responds instantly to the “skilled touch of the accomplished player.”

The accompanying image shows six friends gathered around the Manualo singing along while one young woman sits at the keyboard and operates the levers. “You do not operate the

Manualo,” emphasizes the advertisement, “you play it.”64 By appealing to young crowds, praising their technique, and highlighting the performer’s agency, the advertisement features the player piano as an instrument for active music making.

60 Roehl, 136. 61 Aeolian Company, Catalog of Music for the Pianola, Pianola Piano, and Aeriola, vol. 1, July 1905. 62 See chapter 3 for a discussion of class, gender, and musical repertoire in the domestic space. 63 Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance. 64 Reproduced in Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940, 115. 26

Figure 4: An advertisement for the Manualo Player Piano, depicting the player piano as a feature of

social music making. Reproduced in Roell, 115.

In addition to providing entertainment for friends, the player piano was also promoted as a site for families to gather. Another advertisement depicts a man, presumably a father, 27 surrounded by three young girls who observe his playing at the Estey player piano.65 They hover close to him, sitting on his lap, draping an arm around his shoulder, or standing to his side with an arm around his waist. Here, playing the player piano is an opportunity for the man to entertain his daughters, but more importantly to strengthen their familial bonds. The visible physical closeness of the man to his daughters implies a parallel closeness in relationship. With all eyes on the father’s hands that operate the levers, the children indicate that the act of playing the player piano is a means of building family ties.

Even after the heyday of player pianos was over, the Gribble Music Company in the mid-

1950s was still looking for a way to bring people together over the once popular instrument.

They developed an attachable mechanism called Magic Fingers, designed to convert any traditional piano into a player piano. It was an attempt to make player pianos more affordable, since it did not require purchasing a brand new instrument; anyone with a traditional piano already in their home could install this attachment and convert it into a player piano.66

According to the images in the advertisement, Gribble’s versatile selection of rolls was the center of attention for family parties and gatherings. Providing “perfect accompaniment for other instruments,” adding “wonderfully to the joy of a family circle or gathering of friends,” with “dancing, too,” the piano rolls were the life of the party, bringing people together in a domestic setting.67 It is significant that rolls served more than simply passive entertainment music, like orchestrions or musical clocks.68 Rather, the player piano/performer duo was the

65 Roell, 114. 66 Of course, traditional pianos were already expensive investments and were mainly marketed to homes of the middle and upper classes. A player attachment would have been an additional financial investment, further limiting accessibility. 67 Roehl, 41. 68 See Carli, 397: “The plutocratic owners of mechanical instruments did not view them as playthings but as providers of aesthetic pleasure as well as entertainment.” Also, Ord-Hume’s “Cogs and Crochets” 28 focus of attention in music making. The emphasis on social music highlights the physical and mental dimensions of play, including singing, dancing, and player-piano-operating, that existed between people and the player piano.

Aside from encouraging casual music socializing, the music roll was often treated as an opportunity to educate students and untrained enthusiasts in piano technique. “They will teach you or your children to play the piano by hand—every player piano owner should investigate!” entices a Q.R.S. advertisement (figure 5).69 Some of the image-accompanied advertisements showed the player piano in use during a lesson. “I like my music lessons,” affirms one of the figures in favor of the Standard Action Player, and perhaps it is intentionally ambiguous whether it is the student or the teacher speaking (figure 6).70 Another advertisement shows a woman standing to the side of the instrument, sheet music in hand, while a young girl sits at the instrument and adjusts the roll.71

The player piano manufacturers also relied on famous musicians, who were often also teachers, to endorse their instruments and provide testimonial for the player piano’s professional and educational value. Vladimir de Pachmann, a prominent pianist during the early twentieth-century, endorsed the Orchestrelle Company’s Pianola model: “I wish to add my testimony as to its excellence… for private use in educating the musical tastes of people who have pianos and are unable to use them for want of a thorough musical education.”72 Moriz

Rosenthal, another great pianist of the time, was a spokesperson for the Aeolian Company’s footnote 6, p. 171: “Instruments made to provide background music for meals times were popular, as were those, such as the musical clock, which would entertain at a certain hour.” In addition, Richards’ “Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime” identifies Mozart’s Fantasie K.608 for musical clock as an object of fascination and wonder. 69 Reproduced in Roehl, 141. 70 Ibid., 33. 71 Ibid., 13. 72 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 322. 29

Pianola cabinet-player: “It seems to me greatest in brilliant show-pieces. I think it may be practically useful in assisting piano students to control their technical powers and their tempo in this class of compositions.”73 Further investigation is needed to determine whether these famous pianists actually did use the player piano to assist their lessons, but these testimonials helped player piano manufacturers market their rolls as objects of engaging interaction.

Figures 5 and 6: (left) An advertisement for educational Q.R.S. rolls. (right) An advertisement emphasizing the benefits of the player piano rolls in piano teaching. Reproduced in Roehl, 141, 33.

In the context of a music lesson, the player piano became an instructional tool with which both the teacher and the student engaged in play. Moseley identifies the keyboard itself as an ideal interface for learning and play: “keyboards are not merely input devices: they stage

73 Aeolian Company, “What Rosenthal Says: The Great Pianist is an Enthusiastic Man,” Morning Oregonian, 05 May 1899. 30 exhibitions of timing, rhythm, and dexterity that are as integral to digital games as they are to musical performance.”74 Dolan’s argument that the keyboard is a “model of control and organization” relates to education as well, connecting the controlled and organized methods of instruction with their calculated execution on an interface of order.75 In an educational context, then, the player piano is a site of active learning and engaged play, with the piano roll providing an interface through which performers could demonstrate agency in the music.

Music rolls not only instructed performers in player-piano technique, but also educated them about the history of the music they were about to play. In the mid-1920s, Percy Scholes, a

British music critic and author, started a line of player piano rolls that developed into the

AudioGraphic series for the Aeolian Company.76 These rolls contained extended passages of text before the perforations, for example, in the Schubert Centenary Roll.77 In the style of a moving picture film, the credits roll by first, listing the musical contributors. Then an excerpt of the score provides a means of introduction, followed by the bulk of the text, which sets

Schubert’s music in historical context and is interspersed with woodcut illustrations. Before the main feature of the fully notated piece, the reader is presented a quiz, testing what they learned before progressing onward to the music. As they followed along with the prelude of text, the performer engaged in an academic reading of the music. The player piano became a classroom teacher, complete with an administered quiz. These informational rolls demonstrate that the player piano was not solely for people interested in performance, but was also marketed to an

74 Moseley, The Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, 63. 75 Dolan, “Toward a Musicology of Interfaces,” 11. See chapter 2 for a discussion on the player piano keyboard as a site out of human control, an argument contrary to Dolan’s claims. 76 The Pianola Institute, “The Reproducing Piano – Duo-Art,” http://www.pianola.org/reproducing/reproducing_duo-art.cfm. 77 Ibid. 31 audience of students who could read about and engage with the music educationally.78 Thus, the player piano’s field of play engages the performer in a broader historical and theoretical musical conversation that extends beyond performance.

* * *

Many historic reactions are in opposition to these arguments, viewing mechanical musical instruments as entirely dissociated from human music making. Many musicians, philosophers, writers, and others believed that the rise of mechanical machines was a detriment to society.

John Philip Sousa, American composer and conductor, for example, foresaw “a marked a deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”79 Even in the early nineteenth century, writers felt threatened by the autonomy of mechanical musical instruments.80 Mechanical instruments certainly adopted what were previously human functions; this was their novelty. Much of the attraction of these instruments revolved around the freedom from necessary technical skill.

But in the case of a woman’s role in the twentieth century American domestic household, the player piano did not limit the musical experience, but rather expanded it. Societal expectations for women defined their musical experiences and interactions; women found themselves contained at the piano “through manipulation and training of the body that

78 For more specific examples about piano rolls and interactive images, see Stanford Library’s blog post on piano roll text and illustrations: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/stanford-libraries- blog/2015/10/beyond-perforations-welte-mignon-piano-roll-text-and/. 79 Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 278. 80 For a detailed discussion of both sides of the debate, see Myles W. Jackson’s book Harmonious Triads, chapter 4: “The Organic versus the Mechanical.” Also, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Automata incorporates themes of magic, wonder, mystery, and fear around mechanical musical instruments. 32 maximized both docility and efficiency.”81 The player piano, with its calf-sculpting pedal exercise, whirring gears, sing-along rolls, and a variety of new repertoire, encouraged musical activity for women at home. Fields of play were changing, from the earlier strict regiments of piano playing that limited physical movement and creative thought to a variety of musical genres, an increase in mechanical noise, and laborious physical interaction. Questioning the player piano’s destruction of musical taste is an opportunity for further investigation, but with the introduction of new music that augmented the classical canon for new audiences young and old in the home, it is doubtful that musical taste was deteriorating – it was simply expanding.

We can also acknowledge the question of whether the player piano contributed to a deterioration of domestic pianism. In the context of this paper, the player piano did not replace the traditional piano but instead augments its possibilities. The traditional piano had neither levers nor pneumatic pedals, and while printed sheet music was frequently used in play, the notation and active movement of the paper roll suggests a new kind of interaction. The popularity of the player piano in the United States demonstrates at the very least that music of some variety was present within domestic spaces. The field of play that emerged between the performer and the instrument was not any more or less musical than that of a traditional piano.

Analyzing the field of play around the twentieth-century player piano sparks relevant contemplation about technology in our twenty-first-century lives. Instruments are everywhere, and many have evolved to complete tasks that were, prior to their invention, completely controlled by human actions. In our kitchens, for example, the electric mixer is an enhanced manual spoon for mixing ingredients and even replaces the human hand in kneading bread dough. The typewriter, which has evolved to the computer keyboard, stands in for the human-

81 Head, 205. 33 held pen.82 And in the past few decades, computers are continually increasing their capacity to complete many human tasks, such as playing chess, predicting the weather, or sending mail.

Understanding how humans remain active players at the player piano reflects on our understanding of human agency in modern technology. In all these activities, there is still some essential element of interaction between the human and machine. A human must carefully moniter the kitchen mixer and set the speed to the appropriate setting. Typing requires focused attention and calculated finger movements to efficiently press keys in the proper order. A focus on instruments is increasingly important and relevant especially now that our everyday lives are more and more dependent on physical technologies.83 And with more and more instruments at our fingertips, the opportunities for play are ever expanding.

82 See chapter 3 in Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film Typewriter for a further discussion on the typewriter as a technological invention and its influences on writing and writing discourse. 83 Tresch, Dolan, 279. 34

CHAPTER 2: Conjuring the Fantastic

Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.

—from Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano

I weave my way through a sea of pianos, catching glimpses of the concrete floor and my distorted form reflected in their glossy black varnish. My bare legs prickle with goose bumps as

I adjust to the air-conditioned warehouse from the dazzling Portland sun. Fred Riley, the marketing director at Portland Classic Pianos, navigates the maze of monstrous instruments and leads me down a narrow wooden staircase into the basement. We stop in front of a player piano nickelodeon with a light oak frame and colored glass windows that allow us to peek at the various percussion accessories: drums, woodblocks, a metal xylophone. At the flick of a switch, electricity surges through the instrument so that the colored glass glows with backlit lights and the pneumatics hum with rushing air. Fred clicks another switch, and the paper roll begins to turn. Bells chime and a foot pedal beats against a drumhead in time with the jaunty, jingling tune. The other customers turn their head to locate the source of the racket, and all of a sudden, there is a cluster of children surrounding the nickelodeon, climbing over the bench, sitting on the floor, and marking the glass with finger and nose prints. Their mouths hang open in astonishment and they curiously extend their fingers over the moving keys. It’s quite a sight: the children probe and clamber around the instrument, which I learned once belonged to Ruth

Disney, the sister of American animation hero Walt Disney. I imagine Ruth’s ghostly fingers navigating the keyboard in time with the clusters of moving keys. It’s fitting that this is a 35

Disney machine; even in the basement warehouse the machine effuses an irresistible and fantastical aura.

