Player piano evening on 3

[ardcarp]

What an original idea for a programme...and what a fantastic evening's entertainment.
Expert pianolist Rex Lawson played and talked, giving some rare insights into performing styles from the past on a reproducing piano. And the BBC Singers did what they are best at...doing new and somewhat challenging work; here, Gabriel Jackson's Airplane Cantata. How clever of him to write idiomatically for the player piano, and how clever of them all to keep together.

Maybe the Brahms Liebeslieder were the least successful (a) because however good the pianolist, you just can't get the subtle accompaniment of real players and (b) the BBC Singers' sopranos seemd incapable of singing above an F without shrieking.

I don't think these live concerts are available on i-player. Shame if so.

[Flosshilde]

Agreed, Ardcarp - in fact I was about to start a thread when I spotted yours.

I enjoyed the Nancarrow especially - I've always thought of his player piano music as being impossibly fast, so it was good to hear a slower piece. I must look out for a CD.

[MrGongGong]

Shame I missed this
Rex Lawson is a real character
no i-player then ?

[mercia]

so a 'live' choir was accompanied by a pianola? not sure I understand how that would work

[ardcarp]

I enjoyed the Nancarrow especially

Me too...but I would have liked one of his impossibly fast pieces too.

so a 'live' choir was accompanied by a pianola?

Yep. Rex Lawson can go faster and slower, louder and softer...up to a point.

[Flosshilde]

I hadn't spotted that the live concerts aren't available on i-player. Were the evening concerts in the recorded form available? If so, I wonder why the live ones aren't?

It's rather annoying as I'd like to have heard Rex - I assumed it would be available on i-player, so got on with some chores.

[french frank]

I don't think these live concerts are available on i-player. Shame if so.

It is marked COMING SOON.

[Bryn]

I attended the first part of the concert and very much enjoyed Rex Lawson's contributions (somewhat less so those of the BBC Singers). With the second part appearing a little less enticing to me, and being in need of sleep before work tomorrow, I took my leave and just made the nominally 20.35 Greenline (which, fortunately, was a few minutes late). I've not checked yet but let's hope the on demand iPlayer offering is in HD Sound.

[Bryn]

It is marked COMING SOON.

It is now shown as available for 7 days, but is in that haitus between BBC claim and reality. Give it half an hour of so.

Ah, now playing, and in HD Sound (320kbps AAC-LC) too.

[doversoul1]

Gabriel Jackson's Airplane Cantata.
Is this ‘our’ Gabriel Jackson?

I think Catherine Bott is very good at presenting these slightly quirky (but highly musical) concerts. It was most enjoyable.

[ed.] I’ve just spotted ardcarp’s post on The Choir Board.

[pianolist]

French Frank is quite right in thinking that I hadn't seen this thread, so thank you for the pointer from Gabriel's topic!

I think, and I do want to be suitably modest in all this (!), that I ought to be on hand to explain things. None of us gets much opportunity to listen to pianola concerts on Radio 3, and certainly not in chamber or choral music. I am unbelievably grateful to Michael Emery, producer of the BBC Singers, for the opportunity, and of course to Gabriel for his quite wonderful music.

I think I saw a comment that I can control the speed of rolls to a limited degree. Well, essentially, any pianola player has the opportunity to vary the speed instantaneously, from a complete halt to an unmusical gallop. Pneumatic roll motors, which turn the take-up spool during playing, have very little mass, so it isn't like some old, heavy electric motor which takes time to get up to speed. As I write this, there are still some days left on iPlayer, which is brilliant, because it means I can explain some of the detail which you can't put into words in the concert hall, while the music is still up there to be listened to.

