The Effects of the Player Piano on Music Culture

Abstract

Once upon a time, ordinary people made music for themselves. With the advent of the phonograph, they stopped making music and started buying it. Thus began the story of the commodification of music. The processes by which music is viewed as a commodity became even more evident when new music production technologies emerged. The player piano, in its numerous forms, is both an important component of early twentieth-century musical culture and an important link in a centuries-long chain of technological evolution. Although it fell out of widespread use after 1930, the player piano remained one of the most important technological innovations of the twentieth century. The player piano, in its various forms, has provoked debates about the nature of music, performance, and the ethical status of technology, and is widely misunderstood in terms of both its cultural and technological functioning. The aesthetics of "automated music" range from J.S. Bach, through Conlon Nancarrow and Georgy Ligeti, to developments in electronic popular music and art music.

The player piano has served a variety of cultural purposes, from the immortalisation of great pianists to domestic entertainment and experiments in modernism such as "mechanical music". The history of automatic instruments is also important for how it relates the history of music to a widespread phenomenon of mechanisation. This study will examine the development of player pianos in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the first mass-produced technology that enabled music to be made by individuals with no musical training or experience.