The player piano is an instrument that has long fascinated spectators, and it changed expectations of musical control at the keyboard by conjuring both real and imaginary human hands. From animated keyboards to recorded rolls, the player piano is a place where phantom hands and late composers were revived in musical performance. Fantastic presences such as

Kurt Vonnegut’s described ghost or the memory of Ruth Disney come to life through the movement of piano keys. What is it about the keyboard that brings to mind these fantastical figures, against our knowledge that the player piano is structurally a mechanical contraption of tubing, wood, and metal?

The connectedness of keyboards, hands, bodies, and human souls as indicated in the chart in figure 7 explains the presence of the fantastic around the player piano and serves as a road map for this chapter. I trace the connections between all four links to show that the keyboard suggests hands, which in turn suggest a human body, which in turn suggests a distinctly human presence, which I refer to as “human essence.” While I present these connections as broadly applicable to twentieth-century middle-class American culture, they are in no way absolute.

These connections rely on Paul Théberge’s idea that musical instruments are established through repetition of use. Contrary to the assumption “that the machine is… endowed with a

‘nature’ that is already more-or-less complete and given,” Théberge suggests “the machine, too, is, in a sense, ‘created’ by the user in the act of making music.”84 Thus, the keyboard’s connection to hands is established over time; as people continue to interact with the interface

84 Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 160. 36 in certain ways, they create what become standard and implied relationships between performer and instrument.

Figure 7: Sequence of connectedness

Keyboard ! Hands ! Body ! Human essence (soul)

The idea that the keyboard suggests a distinctly human essence reinforces the western concept of music as a marker of humanity; it is comforting to share human connections with our technologies. Yet there is also something eerie about phantom bodies communicating through a familiar interface. Emily Dolan argues that as historic inventors incorporated modifications to keyboard instruments in order to exert control through the interface, the keyboard itself developed into a “model of control and organization.”85 This statement presents the keyboard, through an evolution of alterations and adaptations, as a site of exercised human agency. I am interested in exploring how Dolan’s perspective of the keyboard as a site of human control helps to explain the sense of unease that arises when instead phantom bodies and hands wrest control of the instrument.

This chapter explores the fascination around the player piano and the idea of disembodied control. I argue that the player piano, by connecting the keyboard to hands, bodies, and human essence, evokes a phantom presence that threatens the concept of the keyboard as a site of human control. Section 1 traces the connections between hands, bodies, and the human essence through historical practices of labor and entertainment. Section 2 focuses on the keyboard’s connection to hands as an additional link in the sequence in figure 7.

85 Dolan, “Toward a Musicology of Interfaces,” 10. 37

Section 3 explores the fantastic perceptions of the player piano and identifies examples of conjured phantom hands and bodies. Finally, section 4 examines reactions and responses to perceptions of disembodied playing that express a desire to regain control over the keyboard.

1. From Hands and Bodies to the Distinctly Human

O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break,” (1842)

Whether real or imaginary, hands imply the existence of a human body, and thus a human essence. Hands have long been linked to power and intrapersonal connection. The Bible is full of references to hands that heal, help, and create. We shake hands at first introductions, hold hands to feel connected, and wave our hands in salutations. In addition to forging external connections, hands also indicate an internal quality that is distinctly human. In the nineteenth century, people regarded hands as windows to the soul: in the 1840s, a new “science of chirognomy… claimed that the character of men was mirrored in the form of their hands and fingers.”86 Chirognomy interpreted visible characteristics of the hand to extract an inner, intangible quality about a person.

The hand at work also provided an opportunity to glimpse the human soul by communicating one’s innermost thoughts into language, through writing. In a 1942 essay,

Heidegger described the importance of the hand for humanity: “Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man.” The capacity for language is distinctly human, and the capacity for writing links the hand

86 Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 102. 38 to the body to the soul, thus demonstrating that having hands is an “essential distinction” of humanity. Heidegger further suggests that the hand has agency over the human soul: “Man does not ‘have’ hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man.”87 The hand, through its power to write, controls a person’s human identity. I explore this theme of agency and control in more detail in the later discussion of hands at the keyboard.

The demonstration of a human essence through the hands goes beyond the visible and includes audible dimensions, which evoke fantastic connotations. Aura Satz elaborates on the use of musical instruments in séances, showing the close connections between music, hands, and the spiritual. Disembodied hands played musical instruments, tapped out messages on the table or the piano, and even controlled the hands of the medium in “self-playing” performance.88 In the darkened room, the visible or audible presence of hands was evidence that a human essence had been conjured. Séances were not infrequent in twentieth-century

America: “the spiritualist movement… was a home-grown product, as American as the telephone and the automobile.”89 These sessions were thus familiar to the same audiences who were likely to have a player piano at home.

Hands in action pointed to a human essence, and their material output also served as evidence for this connection. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European technology was, according to historian Carroll Pursell, “primarily a handicraft technology… most tools were hand tools, and for most tasks human beings were the primary source of power, direction, and

87 Heidegger on the hand and the typewriter (1942-43) in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 198. 88 Satz, “Music of Its Own Accord,” 75. 89 Fitzsimons, Death and the Magician, 9. 39 accuracy.”90 Work such as farming required exhausting physical labor that necessitated hands for using tools, or for using the hand as a tool itself. Domestic chores also put hands to work in precision tasks like spinning or sewing. Cooking required a combination of hand and body skills, emphasizing fine detail and pure muscle. The products of these tasks – whether harvested crops, buildings, needlepoint, or baked bread – pointed to laboring bodies and served as material representations of agency. The products also represented human creativity and gave a glimpse of a human essence that transcended pure mechanics. Bodies at work required hands for their powerful and finely tuned skills, and these hands, by evidence of their material output, implied a distinctly human essence.

If hands implied a human essence, then what were mechanical hands? As technologies stood in for human labor, there was a growing fear of relinquishing human agency and losing something distinctly human. Martin Heidegger expressed this fear when he criticized the typewriter for its mechanization of the human hand through writing: “When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i.e., from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man.”91 This transformation disconnected humans from their written words, and thus their essence. To Heidegger, the typewriter was a threat to human agency.

Mechanical hands in automatons of the eighteenth century also incited feelings of fascination mixed with fear. The father and son pair Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz toured with their automaton creations around Europe to entertain curious crowds. One of their automatons was a mechanical doll, La Musicienne, that played a miniature, fully-functional

90 Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, 10. 91 Heidegger on the hand and the typewriter (1942-43) in Kittler, 199. 40 organ (see figures 8, 9).92 Each of her fingers moved independently and pressed keys on the organ to play music. People flocked to their shows, where La Musicienne was on display along with other automatons that displayed fantastical feats of the hands, including an automaton that could draw pictures and write with an ink pen. La Musicienne’s ability to produce sound by imitating human action at the keyboard, complete with eye movements and breathing, was enough to draw crowds at all hours of the day, in all weather, eager to see and hear the mechanical keyboardist.93

Figures 8, 9: Jaquet-Droz’s La Musicienne, 1774. (left): at the organ; (right): close up of hands Image from the Jaquet-Droz official website, galeriedesmerveilles.jaquet-droz.com

92 Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment, 2. This book analyzes in detail the history of two eighteenth- century automata: Jaquet-Droz’s organist and a dulcimer player by David Roentgen. Image from the Jaquet-Droz official website, https://galeriedesmerveilles.jaquet-droz.com. 93 Even “rain does not discourage people from coming.” Voskuhl, 65. 41

E. T. A. Hoffmann frequently features mechanical figures in his writing, in which the absence of hands is the fascinating and frightening focus. In a scene from Hoffmann’s story

“Automata,” the Professor shows off his collection of automatons in a musical performance by directing the ensemble from the piano. The piano under the hands of the Professor is a musical puppeteer of sorts; it brings the automatons to life and controls them as if pulling the strings of a marionette orchestra. This musical ensemble, including the automatons, the piano, and the

Professor, demonstrates a strange and unsettling handless control between the piano and automatons. One of the spectators later responds, “All that machine music… makes every bone in my body ache… The fact of any human being’s doing anything in association with those lifeless figures which counterfeit the appearance and movements of humanity has always, to me, something fearful, unnatural, I may say terrible, about it.”94 This response conveys

Hoffmann’s fascination with the uncanny capabilities of the mechanical figures and instruments as well as an unsettling fear of their human-like, handless agency.

Beyond entertainment spectacles, hands were important for work in industrial production. The turn of the twentieth century saw a significant boom in mechanization that displaced traditionally human tasks with machines. Disembodied hands were everywhere in domestic inventions: in the weaving loom, sewing machine, washing machine, and typewriter.

With the rise of machinery and mechanized processes, manufacturers emphasized the hand’s role as the traditional tool even as their products strove toward more efficient and powerful processes beyond human capacity. In the context of the industrial machine, the presence of hands helped maintain the reference between the machine-made products and the distinctly human, validating the material goods while reassuring people of a preserved human essence.

94 Hoffmann, “Automata,” 95. 42

Singer, a sewing machine manufacturer in the late nineteenth century, produced machines to replace hand sewing, but the company still emphasized “each unit [was] ‘finished’ by hand.”95

Even with more efficient and consistent production, the presence of the hand demonstrated that material goods contained an essence of human craft and that humans still had agency over the final product.

Hands were closely tied to industrial work, but at first glance, appear to have had a more distant relationship to musical work. In Romantic thought, music was entirely dissociate from physical bodies. Sound was the highest form of art because it did not imitate nature like painting or sculpture, but rather existed on its own plane of expression. In Schopenhauer’s concept of the world as “will and representation,” that is, human essence and physical material, music is a “copy of the will itself” because it is not objective like physical matter but rather a reflection of an inner being.96 Heather Hadlock identifies this search for the Romantic musical ideal as theme in Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann, where Hoffman searches

“for an ideal Presence, metonymized as an elusive ideal Voice.”97 In the opera, music, in the form of the disembodied voice, stands in for the “ideal Presence,” similar to Schopenhauer’s

“will” or human essence.

There is a paradox here, however, because matter is required in order to create sound; music cannot exist without a physically present body. Of all music making, singing is considered the most pure expression of ideal music because it does not require an external instrument. Its internality also indicates that singing is necessarily human because of the

95 Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, 91. 96 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 257. Italics in original. 97 In contrast to the voice as a monophonic instrument, keyboards had the capability of polyphonic music. Hadlock, Mad Loves, 15. 43 relationship between the human body and the voice as an instrument. Hadlock shows that bodies, particularly those of women, were used as instruments in the opera: in a demonstration of externally controlled music making, “the mesmerist or magnetizer… claimed the ability to conjure up sounds from [women’s bodies].”98 In the opera, the body is a channel, an instrument for human-made musical sounds. Disembodied voices also appear in the opera; for example,

Antonia’s violin sings when her body cannot. In contrast, bodiless voices are perceived as inhuman and lacking a soul: consider Olympia, the woman who never speaks because she is an automaton and not truly “human.”

Thus music was necessarily tied to its sound origin, the human body. Musical instruments, though external to the human body, played an active role in linking human hands and bodies to a distinctly human essence. As physical commodities, too, musical instruments were tied to the industry that produced them. Like sewing and writing, music was similarly transformed by increasing mechanization and industrialization. Music, like fabrics or books, could be made, bought, and sold in material forms, and manufacturers placed more emphasis on the hands in the machines to keep their products rooted in a human essence. In the next section, I explore how the keyboard closes the final link in the sequence from hands to human essence.

