The player piano substituted technology for skill with unexampled boldness and ubiquity. Automata built in the late eighteenth century had executed drawings, and had even appeared to play chess, but they had been precious playthings. Player pianos were affordable and widely available. Small motors replaced foot pedals as sources of air pressure. By 1910, a second generation of “reproducing” pianos appeared, using a system developed by the German firm Welte to record the subtleties of performance. Nearly every celebrated pianist of the time was recorded with this system. By 1926, one maker was even able to capture the speed with which hammers hit the strings, making such accurate and complete data recordings that—when converted for playback on today’s CD-controlled pianos—they produce uncannily vivid musical performances with no trace of the original roll’s honky-tonk effect. Pianists were even able to edit master recordings to correct their false notes.20
High-quality recorded music led to bitter controversies over copyright laws, much like present-day litigation over shared MP3 files, but disputes went beyond intellectual property issues. Composers, performers, and critics wrangled over the consequences of the new devices for the study and use of the piano. Did technology threaten musicianship or promise to enhance it? Foreshadowing some of the points later made by Walter Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt school, the bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa wrote a widely reprinted article, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” Player pianos and phonographs, he warned, were about to “reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things,” diminishing music by soulless uniformity Cultural technophiles among music critics and teachers countered that what detractors scorned as “canned music” was welcome competition for inferior live performances. Not only would musical reproduction elevate tastes, they believed, but the player piano would aid teaching. Musical notation could be printed on the rolls themselves, though it seldom was in practice. Speed could be adjusted to help students learn complex pieces gradually; between the wars some celebrated performers, including Fats Waller, learned this way21
The player piano was ultimately undone by its own logic. Early phonographs, primitive by present standards, sounded surprisingly real to people overwhelmed by the medium’s novelty. A good phonograph was only a quarter of the price of a satisfactory piano. Radio broadcasting offered classical as well as popular music. Automobiles and cinema absorbed increasing middle-class time and money. Piano lessons were no longer universal. By the mid-1920s, critics were predicting that pianos would soon become anachronisms like horse-drawn carriages, or antiquarian curiosities like harpsichords and viols. Their pessimism was unwarranted, for the industry revived after the Depression and World War II. By 1980, the United States was again making 248,000 pianos annually and Japan was producing 392,000. The piano had lost its privileged place in middle-class life but had confounded the pessimists who feared the disappearance of musical skills. Recorded and broadcast music did not help the keyboard, but neither did they kill it. For better or worse, they changed it.22
While piano lessons are no longer a middle-class rite of passage, keyboard skills have flourished. Today’s young pianists have the most proficient technique ever, in part as an unintended consequence of the rise of high-fidelity recording. Sound engineers splice retakes of flawed passages into an artist’s work undetectably much as producers and artists doctored the old player rolls. The bright sound of CDs and most high-fidelity equipment, many believe, has also conditioned both audiences and performers. Today’s listeners expect perfect play, and students demand more of themselves. André Borocz, founder of the Menton Music Festival in southern France and a half-century veteran of classical performance, told the writer Rudolf Chelminski that between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “technique has been projected to a previously unheard-of perfection.” Yet many critics also sense that something has been lost; Borocz continued that he “would pardon any number of bad notes to hear a little emotion.” The near flawlessness of recorded music has worked against the emergence of idiosyncratic but passionate figures like Glenn Gould, whose imperfections were part of his fascination. Servitude to the mechanics of the piano keyboard is now a voluntary discipline, but it can be demanding beyond the dreams of the nineteenth-century drillmasters.23
TOWARD A NEW KEYBOARD?
Between the extremes of relentless practice and passive consumption, a handful of visionary musician-inventors sought a third course. Why not take the protests of young piano students, and the increased medical complaints of professionals, more seriously? The word ergonomics was not coined until after 1945, but these critics acknowledged the deficiencies of the familiar interface. It was generally impractical to build smaller pianos for instructing children; but full-size keys and octave spans could be a painful stretch for little fingers. Even mature, expert performers found the black keys awkward when music was written in keys using many of them. The skips, arpeggios, and glissandos of nineteenth-century music could also require challenging manual gymnastics. Transposition into a different key could be a nightmare. The compass of the piano had grown to eighty-eight keys, a challenging stretch. Since the piano was a machine, why not make it more comfortable and convenient to play?
