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The Great Piano Roll Mystery

1962 BBC radio broadcast

a response by Artis Wodehouse February 20th, 2020

Interest in the piano roll and player pianos has never disappeared. Beginning in the1990s,
computer technology facilitated new developments in the preservation and dissemination of now
antique piano rolls. There is currently a building academic interest in these recorded
performances. The 1962 BBC radio broadcast has particular relevance to this initiative.

Questions of authenticity have haunted the field since inception due to the numerous
mechanical relays and editing interventions that piano roll technology required. This remarkable
BBC radio broadcast from 1962 featuring eyewitness piano roll industry interviewees throws
down the gauntlet regarding the ability of the high-end reproducing piano to replicate a given
artist’s performance.
Part I of the 1962 broadcast can be heard at:
https://youtu.be/GJMZUHUq7cw

00:00 Josef Lhevinne, Schulz-Evler Blue Danube on Ampico roll and phonograph disc
Much of Lhevinne’s Blue Danube roll performance on Ampico represents what the artist played
and was captured on a paper stencil. Music such as this flamboyant Blue Danube piano
transcription featuring rapid, adjacent figuration, and large dynamic sweeps is a desirable type
for rendering realistically on piano roll. What is more difficult to render in a life-like manner are
pieces that are slower, less note-laden and that demand a multitude of precise, small-scale
nuances such as the 00:44 Glinka/Balakirev roll performance of The Lark that opens the
program.

Lhevinne’s Ampico roll of the Blue Danube was released in 1927, and the phonograph disc was
released shortly thereafter, in 1928. The difference between Lhevinne’s roll and disc recording
are specifically in small variations of chord balance, dynamic range, perhaps the pedaling and
tiny details of temporal placement. The Ampico roll is impressive, but when listened to closely in
comparison to the HMV disc recording, it suffers from a less than lifelike precision and sonic
homogeneity that tips off the aware listener that it is a roll. However, the way both recordings
were captured by microphone (reverb, equalization) must be factored in because they are
deeply relevant to all the music presented on this program.

4:53 - Rudolph Ganz on Duo Art 1920s piano concerto performances with orchestra

6:42-8:52 - Overview of the player piano idiom

8:58 - 9:21 Gordon Iles. BBC was able to interview several significant operatives directly
involved either as artists or, in the cause of Gordon Iles, in the reproducing roll technology. This
documentation of process and critique has an undeniable authenticity. The Gordon Iles interview
may be the most valuable part of the program. Iles describes what is likely to have been
Aeolian’s late development in recording the artist and capturing their dynamics — in particular,
individual note velocities — in real time. To date, I have not seen in print a detailed exploration
or documentation of what Iles describes.
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As has been put forth in my knowledge of Duo Art literature on the subject, individual note
velocities such as can be captured and played back today in MIDI could not be realized as fully
in the Duo Art system.

For instance, all the notes of a block chord recorded above or below the treble/bass split point
would play at the same degree of loudness. To create a life-like chord balance, (i.e., that one
note be louder than the rest to “bring out the melody”) required that the note chosen to play
louder had to be temporally shifted forward or backward from its neighboring chord tones in
order for it to play at a higher velocity (i.e., louder). This can certainly happen in human
performance, but is not typical. In a specific human performance an idiosyncratic degree of
temporal and velocity variation frequently occurs among the individual notes of a block chord.

To deal with dynamics, Duo Art editors therefore had to code to make believable equivalents of
the artist’s performance. Also involved were practical considerations. The need for adjusting
temporal placement to facilitate small-scale velocity deviations must necessarily have involved a
degree of editing compromise in coding note velocities. A given roll also needed to be edited in
such a way that it would be playable on all reproducing pianos, for these varied in playback as
do all acoustic instruments. Thus, a Duo Art reproducing roll performance is a more or less
successfully edited reconstruction of the small-scale details of the artist’s live rendition in the
studio. This accounts for a perceived impersonality of many reproducing roll performances,
even in the case where a superior roll performance (such as Lhevinne’s) is compared to the
analogous rendition on disc.

The point is that a reproducing roll recording, even one created with great skill is not the same
as an audio recording of same — and of course, neither is equivalent to the live performance of
the artist. Lhevinne’s phonograph disc recording was captured in real time as he played on a
specific piano in a specific venue with a specific technical placement of a specific microphone.
His audio recording took place in a feedback world including the piano’s touch, the piano’s
dynamic range, and the sound of the recording studio venue. A piano roll rendition cannot match
this specificity. But for most (even well-trained) ears, the skillful depiction of Lhevinne (and later,
Ornstein and Rachmaninoff on the broadcast) on piano roll are sufficiently lifelike, authentic and
pleasing.

Iles also states that during the roll recording session, a phonograph disc recording
simultaneously captured the artist’s performance. Verified documentation that this actually
occurred as Iles describes is as yet forthcoming. It is hard to picture the bulky, complicated and
expensive phonograph disc recording apparatus to have been set up in the roll recording studio.

This is an intriguing area for followup, since many of the artists who made both piano roll and
commercial phonograph discs recorded the same selections in both mediums repeatedly.
Perhaps its possible that the roll editors may have used previously issued commercial
phonograph discs of the artist to provide a model for editing an expressive roll rendition?
Specifically, in the case of Lhevinne’s Blue Danube recording on roll and disc, it is fascinating to
know that they appear to have been captured within a year of one another. Could Aeolian have
had access to Lhevinne’s disc performance before it was commercially released?

Gordon Iles can be see onYouTube: Pianola Man (1961)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_jA1LsLCKk