2. The Keyboard

By way of hands, the keyboard conjures a distinctly human essence. It is a site for music making: specifically hand-played music. In 1879, a spectator noticed Liszt’s hands in

98 Hadlock, 57. 44 performance and remarked: “His fingers looked as if they were made of yellow ivory.”99 Were the pianist’s fingers indistinguishable from the piano keys themselves? Already, human hands were transforming into the keyboard, indicating their intertwining identities.

Chopin instructed piano students in his Méthode, “You must sing with your fingers.”100

Chopin points to the body’s interior as the source of music, and the hands as the outlet for sound. Even though keyboards were external to the body, they were still perceived to channel a human essence. The clavichord is, according to Moseley, perhaps the keyboard most closely connected to the human body: it is the “most analogically expressive” because of its sensitivity in translating finger movement to string vibration. The keys seem to distance the player from the source of the sound; but in fact this “paradoxical immediacy of mediation via finger and key causes the player’s body to resonate in sympathy, and the clavichord is thus an instrument that measures the sensitivity of its operator with unrivaled precision.”101

C.P.E. Bach highlighted the connection between human soul and instrument in his instructions to students: “Play from the soul, and not like a trained bird.”102 Music, according to

Bach, emanated directly from the human soul, which could not be programmed or “trained.” By juxtaposing piano playing with a bird, Bach insists on the necessary human essence in music – birds are not human nor do they have hands. Human hands were necessary for piano playing and provided the pianist with instruments that demonstrated the keyboard as a site for distinctly human practice.

99 Davies, 179. 100 Quoted in Davies, 54. 101 Moseley, Keys to Play, 106. 102 Quoted in Moseley, Keys to Play, 106. From Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. 45

The piano keyboard distances itself slightly farther from the body than the clavichord, but still requires channeling music from the soul by means of the hands. Here, I branch away from

Théberge’s idea of instrument creation, which says that technologies become musical instruments through active use, not by the nature of their form.103 Instruments are not defined solely by use; repetition of practice does establish familiarity and function, but the physical design of an instrument still lends itself to certain modes of interaction.104

The keyboard, a product of years of invention and modification, is a familiar physical space designed for the hands. This familiarity results from the necessary interactions between the hands and keyboard. The height of the keyboard is level with the elbows of a seated performer, making it easy to bend at the joint and place one’s hands on the keyboard in front.

Any other flat surface that appears before a seated person usually stands at this same height, allowing an approximately ninety-degree bend at the elbows: consider desks, tables, and counters. The keyboard is efficiently displayed before the performer so that all keys are within sight and within reach from a seated position. The layout is intuitive: the pitches are linearly organized so that pitch ascends to the right and descends to the left from the player’s central orientation. Visually, the white and black keys are grouped into distinct, intuitive patterns. The larger size and placement of the white keys nearer to the performer’s body implies their relative importance over the black keys, which are shorter in length, raised up above the white set, and pushed farther from the performer’s reach. The combined sequence of white and black keys repeats every twelve notes, so that each transposed position in the sequence corresponds with its octave counterpart. The average-sized hand of a grown adult spans just about an octave, one

103 Théberge, 159. 104 Recall Gibson’s theory of affordances, in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. 46 repetition of the sequence.105 Additionally, the distance between keys, both horizontally in the left right movement between notes and vertically in the depression of keys, is practically sized for human fingers. It is not impossible to play the keyboard with other body parts, but it is most amenable with the hands and fingers.106

In practice, the keyboard strengthens its association with hands, and through its established connection with a distinctly human essence, challenges the performer’s control by evoking themes of the fantastic. Hands that displayed superhuman capabilities in performance incited awe and wonder because they challenged human limits. For example, nineteenth- century pianist Sigismond Thalberg mesmerized audiences with his “‘three-hand technique.’”107 Thalberg’s “phantasmic third hand” was a product of his impressive, seemingly impossible pianism.

Virtuoso performers, by stretching the physical limits of the body, propagated the

Romantic ideal of the self as the mediator of ideal music, which reinforced the connections between hands, human essence, and keyboard. Franz Liszt’s hands also became famous through performance, though unlike Thalberg’s controlled yet phantom appendage, “Liszt’s experience… was of a disengaged hand – one belonging less to himself than nature.”108 The body’s loss of ownership of the hand was indeed fantastic. Because the hands were indicative of the human, severing the hands from the body implied a break between body and human essence. The idea of hands as agents independent of the performer implied that hands could act

105 Music comedian duo Igudesman & Joo’s skit “Rachmaninov Had Big Hands” proposes a comical solution to the wide-reaching chords in the composer’s music that often challenge pianists. 106 Consider, for example, Henry Cowell’s “Tides of Manaunaun,” which calls for the pianist’s entire forearm on the keys. Also, consider Liu Wei, who won the 2010 “China’s Got Talent” for playing the piano with his toes. 107 Davies, 95. 108 Ibid., 165. 47 against the performer’s intentions.109 At the keyboard, the hands in fantastic performance became agents distanced from the body, removing control from the performer.

At their height of disembodied control, hands acted independent of and even contrary to the agent. Davies describes the hands of virtuoso pianists, which sometimes “obey no authorial or willful law other than… the God-given laws of nature and natural function. They are increasingly disobedient – having to be wrestled against, rehabilitated, coaxed into action, or addressed.”110 This passage could just as easily apply to the mechanical hands of the player piano, whose complicated network or tubing, wiring, bellows, and levers was in frequent need of repair and readjustment. At this point, disembodied hands and musical machines could share the same body.

3. Phantoms at the Player Piano

Given that piano playing was defined by the capabilities of the performer’s hands and their physical interaction with the piano, it is ironic that the player piano in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed to have perfected piano playing by removing the hands altogether. By mechanizing the technical component of piano playing and assigning note execution to the player piano roll, human hands were no longer needed for technical performance at the keyboard. Manufacturers promoted this feature as a desirable freedom from technical limitations; now anyone, they promised, regardless of finger dexterity, could perform piano music at the player piano.

109 Davies, 165. 110 Ibid., 167. 48

The performer’s hands were no longer obligated to perform technique, but the player piano nevertheless needed to maintain a connection to hands in order to validate its identity as a piano. The performer could just as easily shut the lid on the keyboard and pedal away, but then would the instrument still identify as a piano? As discussed in section 2, the keyboard was so closely tied to the hands that in order to promote itself as a legitimate competitor with the piano and to keep the instrument under the control of hands, human or phantom, the player piano needed to establish the importance of hands in active play (chapter 1) or prove the existence of disembodied hands within the machine.

Player pianos had keyboards, and hence carry the implications from keyboard to human essence that we presented in figure 7 at the beginning of the chapter. Though the early models were mechanical (electric player pianos were only widely available by around 1912), much of their marketing success was based on the conjuring of human hands and bodies, both real and invisible, around the keyboard. A player piano was successful if it could transfer ideals such as perfected technique and the human “touch” of dynamics, shading, and coloring to mechanical means, without depriving the human performer of agency. To underscore their claims that the player piano could outperform the traditional piano, manufacturers emphasized the humanness of the player piano by drawing associations with living and invisible bodies. This section identifies instances of hands, both real and imagined, at the player piano. I argue that through public concerts, paper rolls, and recordings of contemporary musicians, the player piano threatened expectations of control through its complicated relationship with real and invisible hands.

In their insistence on the player piano’s phantom-controlled keyboard as the pinnacle of technique, manufacturers focused on the hand as the standard of comparison. Maurice 49

Rosenthal, a celebrated pianist of the twentieth century, submitted his approval of the Pianola

(one of the earlier cabinet models) in an advertisement in the Morning Oregonian: “The pianola is certainly a most ingenious invention, and I feel quite sure that nothing has more closely approached hand-playing.”111 Rosenthal identified “hand-playing” as the standard of comparison, precisely because it was this removal of the hand from technique that was novel about the Pianola. Another endorsement for the Pianola from composer and pianist Maurice

Moszkowski supports the notion that ideal piano playing could be found in perfected finger technique: “Any one hidden in a room near by who will hear the Pianola for the first time, will surely think that it is a great virtuoso that plays; but after awhile he will perceive his error, because your instrument never plays false notes.”112 The Pianola was superior to human playing because of its note accuracy. Moszkowski emphasized the imperfection of the human hand while revealing that the ideal virtuoso was judged primarily on their hands and the accuracy of their fingers. In his statement, the player piano replaced not just the human hand but the whole body of the virtuoso, transferring agency from the human player to the phantom presence.

The reproducing piano introduced to player pianos the concept of recorded performance that allowed players to reproduce accurate transcriptions of an earlier recorded performance.

Humans had long been working on inventions that record in real time: for instance, in 1753 the

Fantasy Machine was invented to capture fleeting piano improvisations.113 The instrument was unsuccessful, but many centuries later, Welte-Mignon’s invention in 1901 became the

111 Aeolian Company, “What Rosenthal Says: The Great Pianist is an Enthusiastic Man,” Morning Oregonian, 05 May 1899. 112 Aeolian Company, “The Pianola: An Unusually Desirable Christmas Gift,” Morning Oregonian, 17 December 1899. 113 Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, 77. 50 twentieth-century version of the Fantasy Machine. Finally, the “ultimate goal” of “[encoding] in the paper roll the veritable spirit of the original performance” was realized in Welte’s reproducing piano.114

The player piano’s soon-to-be competitor in the market of domestic music making, the gramophone, did not yet produce music that was as high quality as player piano rolls. Many musicians recorded with reproducing pianos and avoided working with gramophones because the gramophone discs limited the time of recording (determined by the size of the disc), and produced poorer quality audio. Reproducing pianos, through their more accurate reproduction, brought listeners “closer and closer to the soul of the recording pianist.”115 Many of these instruments were now electric and no longer needed the use of pedals and levers because much of the expression was transcribed into the roll itself. People became distanced physically from the instrument, and the players transferred their performing agency to artists whose recorded rolls could now be purchased from a catalogue. Anyone could conjure an invisible performer and their hands at the player piano keyboard.

In action, a disembodied performer was not and could not be visible. The absence of a person’s hands and body contributed to the uncanny nature of the player piano in performance.

In order to bring to life these invisible bodies, advertisers depicted their lifelike forms in images to fill in the imagination. For example, Ampico conjured Rachmaninoff at the reproducing piano, in an advertisement that claims “Perfect Recording PLUS Perfect Re-enactment” (figure

10).116 The instrument claims a new perfection in performance through recording accuracy and recreation: “Only when both these essentials are attained can an instrument be truthfully

114 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 173. 115 Ibid., 174. 116 Reproduced in Roehl, Player Piano Treasury, 58. Italics in original. 51 called a perfect medium for re-enacting the artist’s performance.” The player piano is a

“perfect medium” because of its ability to conjure Rachmaninoff’s hands through the player piano roll, and thus, as the picture shows, his entire body. The music notation superimposed on the background behind Rachmaninoff’s form further ties the performer to musical notation realized at the keyboard. Through the translation of notation into the movement of keys,

Rachmaninoff came to life at the player piano keyboard, gaining physical form from sonic output and visible keyboard movement.

Welte-Mignon took a different approach in their marketing; instead of conjuring the actual performer, they channeled a ghostly representation of the performer’s hands. The caption to an image of transparent hands hovering over a keyboard reads: “These are the

Phantom Hands of a thousand immortal pianists: their glorious genius preserved forever, through the miracle of the Welte-Mignon reproduction” (figure 11).117 The “phantom hands” evoke the fantastic within the player piano; it is uncanny that the instrument brings to life not only one, as in Ampico’s advertisement, but “a thousand immortal pianists.” Perfection in performance was no longer under the control of the performer, as in earlier versions of the player piano with pedals and levers. Instead, the reproducing piano with its electrically powered mechanism transmitted another form of human expression: “you hear the actual playing of a master musician.” This claim revives a long history of musicians at the reproducing piano, thus establishing their immortality through music in contrast with the consumer’s mortality. “Their phantom hands will live forever through their Welte-Mignon records.”

