Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Musical Industry

By Brian Dolan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0742564619, $39.95. 264 pages.

Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin

Player pianos are nothing if not antique. The ghostly specter of ebony and ivory keys pressing themselves without a human hand is a spectacle, a novelty, a show that occurs in someone else’s parents’ or grandparents’ living room. And the music of these mechanized marvels: old-fashioned “classics” from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to the ragtime of Scott Joplin and virtuosic stride piano of James P. Johnson. Everything about these mechanical beasts screams, or rather delicately performs, “dated,” from the sounds they produce to the paper rolls that convey musical information into their mechanical organs. In the age of MIDI, iTunes, and digital streaming, the player piano just seems little more than semi-hip anachronism. I recently came by not one but two used player pianos for sale in the Austin area in two days, both for over $2000, not exactly cheap kitsch. So one then feels compelled to ask, why pay for such a piece as a player piano? Why invest in an outdated mechanism that plays old-school music with little to no hope of ever updating its repertoire?

The answers to those questions are the driving force of Brian Dolan’s Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Musical Industry. The book is an absolutely delightful read that chronicles the author’s travels in the West-coast world of player piano connoisseurs, collectors, aficionados, fans, museums of mechanical instruments, and sepia-toned memories as much as it illuminates the history of the invention. From the outset Dolan is clear about his fascination and love for this turn-of-the-century invention in both its original and modern forms. He writes with all of the fascination of a man in a museum filled with previously unseen masterpieces by his favorite artist. The book does an incredible job of performing the player piano: humanizing the mechanical and showing the human hands that toiled to make the instrument what is was, a short-lived but highly influential phenomenon of the early twentieth century. Given the rapid rise and demise of the player piano – its dominance existed for a few decades – one might think of it as the first creation and casualty of the fickle and fast-moving music industry.

Much of the book gracefully oscillates between an ethnography of modern player piano culture, which roves through the houses of collectors, museums, and the National Association of Music Merchants convention, and a history of the growth, development, and demise of the industry. The descriptions and narratives are spotted with colorful figures, visionaries, and the myriad musicians, such as legendary stride pianists James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake, virtuoso Rachmaninoff, and composers Stravinsky and Gershwin, who were part of player piano culture as well as shaping greater international musical development. In particular, Dolan illuminates the life of a relatively unknown hero, a man named J. Lawrence Cook, whose deft fingers and artistic input provided much of the ragtime, stride, blues, and jazz piano rolls made throughout the history of the player piano. A man with a sadly tragic upbringing, Cook was a talented pianist who saw the player piano as the wave of the future. His career moved from cutting and independently selling home-made piano rolls, to recording rolls, including one top-20 hit, to supervising sessions with piano giants “Fats” Waller and James P. Johnson, among others. Cook is responsible for bringing high-quality, artistically-rendered performances of African-American music to the ear of countless Americans who would not have heard it otherwise. Dolan begins the book with the touching story of Cook’s granddaughter “hearing” her grandfather for the first time since his death—she had no idea that he recorded piano rolls—and includes a sensitive biographical chapter about Cook’s upbringing and his contributions to the player piano.

When not telling the history of the industry or the stories of those who made the industry, Dolan turns his attention to some of the meta-questions lingering over the player piano. One of the most interesting concerns the legacy of the invention, not as machinery, but its social impact on U.S. society. The player piano changed the very ideas of performance and reproduction in ways that have resonances today. In a nation emerging from the nineteenth century with a burgeoning middle class, the player piano was marketed as home entertainment that did not require extensive training (as was commonly expected of middle-class women at the time). One could simply pump a foot pedal and be regaled by the classics which were unattainable by most. Yet this was still considered “performing,” as the gramophone had yet to take hold and the amplified radio was still decades away. One who operated the player piano was still considered to be performing and playing the classics to such an extent that instructions, as well as pertinent historical information, was printed on the rolls for the performer. Player pianos also served to teach young performers, such as Duke Ellington, to play music that they might not have encountered otherwise. In these ways, the social impact of this now kitschy technology does deserve to be taken as seriously, and humorously, as Dolan does.

While this book may seem from the outset to be a niche book, it is much more than just a quirky book about a side-line slice of Americana. For one, it is an excellent model of a combination of research, ethnography, biography, and theory. It artfully jumps genres, is a consistently smooth read, and presents thoughtful theoretical queries about the history of technology and socio-auditory culture without getting bogged down. For another, it opens the doors to queries about the auditory culture of the early twentieth century and the first age of mass production of music. Finally, it brings to the surface questions about the first attempts to musically humanize a machine and to mechanize humans, as the standardization of the player piano may be responsible for our aesthetics of perfection and reproducibility in music. As we enter the new millennium with the promise and fear of artificial intelligence over the horizon, and music constantly a click away, it is worth contemplating the magic of the player piano and the reproduction of human-ness.