The Pianolist

The Pianolist is a book by Gustav Kobbé, the American music critic and writer who lived from 1857 to 1918, published in 1907. The book is a guide to the player piano or pianola, the mechanical piano that played music from perforated paper rolls and that was enormously popular in American homes during the early decades of the twentieth century before the rise of the phonograph and the radio displaced it as the primary form of mechanical home musical reproduction.

The player piano had become a major presence in American middle class homes during the years around 1900, and substantial industries had developed around the manufacture of the instruments themselves and around the production of the music rolls that supplied them with repertoire. Kobbé’s book was aimed at the substantial audience of player piano owners who wanted to make the most of their instruments and who needed guidance on the available repertoire, on the techniques for operating the mechanism with expressive control, and on the broader cultural questions about the place of mechanical music in serious musical life.

The book covers the standard topics that a guide of this kind would address. There are chapters on the history and mechanical principles of the player piano, on the major manufacturers and the differences between their instruments, on the available rolls and the way to select repertoire suitable for particular settings, on the techniques for using the various expressive controls that the better player pianos provided, and on the wider questions about how mechanical reproduction of music related to live performance and to musical understanding more generally.

Kobbé approached the player piano with the seriousness of a working music critic. He took the instrument seriously as a means of making serious musical repertoire available to homes that could not otherwise have heard it performed by skilled pianists, and he was generally optimistic about the cultural value of the new technology. He was also realistic about the limitations of the mechanism and about the differences between mechanical playback and live performance by a skilled musician.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of American musical culture and to enthusiasts of the player piano as a historical instrument. It pairs naturally with Kobbé’s other music books.