117 Ibid., 69. 52

Figure 10: An advertisement for the Ampico reproducing piano (1928). Reproduced in Roehl, 58. 53

Figure 11: An advertisement for the Wente-Mignon reproducing piano (c. 1923). Reproduced in Roehl, 69. 54

In addition to conjuring hands and spirits of composers and performers through the keyboard, the Welte-Mignon advertisement also establishes new ideals for perfection in piano performance. They reference the earlier pneumatic player pianos, at which “the only expression possible is that which the operator gives through the use of levers.”118 The expression of the reproducing piano, however, was original to the artists themselves. Why add in your own interpretation when the “great pianists” have done it better? The reproducing piano shifted musical agency away from the live performer and toward the instrument. The reproducing piano was in control of the musical elements of performance by means of phantom hands that were beyond the control of the live performer.

Another advertisement went one step further and conjured the entire phantom composer.

In the image, Beethoven stands with his elbow resting on the piano, as if contemplating the player’s performance (figure 12).119 “The Inspiration of the Master” is visually represented by the composer’s ghostly figure, inspiring the pianist and also implying that the great master is listening in on his performance. In this advertisement, it appears that control is in the hands of the performer, who operates visible pedals and levers at the Cecilian Player Piano. However, the overseeing presence of Beethoven implies that the player channels the composer’s musical performance. This undercuts the player’s agency and places control in Beethoven’s hands even though his phantom figure is not actively playing. Instead, through some fantastic force, he channels his music through the player, who, connected through the keyboard, becomes another piece of the player piano mechanism controlled by the phantom presence.

118 Reproduced in Roehl, 69. 119 “The Inspiration of the Master,” Putnam’s Magazine, vol. 5, March 1909. 55

Figure 12: An advertisement for the Cecilian Player Piano. Putnam’s Magazine (March 1909). 56

Player pianos were the feature of concerts that promoted the fantastic elements of the instrument by emphasizing the disembodied performer. The reputable pianist Leopold

Godowsky paired with Knabe Ampico, a manufacturer of reproducing pianos, to host a series of concerts in Los Angeles. In concert, Godowsky played a piece at a reproducing piano, as if the instrument were a traditional piano. The instrument recorded his playing by punching

Godowsky’s notes in a blank paper roll. Immediately after the piece was over, Godowsky rewound the roll inside, and the instrument took over the performance. The audience heard the piece twice, first by the live artist and second by the player piano, which replayed Godowsky’s exact keystrokes as they had been recorded on the roll.

The first concert on June 5, 1919 was promoted with a full-page feature in the Los Angeles

Herald the following week, full of praise for both the performer and the instrument. The concert review highlights the fantastic spectacle of the hands in performance: both Godowsky’s master control over the instrument, but also the reproducing piano’s precise and artistic performance. On the one hand, Godowsky “made the piano tell its tales of passion, lyric sentiment, and whimsical fantasy” with his controlled, virtuosic technique.120 In this instance,

Godowsky has full control of the instrument; he operates the piano according to his ideas, or

“tales.” On the other hand, “the house sat spell-bound as the marvels of this great invention were revealed” right before their very eyes and ears. Here, the player piano is the agent of control; it becomes the second soloist of the concert. More specifically, the source of amazement is in the comparison of Godowsky’s performance to the player piano’s reproduction. Details of his playing “were so exact as to be uncanny. By closing the eyes

120 Fitzgerald Music Company, “Knabe Ampico Reproducing Piano,” Los Angeles Herald, 11 June 1919. Italics added. 57

Godowsky, whose fingers had made the reproduction, became materialized to the vision of the listeners.” The player piano was so remarkably accurate that it brought an invisible version of

Godowsky’s body to life before of the listeners. By alternating between human and phantom performer, the concert represented a switching of control that evoked the fantastic.

Another advertisement referenced the Duo-Art Piano as a soloist with the New York

Symphony Orchestra. In an article from 1917 titled “The Artistic Triumph of the Duo-Art

Piano,” the instrument plays a solo concerto with the symphony orchestra, replacing the human as the virtuoso soloist.121 Casting a player piano in a role traditionally reserved for a human musician gave agency and control to the instrument and highlighted its fascinating disembodied capabilities. In another Duo-Art concert with the San Francisco Symphony

Orchestra in 1919, the reproducing piano “took Harold Bauer’s place as a soloist. The Concert

Grand Piano, untouched by human hands, played Harold Bauer’s interpretation of a famous

Concerto.”122 Here, the language emphasizes the purity of the instrument to heighten the sense of genuine fantasy. Since keyboards evoked images of hands, a piano “untouched” by humans was certainly an object of fantastic agency, especially when featured as the soloist in an official concert.

The player piano standing in for human performers represents a transfer of agency in work from human to machine. In chapter 4 of her dissertation, Allison Wente interprets the player piano’s relationship to labor through reproducing piano rolls, identifying the piano roll as an object that represents the “laboring hands” of the pianist as well as the other bodies that helped produce the roll. Wente identifies the pianist’s hands as they “then become more than

121 Aeolian, “The Artistic Triumph of the Duo-Art Piano,” The Sun, 2 December 1917. 122 Aeolian Company, “The Duo-Art Piano: The Great Piano of the Future and Today,” The Sun, 28 February 1919. 58 human… they absorb the labor of multiple workers, striving towards the image of God’s invisible hand.”123 Wente argues that the hands of the pianists who recorded piano rolls became

“more than human” as they accumulated labor in fantastic repetitions of performance. Each instance of reproduction was, according to Wente, the work of the pianist and not the listener.

Thus, the phantom pianist claimed control over each performance, absorbing agency from the player and transferring it to the instrument.

The player piano was a fantastic site for music making; the phantoms that controlled the machines from the keyboard or though the piano rolls fascinated players and audiences alike.

However, this threat to human agency was also unsettling, and people sought to explain the fantastic through more rational and scientific avenues. Despite these attempts to quantify the seeming magic, these explanations only perpetuated the idea of phantom hands controlling the machine, reflecting the player piano’s reliance on hands to demonstrate control.

4. Rationalizing the Magic in the Machine

Turning from the fantastic perceptions of the player piano, this section identifies the scientific, rational approaches to the player piano that developed in an attempt to dehumanize the mechanism and regain control. By quantifying the player piano and interpreting it as a machine, manufacturers sought to demystify the instrument through advertisements that presented simplified descriptions of the complicated mechanics and examinations of the paper rolls. Even so, these scientific examinations of the player piano only reinforced the idea of the

123 Wente, “Magical Machines: The Player Piano in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” 188. In chapter 3, I address the player piano’s role in demonstrations of leisure, defined in contrast to labor, as an indication of an upper-class lifestyle. 59

“ghost in the machine” by demonstrating the need to extract it, supporting the idea of the player piano keyboard as a site out of human control.

Hands, elaborated in section 3, were a prioritized focus for the player piano despite the fact that no hands were needed for technical play. The machine’s imagined hands were mysterious, magical, and surpassed human capabilities. In order to demystify the instrument and regain control over the supernatural, some advertisers made an effort to explain the complicated inner mechanisms of player pianos to audiences. “It’s all in the bellows,” explains an advertisement for the Cecilian Piano-Player. “The pianist produces his effects upon the piano by means of muscular force, exerted by his fingers. In the piano-player, air takes the place of muscle; that is, the mechanical fingers of the piano-player are actuated by air.”124 This advertisement simplifies the player piano’s seemingly magical playing to a process of muscle, as opposed to mysterious spirits, and invokes the traditional, pre-industrial concept of hands at work, as discussed in section 3. In the photo a man crouches next to the instrument, pointing with an extended index finger as if identifying the exact physical component that explains the instrument’s operation.

However, the direct comparison of the hands to the bellows perpetuates the idea of the hands in the machine, and the comparison to muscle reinforces the machine as a human. The need to reassure customers that fingers were still present in the machine speaks to the unsettled feelings over the increasing agency of machinery. On one hand, customers desired clarity in their understanding of machines that confirmed human agency over the instrument.

On the other hand, they desired an instrument that replicated piano performance, and thus

124 Roehl, 9. 60 necessitated the presence of hands. In this example, manufacturers attempt to reign in the fantastic elements of the player piano to establish control over the keyboard.

Manufactures were eager to point fingers at specific elements of the player piano that could be identified as the mechanical hands of the machine. These parts were given almost medical-sounding names, such as Angelus’s “Diaphragm Pneumatic.”125 This was a small device located underneath each piano key that acted as the “finger” to move the key up and down:

“When in action it is an air inflated cushion, with the same firm but resilient and buoyant touch that characterizes human fingers. All other pneumatics are collapsed when in action, withdrawing from them the buoyancy of the air, resulting in a hard, mechanical touch.”

Equating the finger with this keyboard device serves a dual function. It explains the mechanics of the human finger with terminology from physics; words like “buoyancy” attempt to expose concrete explanations that counter its mysterious nature. It also humanizes the instrument by referring to the mechanism as a “diaphragm” and by equating its action to that of a human finger. This advertisement belongs to the trend of scientific explanations that sought to counter the mysterious portrayals of player pianos, yet it reemphasizes the human in the machine through the promise of a human touch. By regaining control of the fantastic, the

Angelus manufacturers gave even more agency to the machine by humanizing its mechanism.

Other manufacturers made similar attempts to explain the inner mechanisms of the player piano, intending to relieve some of the mystery surrounding the newness and the incredible nature of the instrument. The Aeolian Company explains “scientifically” that the their instrument “can be made to play with expression.”126 They compare their player piano

125 Ord-Hume, Pianola, 324. 126 Aeolian Music Co., “No. 20: About Music,” Morning Oregonian, 18 June 1889. 61 with an organ, another keyboard instrument whose mechanics of pipes and bellows were familiar to people in the early twentieth century. On the organ, “you may press a key on an organ with your fist or elbow… and the tone will be the same as if you used your fingers.” By comparing the player piano to the organ, this discussion emphasizes that legitimate mechanical musical production is independent from hands. Playing an instrument with the

“fist or elbow” distances the hands from the keyboard and sounds intentionally unmusical.

However, the comparison of organ to player piano mechanisms legitimizes the removal of hands from the player piano while ensuring “expression,” an indicator of a human touch, and clarifying the confusion and fear around the new methods of instrument interaction.

The use of analogies to the human body and familiar musical instruments revealed the reasons for the fascination that surrounded the player piano. These comparisons served as explanations when the interior mechanics were too difficult to explain in detail, and player piano rolls were yet another means of rationally explaining the magic of hands within the machine. An article in a 1927 print of Scientific American explains the process for “Recording the Soul of Piano Playing.” Recordings from performances on the reproducing piano were brought to the “Ampico Research Laboratory” for investigation to “[reveal] the physical basis of those finer emotional qualities which mark the inspired performances of the great masters.”127

The focus on the “physical” contrasts with the images of the phantom and invisible bodies that emerge through disembodied performance. The space of the laboratory also emphasizes the rationality and control of science in opposition to the inexplicable and uncontrollable fantastic.