One is not so much controlling as creating the speed, and it's the same with dynamics. If you get the chance, listen to the two Rachmaninov Preludes, because I can give you a more detailed explanation of the sorts of rolls and what you can do with them. The first one I played, no. 6 in Eb, was an early and very simple 65-note roll. I chose it deliberately because I wanted to deal with one of the simplest roll types, as a way of showing what can be done with rubato. Unlike the roll of the other Prelude, it gives you no helping hand towards bringing out melodies or accents, though the Pianola's subduing levers allow you to subdue one or the other half of the mechanism, split between E and F above middle C, and you can hear that if you compare the two Preludes, even though I did the best I could. But you certainly ought to be able to hear the flexibility of phrasing. In case there is any doubt, all the rolls I played during the concert were of the non-recorded variety, meaning that they were transcribed from the score by musical editors who drew pencil lines on blank master rolls, after which factory workers used hammers and punches to perforate the notes. There is no deviation from a completely metronomic rigidity of tempo on the roll itself. I played a few bars at the beginning of the first Prelude, loudly, and, more importantly, without any movement of the tempo lever. I don't relish doing that, because it risks turning a musical instrument that I love into a circus act, but I can see that it is necessary as a guide.

The second Prelude, no. 4 in D, was the second piece on a double roll, which is why Catherine Bott had to cover, since my concert pianola has no fast forward, so I have to pull the roll through by hand. That Prelude is on a Themodized roll, meaning that there are perforations looking like ditto marks at the edges of the roll, positioned synchronously with any melodic notes which the original roll editor has deemed are worthy of emphasis. That doesn't mean that those notes play more loudly in any automatic way, but it simply allows you to subdue both treble and bass, secure in the knowledge that the relevant notes will instantaneously be returned to the dynamic level you are creating with your feet at that moment. You can always accent with your feet without such devices, but their real value is in allowing you to create accents without affecting adjacent notes.

I don't want to flood this thread, especially not as a new member of the Forum, so I'll leave any talk of Airplane Cantata and the other works for now, and simply allow you to digest this bit. I mentioned that there are some pretty awful examples of player pianos on the internet, and a short series that will show you exactly what I mean can be found here. There are three videos in the set - I shan't provide links to all of them, but they should come up automatically amongst YouTube's other suggestions.

[ardcarp]

Am I right in thinking, Pianolist, that player pianos work on suck rather than blow? Someone mentioned that the 'bellows' are actually extractors, and the little pneumatic motors are exhaust pneumatic...just as in some pipe organ actions.

[Alf-Prufrock]

Thank you, Mr. Lawson, for this explanation, which knocked on the head a lot of mindless expectations on my part. The procedure is not gross and mechanical, as I had thought, but artistic and subtle. I am most grateful to read this and will investigate the internet references you give.

[pianolist]

Pianolas work on suction, by and large. There were some automatic player pianos that were run on electricity, even a hundred years ago, but they were the exception. Many of the people who worked in the player industry came from the organ-building field, or alternated between the two, which led to some woolly use of English. One actually operates exhausters with one's feet, though they often got called feeders, and similarly the equalizer, which is where the output from the two exhausters is combined, was sometimes known as the reserve. It's also not quite right to talk of vacuum, or at least not in an absolute sense. A total vacuum would destroy any pianola post-haste!

Anyone looking for a reliable upright ought to consider a pianola, in my view. Nowadays they are frequently failing to sell for 99p on Ebay. You might have to work on them, but they were generally installed into good-quality pianos, because the manufacturers knew that they would be well used. I bought a Steck 7-foot ex-player grand on Ebay last year for £82. Now I know what I'm looking at, of course, and the lid had been scratched with names and initials by the nasty little oiks at the school where it lived, so it looked bad in the photos. But it was only in the polish, and the piano itself is absolutely gorgeous. If it had not been an ex-player, and if it had displayed the magic name, "Steinway," on its fall, I'm sure it would have gone a long way into four figures at the Conway Hall piano auctions. Obviously you need to look carefully at anything you are thinking of buying, to make sure it isn't full of woodworm or splits, but pianolas are certainly an undervalued instrument.

One other snippet of information is that the BBC's history is replete with pianolas. They were used for the earliest test transmissions, before even the BBC(ompany) was set up, and at Savoy Hill they provided interval music, in the same way that the continuity announcer would enlist CDs nowadays. One of the BBC's first expert music balance engineers, Harry Ellingham, was originally a player piano expert. He organised the "Piano-Player Review" in 1912, wrote a book entitled "How to Use a Player-Piano," and in 1938 contributed a series of articles to the Musical Times on "Wireless Transmission of Music." I made a pdf file of the last-named recently, which might interest some readers. I've uploaded it here.