
Prelude #3 – Jun 19, 2021 Papers by: J. Dyer, S. Kucinskas, C. Koehnken, etc.
These were the presentations and topics of the Prelude #3:
Julian Dyer (Wokingham) Aeolian’s Roll Production in London, Including Its 1920s–30s Dance and Popular Music
Darius Kucinskas (Kaunas) Ethnic Piano Rolls. A General Overview
Camilla Koehnken (Ghent)/Peter Phillips (Sydney) Josef Weiss’s Recording of the Liszt b minor Sonata. Aspects of Performance Practice and the Technique of Duca Rolls Presentations & Listening Session
Topics of this Prelude had been:
Julian Dyer (Wokingham)
Aeolian’s Roll Production in London, Including Its 1920s–30s Dance and Popular Music
This presentation is based on research for my new catalogue of Meloto dance rolls, shortly to be published by the Player Piano Group. It covers Aeolian’s ‘popular’ music rolls of the 1920s and 1930s made at their London roll factory – dance music from 1925 to 1939, and popular music following the 1932 sale of the business to local ownership. I’ll touch on the evolution of metrically- arranged “hand-played” rolls for dancing, the complex sharing of musical material between Aeolian’s many brand names and associated companies in both the UK and USA, and some of the history that lay behind this.
Aeolian issued popular music right from the start of rolls in 1897, created directly from published sheet music. Like many companies they introduced hand-played rolls in 1913 – initially purely hand-played but progressively made ‘tidier’ following the dance craze of 1916. By about 1919 the rolls were wholly metrical although based to an extent on hand-played originals, frequently augmented with detail that only a machine could play – a brand-new art-form for a new digital age.
Darius Kucinskas (Kaunas)
Ethnic Piano Rolls. A General Overview
This presentation aims to explore the conception of ethnic piano rolls and to answer some basic questions: what is meant by “ethnic” piano rolls; what rolls might fall into this category; when, where and who published these rolls; what kind of music was punched on these rolls; where we can find collections of these rolls; and who is doing research on it. This work is to be published in the forthcoming book Ethnic piano rolls in the United States, by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Camilla Koehnken (Ghent)/Peter Phillips (Sydney)
Josef Weiss’s Recording of the Liszt b minor Sonata. Aspects of Performance Practice and the Technique of Duca Rolls Presentations & Listening Session
Three pupils of Franz Liszt made recordings of his iconic Sonata in b minor. While the recordings by Eugen d’Albert (Welte-Mignon) and Arthur Friedheim (Hupfeld) are available on CDs and online, a third recording by the lesser known Josef Weiss (for the Philipps Duca reproducing piano) has long been considered lost. Copies of the rolls, however, did survive and were digitized. Camilla Köhnken analyzed the recording as part of her PhD thesis and revealed hitherto unknown aspects of performance practice in the Liszt tradition. Peter Phillips has studied the technical aspects of Duca reproducing rolls and developed an emulator for the expressions system. For the first time ever, the Weiss recording can now be appreciated according to its full potential.