There is an emphasis on sight over other senses as an indicator of truth: “The performance is

127 “Recording the Soul of Piano Playing,” Scientific American, November 1927, 422. 62 figuratively put under a microscope” to extract visible details in the score, placing priority and value on sight over all other senses.128

Many musicians directly expressed their fears of mechanical music as a force that could entirely destroy human-made music. Sousa saw mechanical music as a “mathematical system” that left no room for human expression, contradicting the idea that music, “from its first day to this, has been along the line of making it the expression of soul states; in other words, of pouring into it soul.” A response to his article, however, proposes, “The mechanical player suggests great possibilities for the future of music.” Through machines, humans can further control sound, for example, with “seventy-six keys to the octave.”129 The smaller divisions of the octave suggest more tools for the human performer, which give more opportunities for control to humans, as opposed to machines. This reader, by suggesting a future of increased human control through mechanics, implies that humans are the ultimate agents in music making.

* * *

The keyboard continues to evoke images of phantom bodies and ghosts. A piano appears in Disney’s Haunted Mansion, playing on its own in a cobwebbed corner among broken furniture and half-melted candles. In the 1985 film “The Goonies,” the friends must press the correct succession of notes on an organ keyboard, on which the individual keys resemble severed fingers. The eponymous protagonist of “The Phantom of the Opera” composes at an organ, located in the basement sewers below the opera house. His keyboard is similarly decorated with candles, and his music is associated with his disembodied voice that evokes fear

128 “Recording the Soul of Piano Playing,” Scientific American, November 1927, 423. 129 Sousa, “Menace of Mechanical Music,” 279, 640. 63 and challenges control among the opera house production crew. These are only a few examples that demonstrate the keyboard in use as a site of fantastic presences and dissociated control.

It appears that this claim raises a contradiction to the idea proposed in chapter 1, where I discuss how the player piano encourages active human play and thus gives the performer agency and control in musical performance. However, the coexistence of engaged play and disembodied control is not necessarily impossible. Players can easily increase or decrease their levels of interaction with the interface, thereby shifting their levels of agency in performance.

Additionally, engaged play and disembodied control can exist simultaneously if the performer never interacts with the keyboard.

Pinch and Bijsterveld observe the continued desire for human bodies in active musical performance today, where “machines or machine-like instruments have been incorporated in ways that permit personal achievement to remain visible and audible.”130 Music making and a human essence are still inextricably linked. Throughout history, the desire to keep the two closely connected, here demonstrated by a show of “personal achievement,” is apparent in any type of musical performance, and not just limited to keyboards.

As the player piano technology advanced toward electrically powered mechanics, however, manufacturers did away with the pneumatic pedals and built the expression levers directly into the machines. As a result, the performer became increasingly more distanced from the keyboard and their hands had less control over the musical output. Once the player disengaged physical interaction from the player piano, the keyboard became a site of uncontrolled play that was literally out of human hands.

130 Pinch and Bijsterveld, “‘Should One Applaud?’ Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music,” 558. 64

Modern player pianos that operate on digital notation are advertised as equivalent to sound systems that require little to no human input. The Steinway Spirio, for example, is a twenty-first-century digital player piano that plays selections from a digital music library instead of using paper rolls. It plays acoustic piano music without any human input; the tempo changes, dynamics, and musical expression is encoded into the digital file and requires no active input from a performer as the twentieth-century instruments did. Yet, in an advertisement for their player piano, Steinway evokes images of phantom players through a dimly lit video that captures long shadows over the Spirio’s self-playing keyboard. Pianists who have recorded for the Spirio express their impressions of the fantastic nature of the instrument:

“It really feels like an out-of-body experience,” says artist Greg Anderson. Pianist Jenny Lin agrees, “[it’s] like having a live person in your living room.”131 From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, the player piano was and is a site for ghosts and fascination. These phantoms became familiar to American households, where the player piano established its identity as a domestic instrument.

131 Steinway & Sons, “Steinway Artists Anderson & Roe and Jenny Lin Talk About Steinway Spirio,” YouTube video, 31 March 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_SQJgVBofo. 65

CHAPTER 3: Upward Aspirations

Figure 13: An advertisement pictures the Lauter-Humana player piano in an idealized domestic setting. From “The Purchaser’s Guide to the Music Industries,” compiled and edited by John C. Freund, 1922.

The Steinway Spirio, launched in April 2015, provided another sort of fantasy to audiences by addressing a dream of upper class status. Unlike Steinway’s other instruments, which over the past 170 years had been designed for “top-tier artists,” according to a news feature announcing the instrument’s debut, the Steinway Spirio was a player piano designed instead for “top-tier listeners.”132 A promotional video with footage from the Spirio launch event reveals exactly which type of listeners Steinway hoped to attract.133 The video intersperses slow-motion camera pans of the piano’s casing and keyboard with footage from the event. Men in tuxedos and women in cocktail dresses sip thin-walled glasses of champagne and martinis with frosted rims. Colorful, fresh bunches of flowers, caterers in thin black ties,

132 Stinson, “Steinway’s New Piano Can Play a Perfect Concerto By Itself.” 133 Steinway & Sons, UK, “Steinway & Sons – Spirio,” YouTube video, 29 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0NdNQNpfK0. 66 and impossibly tall ceilings of an outdoor tent imply that this is much more than a neighborhood event; it is hosted for and by the upper class. The Spirio, at the center of it all, reflects in its polished veneer and its aesthetic the high status lifestyle of the party. The player piano, suggests the video, is an instrument of high class, of wealth, of luxury.

Technology today plays a significant role in our domestic and social lives. How is our technology advertised, and how do we interpret the messages promoted by manufacturers?

What is the relationship between our sense of social standing and the technologies that we use and display, out in public and in our homes? How have our domestic spaces changed over time, and how have their soundscapes changed? These questions probe into our modern day relationships with technology, bringing interactive objects to the forefront of study and critical thought and putting them in a social context. Studying the player piano of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will give insight into these inquiries.

Steinway’s method of associating the player piano with an upper-class lifestyle is a practice at least a hundred years old. Ever since the first commercially available player piano models were introduced to the United States market, the player piano has represented upper- class social status, specifically within domestic spaces. The previous chapters consider the player piano as an object of study, first of active play and then of fantastic images. This third and final chapter maintains a focus on the player piano as an interactive, musical object to evaluate its reflection of the domestic aspiration for elevated social status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Investigating the player piano in a social context reveals important insights into the technology’s influence on and in society, and the role that technology plays in everyday life.

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When analyzing the player piano in the context of domestic spaces, many scholars have argued that the player piano contributed to the democratization of music. Through technological innovation and commodification of music, the player piano reached broader audiences and made music making more accessible to those who did not necessarily have the skills, time, or money to take lessons and practice traditional piano. Advertisements, in order to reach as many customers as possible, emphasized the player piano’s broad accessibility to music. Perhaps the most enthusiastic statement came from an Aeolian Company, which claims in an advertisement, “The Pianola is a piano-player by means of which ANY one can play upon

ANY piano ANY selection he may desire to hear at ANY time.”134 Contemporary musicologists have explored the different consequences of this new accessibility to music. For example,

Timothy Taylor has shown how the player piano’s idealized images of democratized music making, from family stability to technical perfection, contributed to defining a new music commodity culture.135 Mark Katz has argued that the player piano’s wide accessibility and ease of interactivity increased amateur music making.136

Even though the player piano played a role in democratization by broadening the general population’s access to music, it simultaneously reflected a narrowly focused, upward-reaching goal of upper class status, contradicting its aim of spreading music democratically through the middle class. My research acknowledges the player piano’s influence on the democratization of music, but it also contributes to a more complex understanding of the player piano’s culture in

134 Aeolian Company, “The Pianola: An Unusually Desirable Christmas Gift,” Morning Oregonian, 17 December 1899. This quote is reminiscent of Paul Theberge’s book Any Sound You Can Imagine, the title of which references the wide scope of digital MIDI sounds. Like MIDI and its endless possibility for sound combinations, the player piano can produce any imaginable collection of sounds on the piano that the perforated roll allows. 135 Taylor, “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music’,” 288. 136 Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music.” 68

American domestic spaces by bringing to the foreground a contradiction between its aspirations for democracy and upward social mobility.

The advertisements of the period reflect both the public’s aspirations to rise in social status and the manufacturers’ goal of presenting the instruments as upper-class commodities.

The Aeolian Company, a leading manufacturer of player pianos in the United States, distributed many of the advertisements discussed in this chapter. In analyzing Aeolian’s marketing strategies, historian David Suisman observes, “Aeolian’s goal was to merge with or integrate itself into the existing piano business, not replace it.”137 While I would instead argue that player piano manufacturers marketed the instrument as an improvement on existing pianos, I agree with Suisman that companies like Aeolian integrated their instruments into the existing piano market.138 The advertisements distributed by Aeolian and other manufacturers reflect the motivation to introduce the player piano seamlessly into the existing piano business. This advertising technique relied on the piano’s association with upper-class culture to promote the player piano.

A background of the domestic space as a place to express social status is explored in section 1. Section 2 shows the player piano as a symbol of high social status, with references to its European musical roots. Section 3 identifies the role of women in the musical domestic space, connecting commodities and leisure through fashion and moral values with the player piano. Finally, section 4 evaluates the physical and musical presence of the player piano as a piece of furniture and as a musical player with access to a vast variety of repertoire. While I intend to reveal the player piano’s association with the upper class, I hope to do so without any

137 Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, 98. 138 Many advertisements emphasize the ease and accessibility of playing the player piano by juxtaposing it with descriptions of a laborious, tedious, and limiting play experience at the traditional piano. 69 negative judgment of the instrument or its impact on Americans’ lives; I simply point out the contradiction between the broad democratized access to music and the aspiration of associating with a narrower upper social class.

1. Upward Social Mobility in the Domestic Space

The domestic household at the turn of the twentieth century was a space for people to display their social status; namely, to demonstrate that they belonged to upper social classes.

Given the indistinct nature of class divisions, for the purpose of this paper, I define loosely three socio-economic categories: a lower, middle, and upper class. Social historian Margo

Anderson points out inconsistencies in twentieth-century American values, between the pride for “our absence of overt class distinctions” and the country’s “highly stratified society – especially in terms of class, socioeconomic status, or income.”139 Anderson’s observation reinforces on a societal scale the contradiction between a democratized ideal and a stratified reality. Given the difficulty of defining boundaries for social classes, I identify three approximate categories that suffice for this chapter. While I recognize that divisions of a population into strict groups erase many of the subtleties of history, these categories help to illuminate the direction and goals of Americans’ upward social aspirations.

Through consumption of material goods and participation in leisure activities, American families demonstrated a desire to practice habits of upper-class living, thereby revealing their upward social aspirations. Thorstein Veblen, an economist and sociologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published in 1899 a discussion of two theories that recognize consumption and leisure as outlets for demonstrating high social status. In his theory

139 Anderson, “The Language of Class in Twentieth-Century America,” 349-50. 70 of conspicuous consumption, Veblen presents the “unproductive consumption of goods” as a indicator of good taste and social influence.140 Participating in consumption was something to look up to, marking a person’s social power and even their moral code. It demonstrated a person’s access to wealth and their ability to spend money freely, indicating a high social standing. Additionally, Veblen’s emphasis on “unproductive consumption” points out a person’s ability to abstain from income-generating work, distancing them from the working lower and middle classes.

The reference to “unproductive consumption” relates directly to Veblen’s second theory, the theory of conspicuous leisure. He defines leisure, or the “conspicuous abstention from labour,” as a mark of respectability and financial success.141 The theory simultaneously indicates labor as a “mark of poverty and subjection… inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community.” The juxtaposition of leisure and work as two opposing activities identifies an inverse relationship between them. In a person’s everyday life, a higher concentration of one indicated a lower concentration of the other. The ratio of leisure to work implied a person’s relative position, high or low, within the social class hierarchy.

