Tim Armstrong - Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity - Modernism/modernity 14:1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Text, 2010
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the emergence of a new technology for the mechanical reproduction of music struck many people in the United States as a harbinger of dramatic cultural change. To its champions, this technology would usher in a more democratic musical age, bringing "good" music to more people, more easily, untethered from the painstaking and time-consuming labor of learning to play the piano. For some, this held the promise of fighting back what they saw as the degenerative, corrupting effects of the rising tide of popular music. A few contemporaries championed this new technology of mechanical reproduction for its creative potential in and of itself, capable perhaps of opening new realms of musical expression. Others, meanwhile, found the technology a menace, debasing the time-honored value of traditional musical training and robbing copyright holders of their rightful compensation for their creative labors. This technology was called the player-piano.
Keyboard Perspectives XI, 2018
The pianola was an intricate musical instrument that challenged common conceptions about and fostered new possibilities for music making at the turn of the 20th century. While some people embraced it enthusiastically, taking advantage of its potential for musical expressivity, others rejected it on the basis of its defiance to conventional approaches to keyboard performance. This article examines the mechanical design of the pianola, the challenges and opportunities for the short-lived performance practice around it, and its transcendence for the music industry and other realms of musical practice in the 20th century. By discussing “what happens when the playing of the pianola happens” the article offers also an interpretation of the pianola’s performative dimension and of the extent to which it helped redefine the boundaries of what was humanly or musically possible. Keywords: pianola, pianolist, player pianos, Aeolian, dialectic soundings, metrostyle, themodist.
The British Journal for the History of Science
Neither Whittle nor von Ohain got their jet engine designs into production. Stories of their importance to the creation of the jet engine were constructed, in part, for political reasons. In postwar Britain, Whittle was consciously turned into the singular inventor of the jet engine by a country relishing its own technological brilliance and by politicians who thought championing him would bring export orders. Von Ohain was brought into a dual-inventor story as Germany sought to normalize its aviation industry and rid it of its Nazi past. Both narratives gain much of their potency from the wider cultural significance of stories about heroic, lone inventors. Historians should not adopt popular judgements of what innovation is and where it takes place. Such assumptions, as Giffard points out, have produced a great loss of understanding that we can no longer countenance. The first step in building a far richer history of technical change is for all historians interested in invention to look at this book.
Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, 2022
What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. 1 It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher's table: "an assumed background on which one writes." 2 Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. 3 More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, 4 serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. 5 So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was "complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity" 6-and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. 7 From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage's 'prepared piano,' I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency.
Digital Analogies: The Keyboard as Field of Musical Play
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2015
Relating evidence from the mythological to the contemporary in both historical and media-archaeological registers, this article explores how techniques of sonic generation and representation shuttled between what might be defined as digital and analog domains long before the terms acquired their present meanings—and became locked in a binary opposition—over the latter half of the twentieth century. It proposes that such techniques be conceptualized via the “digital analogy,” a critical strategy that accounts for the nesting of techno-musical configurations. While the scope of digital analogies is expansive, the focus here falls on a particular interface and mode of engagement. The interface is the keyboard; the mode of engagement is the play, both ludic and musical, that the keyboard affords. Operations at the keyboard have been integral to ludic communication and computation as well as to the practices of composition, performance, and improvisation. To map out this genealogy and to show how it continues to inform loci of musical play from sound art to digital games, the article draws on an array of critical and theoretical texts including Friedrich Kittler’s media analyses, Vilém Flusser’s writings on technology, and post-Foucauldian discourses on cultural techniques.
