A Very Brief History of the Player Piano

A brief history of the player piano.
The player piano is a type of piano that can play music (both classical and popular) on its own. It doesn’t need a human performer to press the keys, and can do so by itself. For the majority of history, musical instruments had to be played by humans. If you wanted to hear music, you would need performers to play it for you, or you’d need to play it yourself- and in order to do that you would need plenty of money. But the advent of the player changed all that, and laid the groundwork for all the free and accessible music that we have today.

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The piano itself was invented around the 17th century, developing out of other keyboard instruments that came before- like the organ, the clavichord and the harpsichord. The organ would be the first keyboard to be automated. Organs are essentially lots of various pipes connected to bellows, which, when keys are pressed, blow air through the pipes and create sound. This was found to be much easier to automate than pianos, as organs mechanically are arguably a lot simpler.
Moving forward, and with the advent of steam power, people were becoming aware of the ability for pneumatics to do hard mechanical work for us,
Some of the first pneumatic player pianos were shown in the Philadelphia world’s fair in 1876. However, one of these prototypes was the pianista, which is considered an early ancestor of the true player piano.
Now we jump forward to the turn of the 20th century. Many different types of automated pianos had appeared, some with handles and crankshafts, some with bellows that you press with your feet, but it was at this point that all the different designs were beginning to coalesce- and the first true player piano, the Pianola, appeared.
Despite its obscene price, buyers- mostly rich- were fascinated by the new pianola, and it did very successfully right from its release.
Various musicians like Debussy and Scott Joplin would develop their own piano rolls- they would play one of their pieces into a pianola, and it would encode their performance- all the little details of rhythm and dynamics- into a piano roll card. This means that today we can essentially listen to the original composers playing their own music. Interestingly, Debussy, in his piano roll performance of Claire de Lune, played very quickly compared to the languid performances pianists give today- perhaps his creative vision was different to how we interpret it nowadays- and we’re missing some hidden meaning and emotion- or perhaps he was bored and just trying to get the performance over and done with.
Composers of the late 20th century began to see the player piano as an opportunity to make art that had never been seen before. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer born in 1912 but only having achieved notoriety in the 80s, composed lots of pieces for the instrument. The human body can only do so much with a standard piano- we’ve only got 10 fingers and we can only play so fast before things go out of control, but automated pianos aren’t governed by the fragile limitations of the human performer. Player pianos can be instructed to play any amount of notes, as fast as the composer likes, as often as they like, as hard as they like- and Nancarrow took great advantage of this in his “Studies for player piano”.
With the appearance of computers in the 90s, player pianos have only gotten more sophisticated over time. Composers and performers can now completely forgo the use of piano roll cards, instead choosing to beam the musical instructions written in MIDI directly into the piano’s computer via wifi.
Player pianos nowadays are still not massively accessible, and are generally only used for show or displays of wealth. They remain very expensive [steinway £46000 WTF] so they’re only available to the proper wealthy- but honestly, I don’t think that even matters! With computers, the idea of automated instruments has become almost obsolete- we now have notation software, DAWs and programs that can do it all for us. The player piano, with its very high price, has ironically inspired the development of products that make music free! That was the original goal of the player piano, to make music accessible to everyone, even people who can’t play or pay others to pay for them- and I think its achieved that goal.

Music By: Beta Records
Link: https://goo.gl/peHHCX

Видео A Very Brief History of the Player Piano канала Jo Fraser Composer