Though Veblen’s theories seem appropriate for a historic analysis, his arguments are dated, and their inconsistencies must be acknowledged. Fashion historian Rebecca J. Kelly notes that Veblen’s book was “published at the very apex of the Gilded Age, and is theoretically accurate rather than historically reflective of the period,” meaning that his theories served as broad generalizations of consumption and leisure habits of the time rather than as exact

140 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 54. 141 Veblen, 29-30. 71 accounts of the average American household.142 In reality, the extreme ostentatious displays of consumption and leisure were limited to small pockets of those in the wealthiest upper class.

Instead, Kelly argues, “examples of everyday living rather than outlandish acts should be used to interpret Gilded Age dress and lifestyle.”

Kelly raises a revealing point and prompts questions about the accuracy of Veblen’s theories. How far beyond the elite upper classes can we extend a “theoretically accurate” application of Veblen? At what point do his theories become irrelevant? Americans’ participation in consumption and leisure practices covered a wide range. As Kelly suggests, everyday living was perhaps not as extreme as Veblen implies. Yet, as I will show, the presence of objects and the participation in leisure activities invoked an image of an upper-class lifestyle. Even if people’s consumption and leisure practices did not ensure them an upper- class identity, the accumulation of habits associated them with that lifestyle.

The growing consumer market and rise of industry in the United States encouraged homeowners to participate in active consumption and leisure. Public historian Carolyn M.

Goldstein identifies the middle-class home between 1899 and 1907 as a space that was closely

“was now more intertwined than ever before in an expanding national market, a growing network of new technological goods and systems, and an emerging culture of consumption.”143

That the domestic space had an active role in consumerist practices supports Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. Consumption in middle-class households was, as Kelly points out, not nearly as extravagant as Veblen suggested, but it still existed, at least on a smaller scale.

142 Kelly, “Fashion in the Gilded Age: A Profile of Newport’s King Family,” 11. 143 Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economics in Twentieth-Century America, 24. 72

There exists an interesting conflict in the role of the domestic space as an outlet for displaying social status. On the one hand, a person’s social status was a very public part of their identity. Demonstrating social status in the home consisted of outward expressions such as interior decoration, accumulation of commodities, and leisure activities, in line with Veblen’s theories. It relied on an evaluation within the broad context of the entire population. A person’s social status was publicly defined and displayed; it consisted of expressions of style and values in an outward, visible display for others to see. Commodities in the home such as plush rugs, heavy drapes, and elegant furniture were physical objects that called for a visual interpretation of status.

While the domestic space was a place to outwardly display one’s social standing, it was, on the other hand, a very private, closed space. Here arises a conflict of public versus private expression and interpretation of social status. The home was an insulated space, defined in contrast to the outside world. There was a divide between home and work, home and industry, home and urban noise. Historian Craig H. Roell presents the home as a place of safety, a place that protected from the “anxieties of the industrial society” and fostered the “moral and spiritual values that the commercial spirit was threatening.”144 The domestic space as a haven was especially relevant with the beginning of World War I in 1914. The home served as a place of safety and comfort, standing against the danger and chaos of the war abroad. Taking these private domestic elements into consideration illuminates a conflict between an outward display of status and an inward-focused space. For whom was a display of status intended, and did these demonstrations extend to the external world, beyond the insulated home?

144 Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940, 13. 73

The presence of guests in the home and the wide distribution of advertisements created an illusion that the domestic space was externally visible. A family’s home was not open to the public, yet non-residents passed through as invited guests. And even if they were few in number, there was constant exposure of player piano periodical advertisements that projected images of an ideal domestic space. The images from these advertisements created the impression that the private domestic space was could be publicly visible, and in order to aspire to a higher social status, one needed to match the spaces pictured in the media.

Children, too, as a product of their mother’s upbringing, reflected the social status of a household. Women were the primary domestic caretakers of the early twentieth century, and it was important that their children’s behavior, etiquette, activities, knowledge reflected well on the home in which they were raised. Children thus served as representatives of their family’s status, appearing both in and outside of the home. Many player piano advertisements targeted younger audiences or mothers with children, thus reflecting the children’s influence on a family’s social image.

2. Representing Social Status

No one will have the nerve to sneer at an instrument highly commended by the late Anton Seidl, the world’s greatest orchestral leader. These instruments are in use in musical conservatories, in churches, in the vatican at Rome, on private yachts and in thousands of homes of cultured and refined people.

—Aeolian advertisement, on the Pianola (1898)145

145 Aeolian Company, “It Sometimes Happens This Way,” Morning Oregonian, 22 December 1898. 74

Even before the player piano became commercially widespread, during the nineteenth century the traditional piano symbolized an elevated social class. Historian Craig H. Roell notes that even into the late nineteenth century the piano remained connected with social status, an image perpetuated by manufacturers hoping to attract customers that desired an upper-class lifestyle. The piano embodied the American ideal of upward social striving, and appealed to those who aspired to social elevation: the piano represented wealth, taste, and elevated morals.146 Pianos were expensive and could represent a family’s financial security, which was another way to demonstrate wealth and social status.

The player piano’s image as an object of upper class status originated with the piano’s historical connotations. Alfred Dolge, a music author, observes in 1911 a trend between pianos and people of “culture and refinement.” The instruments were objects of Veblen’s

“unproductive consumption,” and were popular only in countries that could afford to produce and consume such expensive luxuries.147 Dolge’s direct connection between the piano and wealth demonstrates its reflection of upper class status.

The piano’s historic origins in Europe also had an influence on its role as a mark of social status. The instrument reflected an affluent lifestyle, dating back to the European courts. In the mid-1700s, the piano appeared as a new instrument designed for courtly settings. As it spread around Europe, it stayed associated with these tight royal and aristocratic circles within the courts.148 The piano carried into the twentieth century a history steeped in the European upper class and its associated living spaces and practices.

146 Roell, 23. Note that the language in some of the player piano advertisements that I analyze reflects the fervent and almost aggressive advertising practices of the time. 147 Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers, 165. 148 Parakilas, “1700 to 1770: The Need for the Piano,” 19. 75

Though the player piano in many ways expressly differentiated itself from the traditional piano, it still held fast to an association with its predecessor. Unlike the gramophone, which occupied a distinct niche in domestic music consumption and the music industry with its new appearance and unprecedented technological capabilities, the player piano was designed and marketed as an improved counterpart to the traditional piano. The gramophone proposed a new way to interact with music, emphasizing listening over performance and offering an opportunity to hear any type recorded sound. The player piano, on the other hand, performed only piano music, and, as I show in chapter 1, encouraged active engagement between the performer and instrument. Whatever representations the piano carried also applied to the player piano, and these connections to upper-class status were apparent in advertisements and the player piano’s reception in domestic spaces.

Some player piano manufacturers associated their instruments with European aristocracy to reinforce the player piano’s connection to social status. In a full-page advertisement from

1913, an image of Aeolian’s Weber player piano is the center of a web that connects the instrument with names of European rulers printed over a map of Europe (figure 14). By visually mapping their instrument to foreign monarchs, Aeolian implied that the player piano represented royalty and political power.149 Because of his “birth, breeding, travel, training, opportunity and experience,” according to Aeolian, the political ruler is associated with refined taste; he is a “critical and discriminating gentleman of culture.”150 The “unanimous preference” for the player piano among these elevated authorities implies that Aeolian’s instrument displayed the same distinguished status and taste that the rulers represented.

149 With the exception of the Legion of Honor of France. 150 Aeolian Co., “The Leading Rulers of Europe Are All Patrons of the Aeolian Company,” Sunday Oregonian, 14 February 1913. 76

Figure 14: A full-page advertisement from the Aeolian Company drew direct connections between the player piano and European aristocracy. From the Sunday Oregonian, 1913.

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Despite their fixation on Europe as a symbol of wealth, Aeolian’s language reflected a distinctly American perspective by emphasizing the democratic values embodied in their instrument. In the advertisement, Aeolian reassures potential customers, “although The

Pianola and other Aeolian instruments are the choice of Royalty and of the wealthy and cultured everywhere, they are by no means the most costly.” Noting the affordable cost of their instruments emphasized their democratic accessibility. It is ironic, however, that although

Aeolian marketed the player piano as an affordable instrument, they promised that the purchase would elevate the customer’s social status. Even the map reflects this upward striving: the player piano is situated above or at equal latitude with each royal name that extends its arm in approval. The player piano is also located on the left side of the frame so that all the royal connections reach across the Atlantic, gesturing toward the United States.

Promoting connections, beyond the most prestigious European monarchs, with established upper class American customers contributed to the player piano’s identity as an instrument of the United States elite. In the 1920s, Ampico advertised their recent sale to movie star and customer Jackie Coogan to emphasize the player piano’s popularity among young, fashionable celebrities. The instrument’s decorative opulence is the focus in a newspaper feature: the player piano was “finished in old ivory and gold, with the inside of the lid handsomely decorated in colors by Sutton… The body of the case is in old ivory enamel, the garlands and carved decorations being entirely of gold with the high lights burnished.”151 The focus of this description is not the technical capabilities of the player piano; rather, its visual appeal and fancy materials highlight the instrument’s association with extreme wealth and the upper class.

151 Reproduced in Roehl, Player Piano Treasury, 65. 78

This particular instrument was “specially designed and executed on order” for the movie star and was not available to the general public, but by publicizing the instrument, Ampico implied that the elegant craftsmanship described in the news feature was standard for their company. The association with an upper-class customer carried over to the company’s name and reinforced Ampico’s reputation as a producer of quality instruments. Coogan’s palatial player piano represented an ideal for Ampico’s other commercially available player pianos, indicating the instrument’s connections to the upper class.

The player piano also established a reputation as an instrument within academia’s elite circles. When Harvard University’s music department incorporated an Ampico reproducing piano into their classes, the company used this connection to promote the player piano’s association with the academic upper class; the selection by “Professor Walter R. Spalding, the head of the music division” signified approval with the seal of a distinguished title.152 Harvard

University was considered the most prestigious university in the country, and with a history rooted in European academic traditions, the university represented an educated upper class.

The fact that Ampico’s player piano was used for “appreciation of music courses” further reinforced the value placed in the Western classical tradition that originated in Europe.

Together, the elite associations of the player piano and of the university reinforced each other, each promoting the other as a symbol of upper-class status.

3. Women at the Player Piano

In establishing a distinguished reputation, the player piano was associated with powerful men; consider the men of European monarchies, American film star Jackie Coogan, and the all-

152 Reproduced in Roehl, 65. 79 male population at Harvard University.153 Pinch and Bijsterveld argue that the player piano’s inner mechanics marked it as a “masculine technology… in contrast to the piano, which was gendered feminine at the time.”154 However, playing the player piano in everyday domestic life was a practice predominantly for women. The frequent appearance of women as (player) pianists in advertisements points to a female-dominated role of domestic pianist. The placement of advertisements in periodicals opened up the private domestic space for public viewing. After establishing the upper-class reputation of the player piano in section 2, I now turn to examine the application of the instruments in American domestic spaces, where they were frequently advertised to and used by women. This section shows that women, as the primary domestic music makers, utilized the player piano as an instrument that symbolized a fashionable and moral lifestyle to display and elevate their family’s social status.

The women portrayed in the advertisements that I analyze represent American middle and upper social classes. Since my analysis is based on the portrayal of the player piano through media distributed directly from player piano manufacturers, this argument focuses on a particular cross-section of the American population that was idealized in public images.

Further studies could investigate first-hand accounts about the experience of owning a player piano from women and families of all social classes. The scope of my research includes the perspectives of the manufacturers to analyze images targeted at customers.

