Games, Ghosts, and Glamour
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
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