The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism (dissertation)
This dissertation examines modernist twentieth-century applications of the pipe organ and the carillon in the United States and in the Netherlands. These keyboard instruments, historically owned by religious or governmental entities, served an exceptionally diverse variety of political, technological, social, and urban planning functions. Their powerful simultaneous associations with historicism and innovation enabled those who built and played them to anchor the instruments’ novel uses in the perceived authority of tradition, church, and state. This usage became particularly evident after World War II, when Philips Electronics and the engineers and musicians whose careers were shaped by the military-industrial complex and the Cold War used the organ and carillon to present alternative visions and performances of their research, knowledge, and services. The organ served as a vehicle for innovation for early electronic music and sound synthesis pioneers in three ways. First, it provided a model for an efficient user interface for new synthesizer technologies that found both musical and military communications applications. Second, the pipe organ became the first instrument to be electronically simulated on a commercially viable basis. As a result, the first federal legal proceedings to define the successful simulation of musical sound centered on the electronic organ. Electronic organs also helped shape a historicist “neo-baroque” movement that was, in part, both a reaction to and an outgrowth of their commercial success. Third, inventors in the field of electronics, particularly military electronics, turned to organ building to satisfy a desire to connect with historicist ideas about craft and tradition. They became leaders of the Organ Reform Movement after World War II, dedicated to reviving aspects of Baroque organ building. I build on Richard Taruskin’s critique of “historically informed performance” as itself a form of modernism in order to elucidate previously overlooked relationships between Reform organ building, organ recording artists, the military-industrial complex, and cold war politics. The carillon served as a vehicle for international exchange after World War II, facilitating the sharing of soundscape and landscape design ideas between America and the Netherlands. In the 1950s, the people of the Netherlands donated a carillon to the United States as a sounding symbol of political harmony between the two allies. However, the resulting political squabbles and the disharmony and decay of its bells tolled the ineffectiveness of this instrument of diplomacy. In the following decade, Philips Electronics took inspiration from suburban American corporate research parks to construct a techno-cultural complex in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This International Style park used the Dutch carillon’s sonic and visual symbolism to re-center the perceived core of Eindhoven and of civic authority onto Philips’ campus. An important part of the broader history of postwar expansion and the military-industrial complex are the science-fiction, mystery, and filmic spinoffs and sonic imaginaries associated with these reinvented carillons and organs, and the way such narratives cross the boundaries between high art and popular culture. The institutions and donors that built carillons often justified them with utopian rhetoric about creating community, public music, and elevating general musical taste. However, a vein of dystopian fiction about bells in literature, opera, film, and television counterbalanced that discourse. The realm of fiction ties together this dissertation’s overarching themes of historical revival, technological innovation, modernism, and military electronics research.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 72, No. 1, 2019
Gabriel García Márquez's literary portrait of the arrival of the pianola in Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude functions as a metaphor for the reception and cultural legitimization of player pianos in Latin America during their heyday in the 1910s and 1920s. As a technological intruder, the player piano inhabited a liminal space between the manual and the mechanical as well as between unmediated musical experiences and the mechanically mediated consumption of sounds. It thus constitutes a paradigmatic case by which to examine the contingent construction of ideas about tradition and modernity. The international trade in player pianos between the United States and Latin America during the first decades of the twentieth century was developed in tandem with the commercial expansion and political interventionism of the United States throughout the Americas during the same period. The efforts of North American businessmen to capture the Latin American market and the establishment of marketing networks between US companies and Latin American dealers reveal a complex interplay of mutual stereotyping, First World War commercial geopolitics, capitalization on European cultural/musical referents, and multiple strategies of appropriation and reconfiguration in relation to the player piano's technological and aesthetic potential. The reception of player pianos in Latin America was characterized by anxieties very similar to those of US consumers, particularly with regard to the acousmatic nature of their sounds and their perceived uncanniness. The cultural legitimization of the instrument in the region depended, however, on its adaptation to local discourses, cultural practices, soundscapes, expectations, language, gender constructions, and especially repertoires.
"Clearing the Bench: Absolute Music and The Player Piano" [MTSE 2018]
The player piano reneges on one of the basic promises of musical performance: the fallible performer. As such, it represents one particularly vexing step on music's path from an exclusively human and a-mechanical endeavor, to a mechanically recorded, stored, and mediated experience. The player piano promises a new kind of absolute music to its listener, free from a performer's personal, affective influence or error, but the achievement of absolute music remains elusive even in its mechanical execution. In 1854 Eduard Hanslick discusses absolute music as music that speaks only through sound; the performer " coaxes the electric spark out of its obscure secret place and flashes it across to the listener " to animate the work (1986, 49). But the absolute offered by mechanical music — a performance unfettered by the live performer — uncovers a new and previously unimagined aesthetic space, a space free of physical and expressive human limitations. Mechanical music reshapes the definition of absolute music by allowing composers to explore music without the pianist-as-mediator influencing the musical product. In this paper I will show how the player piano revises standard definitions of absolute music — music about music, defined by Ashby (2010), Bonds (2014), Dahlhaus (1995), Goehr (1992), and others — by suggesting a performance without the present, laboring body and fallible emotive interpretation of a human pianist. Rather than seeking clarity, the proposed paper sheds light on one problem within the discourse on absolute music: its shifting status after the advent of mechanical reproduction. I support my discussion with brief analyses of original works for player piano, each representing a different stage of the player piano's rise, peak, and fall: 1) Igor Stravinsky's Étude pour Pianola (1917), 2) Alfredo Casella's Trois Pièces pour Pianola (1921) and Paul