The traditional piano has a gendered history as a domestic instrument. In the late nineteenth-century United States, women were responsible for creating music in the home,

153 Harvard was an all-male institution until 1977 when it merged with Radcliffe College, an all-female school in Cambridge. 154 Pinch and Bijsterveld, “‘Should One Applaud?’ Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music,” 543. 80 specifically at the piano. At the time, music was considered a fashionable and morally refining art. Women, too, were primary figures in positions of fashion as well as in care and healing.155

Both music and women, therefore, contributed similarly to the household environment with their socially uplifting and nurturing presences. Roell discusses the domestic value of women at the piano, arguing that it was “the woman’s task to provide this beauty, this oasis of calm.”156 A fashionable and morally sound lifestyle was a marker of social status in the early twentieth- century. Through demonstrations of consumption of fashionable goods (musical instruments) and demonstrations of leisure (music performance), women effectively communicated their family’s social standing.

Most of the advertisements for player pianos were designed for audiences of women.

Headlines such as “The American Player Piano in the Home is the Delight of the American Girl” and “How Your Daughter Will Love a Reproducing Piano!” called out directly to women or their immediate families.157 Additionally, advertisements that pictured people at the player piano more often featured women than men. Advertising schemes targeted women within a wide age range from young girls to married women with children, perpetuating the identity of the ideal domestic music maker as a beautiful women in a white, upper class, family-oriented household.

But surely, as Aeolian reminds us, the point of the player piano was that “ANY one can play upon ANY piano.” The conflict between the player piano’s democratized music and its reality of limited aspirations is evident here in the narrow demographics of the targeted audience.

Musicologist Catherine Hennessy Wolter analyzes two sources of traditional and player piano advertisements from 1914-17, the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. She

155 Consider women’s stereotypical societal roles as mothers or as nurses. 156 Roell, 13. 157 Reproduced in Roehl, 24, 68. 81 notes that while the player piano promoted its democratized goal of widening music access for larger audiences that included men, the advertisements presented their instruments “under the guise of familiar gender constructs.”158 Wolter acknowledges that gender norms were slowly shifting at the beginning of the century due to the changing instrument technology capabilities; however, changes were slow and the traditional gender roles were still ingrained in societal expectations. Wolter shows that most manufacturers, when persuading customers into a purchase, relied on established and familiar gender roles to structure a scenario that everyone understood.

Manufacturers wanted customers to desire and aspire to the images in their advertisements, so they ensured that the women pictured in their advertisements were beautiful and well dressed. These images reflected an upper-class taste and budget for clothes, commodities that women could accumulate and publicly display both in and outside the domestic space. One advertisement from a New York manufacturer directly links women and fashion with their player piano (figure 15): “Beauty and Fashion are captivated by the Behr

Piano Player.”159 Next to an image of the player piano is a tall woman who is dressed elegantly in a long fur coat and dons a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich feather.160 The pairing of her high fashion clothing, especially the expensive feathers and fur, with the player piano associated the instrument with an upper-class style. Not everyone could afford to dress in such luxurious attire, however. Behr’s advertisement attracted customers who aspired to status distinction through clothing and fashion by connecting their instrument with an image that

158 Wolter, “‘What the Piano[la] Means to the Home’: Advertising Conventional and Player Pianos in the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, 1914-17,” 164. 159 Reproduced in Roehl, 10. 160 Elizabeth Ewing notes that during the first decade of the twentieth century in England, ostrich feathers were so “costly” that women would often own just one, and the ornament “would be transferred from one hat to another.” History of Twentieth Century Fashion, 10. 82 embodied upper-class ideals through clothing, even if the portrayed fashion was an unattainable goal.

Figure 15: An advertisement for Behr Figure 16: Women at player pianos in pianos. Reproduced in Roehl, 10. fashionable, upper-class dress. Reproduced in Roehl, 22.

Figure 17: Women at player pianos in fashionable, upper-class dress. Reproduced in Roehl, 3. 83

Figure 18: Women at player pianos in Figure 19: Women at player pianos in fashionable, upper-class dress. Reproduced fashionable, upper-class dress. Reproduced in Roehl, 12. in Roehl, 9.

Figure 20: Men gathered around a player piano. Their clothing reflects fashionable, upper- class dress that is mirrored in the shine of the player piano. Reproduced in Roehl, 17. 84

Other advertisements collected in Roehl’s Player Piano Treasury depict women in elegant dress playing the instrument (figures 16-19). The women pictured wore long, trailing skirts of ornamented fabric, hairpins or flowers, hats, and billowy sleeves. The excess of expensive fabric and ornamentations demonstrate Veblen’s described “unproductive consumption of goods;” fabric for the sake of display rather than function. Among the men pictured, most are dressed in sharp black suits with bow ties and sleek haircuts. One image stands out in its depiction of an entirely male-dominated room, probably a gentlemen’s club or some similar exclusive, private domestic-style space (figure 20). The men are visibly wealthy: they wear top hats, hold cigarettes and canes, and sport manicured moustaches. The presence of a butler standing to the side of the player piano is a double demonstration of class, indicating the men’s displaced responsibility for domestic upkeep and ample time for leisure activities, such as music making.

Fashion was an external, visible way to display social class, while living a moral lifestyle was less immediately identifiable on the surface. Since a woman’s domestic responsibilities included maintaining a fashionable and moral household, it was appropriate that she demonstrated these through music, which was also associated with moral values. Moralizing musical practice could be communicated through conspicuous leisure, with a special focus on children as the recipients of this activity.

Since mothers were primarily responsible for their children’s upbringing, it was up to women to foster a sufficiently moral environment for their families within their domestic spaces. “Were not women to maintain a home environment that provided essentially the same respite from the ills of industrialization?” asks Roell in a discussion on the moral value of music 85 in the domestic culture.161 The idea of the home as an insular, protected environment was especially relevant in the context of moral uplift. Mothers were called upon to create a safe environment for their children, in contrast with the industrial, commercial chaos of the outdoor cities. The player piano, then, was seen as a morally uplifting instrument that benefited children and defined an upper class lifestyle that could insulate itself. Disengaging from the external workforce was also a display of status and conveyed a family’s ability to indulge in leisure activity defined by the absence of labor.

Children represented a family’s investment in the future; in learning to appreciate and play music, children perpetuated and guaranteed a continuation of valued cultural practices.

The idea of children as mediators between the public and private spheres also addresses the conflict between public displays of status in a private setting. For example, a 1912 advertisement for a traditional- and player-piano sale in New York describes children moving in and out of the domestic space, and encourages families, and especially mothers, to consider purchasing a piano for their household to protect their children:

Your heart will quicken its beat as you think of your children—or the little brothers and sisters—and the joy of these pianos will bring to their home—and yours. With nothing but the streets to play in, with their ears barred to the music of nature, the city child has a hard time of it finding a substitute for what country children are blessed with. Even their homes are often cramped and squeezed and crowded and buried in our great apartment houses. Often a few flowering plants at the window betoken the great love in these homes for the beautiful; and when the hurdy-gurdy comes along the children’s feet begin tapping—and off they go to dance and sing and let loose their joy—in the streets! Now, why not bring into YOUR home that music which the children love and need for their healthful, all-around growth. Why not place there—perhaps as a surprise—a PIANO?162

This advertisement is unusual in that it describes in detail an average urban, middle-class domestic household that is not nearly as affluent as the spaces usually depicted in

161 Roell, 20. 162 Wanamaker’s, “The World’s Greatest Piano Sale,” New York Evening World, 21 September 1912. 86 advertisements. In this description, the home is imperfect; it is “cramped and squeezed and crowded” and the language suggests that the urban location is distracting, even detrimental for children. The city streets are contrasted with an idealized countryside, which is the implied preference of the two with its fresh air and low-fi soundscape. The “few flowering plants” in the windows suggest some attempt to counter the urban environment, but they are “few” and inadequate. The hurdy-gurdy, or barrel organ, was a relative of the player piano that operated with pinned barrels instead of perforated sheets. In the text of the advertisement, the hurdy- gurdy represents a lower-class urban culture, which is associated with a lack of morals and refinement. In contrast, the piano instead promises to keep children inside the home, where their health and “all-around growth” can be properly nurtured under the watchful eye of their mother. When a mother raised her children with stable moral practices, she demonstrated both within and outside the domestic space her ability to enforce upper-class habits.

It was considered proper to keep children confined to the moral safety of the domestic space, and this was true for a wide range of youth. The player piano helped in “keeping young people at home,” as the Hauschildt Music Company of Sacramento advertised in a 1917 edition of the Sacramento Union.163 This advertisement emphasizes the domestic space as a safe and enriching place with music as the featured moral force: “Nothing cements home ties like music.

Besides, there is a sort of moral uplift to music that no other form of entertainment carries, and it supplies that deep and lasting joy that other amusement lacks.” This language would have appealed to a woman who sought to establish “home ties” with her children who, as they got older, might have been straying from home. The moral value of the player piano promised a stable family that reflected upper-class ideals.

163 Hauschildt Music Company, “Keeping Young People at Home,” Sacramento Union, 11 March 1917. 87

The “young people” pictured in the accompanying image indicate a prosperous household. The two women wear dresses with long skirts that rise just above their ankles, reflecting a younger style. Their skirts are broad and frilly, indicating an excess of material for decoration that reflects style and wealth. The single man is dressed all in black with a collared shirt, tailored pants, and pointed shoes. Both women wear heels, which serve as a statement of impractical, excessive fashion. Within the house and around the player piano, these children could participate in harmless music making, which supposedly enriched their morals and elevated their social class, as demonstrated visually by their clothing and music’s associations.

In this advertisement, the player piano symbolizes an insular domestic ideal that promotes a healthy and moral upbringing for a mother’s children, even into their adolescent years, reflecting the social status of her and her children.

The advertisements I present in this section spoke directly to consumers and emphasized the worthwhile outcomes of their purchase. It was important to appeal to a customer’s values and desires so that they would feel positively about purchasing the described product, in this case, the player piano. In selling the instrument to women, manufacturers promoted the instrument as an object that would complement and enhance their lifestyle, bringing fashion and moral uplift to their household. Satisfied customers were important to the manufacturers; they wanted women to view their purchase as a benefit to their home.

In reality, however, many people were skeptical about the player piano’s ability to enhance women’s lives. A satire piece from a 1911 edition of the San Francisco Call suggested that the player piano could improve a woman’s role as domestic music maker by replacing her completely: 88

The tired merchant no longer invests $2,500 in a musical daughter and then has her purloined by a dry goods clerk before she has worn out a single piano. He blows $400 in on a quiet and polite machine which doesn’t need a new dress every week and which always feels like playing right after supper when requested to.164

The comparison of the player piano with the merchant’s daughter highlights the woman’s expected role in the house as music maker; however, she is imperfect. The player piano can do better than she: it is less expensive, it is better behaved, and it does not abandon the merchant for a penniless marriage. The player piano, as a replacement for the daughter, demonstrates its democratic accessibility to people such as the middle-class clerk. The satire also reveals that women were key figures in displaying a family’s class status. She is associated with polite etiquette, a husband, and new dresses, demonstrating an upward social aspiration. The personification of these traits in the instrument shows that the player piano, as the dual presence of instrument and woman, was an economical (and thus democratic) way to achieve social status.

However, the satire also subtly slights the merchant for his decision. To say he “blows” his money on a machine implies a waste of resources and a poor choice. While the merchant makes a democratic decision that earns him peace of mind, social class, and quality music, something is not quite equivalent in the transaction of daughter for instrument. The satire’s focus could be interpreted as a commentary on the selfishness of displaying status, for the merchant makes the trade out of self-interest. Or maybe the ridiculousness of replacing a human with machine is reference to the anxiety of machine-produced music as discussed in chapter 2; the mention of etiquette and clothing is comically human when applied to the instrument. In either case, the satire conveys a close relationship between women and the

164 Finch, “Vest Pocket Essays: Piano Players,” San Francisco Call, 7 December 1911. 89 player piano, one that relates to their physical presences, the music they produced, and the social status they displayed.

4. Furniture and Repertoire

The presence of such a hefty object in the home could not be ignored. Aside from associating itself with clothing, the player piano itself was visibly fashionable. Some instruments were more ornately decorated than others, but all were featured pieces within the living room, which already contained other commodities that indicated social status, including window drapes, carpets, potted plants, floor lamps, and other pieces that contributed to the domestic décor. In addition to the instrument’s exterior, the musical sounds it produced crafted the domestic soundscape. From Beethoven to Sousa, recognizable European and American composers offered homeowners a chance to project their class associations through a sonic medium.

Whatever the player piano contributed to domestic decoration, the traditional piano had established earlier. Drawings from 1845 by Jean Henri Pape demonstrate a trend of instrument design that accentuates the furniture presence of the piano.165 The drawings display pianos that are elegantly crafted with scrolled feet, flat table surfaces, and cabinet doors with knobs for handles. These objects could be tables and desks, if it were not for tell-tale keyboards that in the images are sometimes visible, sometimes covered by an inconspicuous lid. Looking at the instruments, one can play a guessing game of categories. Is it a table, or is it a piano? The game is not easy; Pape has intentionally created a hazy blending of the two identities.

165 Pape, “Notice sur les inventions et les perfectionnements de H. Pape,” 55-58. 90

Most pianos were not as overt in their imitation of existing furniture structures, but they still emulated a general design and tendency toward ornamentation. Figure 17 from earlier in this chapter shows the piano as an eye-catching piece of furniture. While the woman in the image plays a cabinet-style player that is attached to her grand piano, the player piano blends almost indistinguishably into the body of the piano, fusing them into a single instrument. The long train of the woman’s dress imitates the elaborate scrollwork on the side of the piano, emphasizing the high social status of both the woman and her instrument. These flowery designs are also cast into the wallpaper in the background. The piano coordinates with the interior design of the room as well as with its performer to link the domestic space, the instrument, and the people to an upper-class image.

Player pianos, too, could be grand and ornate; consider Jackie Coogan’s Ampico player piano mentioned in section 2. Specially designed for a high-status celebrity, the focus of the instrument was its exterior craftsmanship as opposed to its functionality. The mention of “old ivory and gold,” and a “handsomely decorated”166 lid show that this player piano was meant to reflect wealth and inspire awe. The instrument served as a piece of decorative furniture, appealing to an aesthetic design and taste for style.

Admittedly, however, the average player pianos were not nearly this extravagant. Most were unadorned uprights with a plain black veneer or stained wood. Here, the hazy areas within

Veblen’s critique of conspicuous consumption are relevant: families that were not members of an extreme elite class still participated in consumption to demonstrate social status. Middle- class families could not afford overly ostentatious instruments, but the standard player piano still represented a striving toward these upper-class ideals. One drawing of the Duo-Art player

166 Reproduced in Roehl, 65. 91 piano from circa 1912 describes, “The Duo-Art is not only a magnificent piano, endowed with ability to reproduce playing, but is as well a really fine piece of furniture.”167 Three grown women and one young girl gather around the instrument to admire its construction and design.

The presence of the women reflects their relationship with the domestic space, identifying them as the primary consultants for approving quality in décor. Even as the player piano appealed to wider audiences, in this instance the middle class, it continued to represent a desire for upper-class status that was reflected in the possession of “magnificent” household commodities, such as furniture.

Appearance mattered for the physical body of the player piano as well as for the rolls.

Rolls were bought with more frequency than the instruments; they were less expensive, and the democratized intent of the player piano was that one instrument could play any of a vast variety of pieces. The rolls were thus collected commodities, and since a performer would look at the roll each time they opened it up to play, its appearance was important. Welte-Mignon produced a series of “purple seal” rolls, which invoke royalty and official approval. One of these deluxe rolls from the 1920s is pictured in Stanford University’s collection (figure 21).168 The dense decorations imply Welte’s highly regarded status among other player piano manufacturers. Like a military figure or government official, the piano roll proudly displays its value with a highly decorative lead. This image is striking in light of the democratic nature of the player piano rolls. Even though piano rolls were valued as inexpensive objects that anyone

167 Ibid., 57. 168 Stanford University Libraries, “Welte-Mignon at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Stanford Libraries Blog, http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/stanford-libraries-blog/2015/11/welte-mignon- 1915-panama-pacific-international-exposition/. 92 could own, there still existed class divisions among the rolls themselves; the purple seal rolls, for example, belonged to a higher class than others.

Figure 21: Welte-Mignon’s Purple Seal piano roll. From the Stanford University Library collection.

The wide variety of repertoire available to the domestic consumer through piano rolls ranged from the classical canon to popular sing-alongs. The classical canon, with its roots in the European upper class, was used to promote the player piano as an instrument that would bring status to a household. Connections to “master” composers, whether immortalized in their compositions or in their recorded performance on the reproducing piano, demonstrated an aspiration to upper-class status. As one advertisement from 1919 suggests, these “Immortal

Masters of the Past and Present” symbolized the musically elite.169 Headshots of the composers and performers frame the vertical sides of the advertisement page, suggesting that these

169 Auto Pneumatic Action Company, “Immortal Masters of the Past and Present,” The Music Trades, 22 February 1919, 14. 93 composers are so famous that they should be recognizable by their faces alone. Like the Welte-

Mignon purple seal rolls, the piano rolls that promised democratized access to music ironically encourage an aspiration for narrow, upper-class status.

The increasing popularity of ragtime and popular music in the early twentieth century suggests a possible exception to the contradiction between democratization and status aspirations. Popular music did not carry the same elite connotations as the classical canon, and it was played and enjoyed by people from all classes, low to high. It was an accessible genre with easy-to-sing melodies, relatively simple harmonic progressions, and a strophic form with a repeating, catchy tune. Roell connects popular music with the change in pace of industrial

America: “As America modernized, as it became progressive and faster paced, popular music also speeded up both in production and in tempo.”170 A direct reflection of the outside world, popular music broke the boundaries of the moral, protected domestic space; it brought the external sounds of commercialization and industrialization into the home.

Ragtime, when printed on player piano rolls, was a new, popular music commodity that was introduced into the domestic soundscape. There is a tension, however, in the appropriation of ragtime, initially associated with black musicians, by white consumers who represent the majority of player piano owners. White families could now “[possess] what they could not otherwise create: black soul.”171 Is this an example of democratized music? The wide accessibility of ragtime through player piano rolls meant that it was recognized as a legitimate genre; and indeed, the Aeolian Catalog from July 1905 lists over 598 pages a wide variety of

170 Roell, 32. 171 Dolan, Inventing Entertainment, 101. 94 music, including Schumann Lieder, Sousa marches, arrangements of Wagner operas, popular songs by Rosamond Johnson, and Scott Joplin rags.

However, over time, the genre lost its identity and origins in black musical practice; it was increasingly associated with white, middle-class families. Roell notes that by 1910, ragtime was becoming less frequently associated with black musicians and had gained a more positive reception among white consumers.172 As the genre was adopted by middle-class America, white composers wrote their own renditions on popular rags. These songs were notated on piano rolls and sold to the general public, gaining a presence in the middle-class domestic space. The mixing of popular tunes into an upward-aspiring domestic space demonstrates a dissolving of ragtime’s identity into a white-dominated environment. On the other hand, the sounds of popular music contributed to a changing domestic ideal that slowly reduced the narrowly focused drive for upper-class status. Musical sounds, then, played a significant role in shaping the spaces that they filled.

* * *

Over one hundred years later, the Steinway Spirio offers twenty-first-century Americans access to an upper-class lifestyle. The Spirio radiates wealth; another advertisement video for the instrument pictures a family in a living room, adorned with a plush white couch and matching rug, ceiling-tall windows, and modern art paintings.173 The video is an updated version of the advertisements from the early 1900s: one shot shows the Spirio accompanying a cocktail party, another shot shows a father dancing with his young daughter.

172 Roell, 33. 173 Steinway & Sons, “Steinway & Sons Spirio: High Tech & High Art,” YouTube video, 16 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZQsNeM9H3k. 95

Analyzing the player piano in its historical everyday environment through interpretations of advertisements provides a critical lens through which to observe our twenty-first-century society and the technologies we use daily. Cell phones can be as fashionable as clothing: accessorizing our electronic devices with cases, stickers, and key ring jewelry reflects the significance of technology as a statement of our social class and sense of style. In the home, technologies such as sound systems, exercise equipment, or video game consoles reflect our ability to spend money and leisure time. Pianos, too, still represent to some extent a family’s moral and cultured household, though it is a connotation that has over the years become less prevalent. Study the player piano puts our modern lifestyle and technologies into perspective.

When we are more aware of our identities as expressed through our commodities, we can glean a deeper understanding of their role in our lives, and be more attentive to their relationship to our social and living spaces. 96

CODA

Player pianos are no longer a staple in the average twenty-first-century American domestic space. With improved gramophone technology and the onset of the Great Depression, among other factors, the player piano’s rate of sales petered out around 1930. In a data table reported by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Roehl observes a point of steep decline in numbers of player pianos produced between 1929 and 1931, when production decreased by about 61%.174 The instruments that have survived into the twenty-first century live in private collections, dusty living room corners, and piano warehouses, all in various states of (dis)repair.

Some have made it into museum collections, and others have met their destinies in landfills.

Newer models have been modernized with electricity for use in public spaces such as train stations, airports, or shopping malls where acoustic music adds a refreshingly human spark to otherwise anonymous and commercial atmospheres.

Yet the player piano is still relevant today. In a time when technologies are more and more pervasive in everyday life, understanding our relationships with our phones, our computers, or our data storage, for example, becomes ever relevant. Themes of play, fantasy, and domestic culture are immediately applicable to modern day technology. Video games, including interactive games that utilize cameras or sensors that track responses from the human body, are extremely popular for home gaming systems, cell phones, and computers.

Artificial intelligence suggests a growing agency of technology, and we often treat these

174 Roehl, 43. 97 technologies as human.175 In our private and public lives, technology also represents social status and fashion and reflects an aspiration for upward social mobility.176

We interact with technology daily, yet we do not often stop to think about its influence on our actions. When we start paying attention to our interactions with these objects, we observe that their physicality and programmed responses influence the way we hear, view, interact with, and think about the world. We don’t, and can’t, have full agency over our technologies, but we do maintain with them an active relationship that shapes our actions and decision making, large and small. The player piano is just one case study from a pool of thousands of possible investigations, but it helps to illuminate potential directions for studies of other interactive objects.

Technology is everywhere, and it is inevitably active in our everyday lives. Following the lead of Tresch and Dolan, I aim to “expand our view beyond the standard notion of the tool as utilitarian and passive, and beyond the ideal of the machine as embodying inhuman precision and standardization.”177 Through a close examination of the player piano, I hope to illuminate the instrument as an object of valuable musicological investigation that contributes significant implications for future instrument and technology studies. The player piano, then, is not just a quaint, charming instrument of history; it is a muse for contemplation of human existence and interactions of the past, present, and future.

175 For example, international chess tournaments have tested human and computer strategies in competition. Additionally, the movie “Her” (2013) explores a near-futuristic America in which people have relationships with their operating systems. 176 Consider the difference between an iPhone and a flip phone, or the fashion and leisure statements of Apple Watches and Fitbits. Additionally, advertisements for personal technologies often promote their commodities in terms of fashion; for example, laptops are desirable when they are thin, sleek, and have a glossy finish. 177 Tresch, Dolan, 283. 98

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