The mildest change was an adjustment for transposition. In early-nineteenth-century instruments in which strings were still parallel to the keyboard, keys, hammers, and all could be moved away from or back toward the artist, so that the same performance struck a different set of strings. Or the keyboard could shift laterally. The popular composer Irving Berlin used such a transposing piano from Weser Brothers, now in the Smithsonian Institution. Less elegantly, a false keyboard could be mounted above the real one, so that each key mapped to another. Other innovators as early as 1780 devised organlike keyboards that curved to better fit the musician’s reach. A handful of production instruments were built in mid-century by firms in Vienna and Paris. Around 1870, the illustrious house of Bechstein sold a keyboard with a curved arc for each arm; it was surprisingly awkward to play, and it failed. Finally, an Australian-born inventor, Ferdinand Clutsam, apparently not a pianist, patented the first widely admired concave keyboard in 1907. It was taken seriously enough to be fitted to a Bösendorfer grand, one of the finest pianos. In 1908, Ibach, a German firm, invited artists to play and comment on a prototype in its Berlin showroom. Two future stars were initially impressed: amid lively applause Ernst von Dohnányi told his friend Rudolph Ganz that he had played the first Chopin étude faster and better than he ever could on a conventional keyboard. Dohnányi and Ganz both used such instruments for concerts the following year.24
The problems of the Clutsam keyboard were social, not mechanical or aesthetic, and they reveal much about technology and technique. The Clutsam was, Ganz recalled “agreeable and easy,” yet on a concert tour even a major company like Ibach could not guarantee it would always be available. Switching keyboard styles from one concert or practice session to the next was disorienting. There was also a legal problem: contracts between inventors and manufacturers, and between the makers and leading artists, were a quagmire and international licensing efforts fell apart, Ganz recalled later.25
The technology of the piano was bound up with the skills of elite artists. Even when, as individuals, they endorsed change, it was impossible to distribute an innovation rapidly to every concert hall—and gradual acceptance proved worse than none at all. But what about radical new keyboard configurations appealing to the amateur: not just a new curvature but a different size and arrangement of keys? The Jankó keyboard, a second fin-de-siècle device with an even more impressive lineage, met the same fate.
Paul von Jankó (1856–1919) was a member of the minor Hungarian nobility with impeccable academic credentials including engineering, mathematics, and music courses in Vienna and Berlin. His teachers included Anton Bruckner and Hermann von Helmholtz, and his theoretical work on temperaments of more than twelve tones is still
highly regarded today. He was not the first to address the problems of raised keys; previous experimental keyboards had lowered the black keys almost to the level of the white, or equalized all the keys. Jankó’s innovation in 1882 was not only to use uniform keys narrower and shallower than conventional white keys and with rounded profiles, but to arrange them in two staggered tiers of whole tones:
Paul von Jankó, a mathematically and scientifically trained Hungarian musician, believed his keyboard would benefit pianists from beginner to virtuoso. Some leading manufacturers offered it, a few artists expressed interest, and a school devoted to his invention opened in New York. But most pianists and critics prevailed with their belief that it took the edge off performance by making challenging passages too easy.
The Jankó keyboard looked forbiddingly complex but actually simplified playing. The octave was six keys wide, relatively easy for a child or any person with a small hand; people with normal and large hands have a correspondingly greater reach with the Jankó arrangement. It was also easier to play arpeggios, glissandos, and other complex passages, especially with the addition of banks of keys identical to the home rows above and below them, which the piano historian Edwin M. Good has compared to seats in a balcony. Three touch pieces (gently rounded playing surfaces) were mounted in different locations on the same key26
The greatest advantage of the Jankó arrangement was that any composition in a major key could be played in another major key merely by shifting the hands, without the mechanics of other transposing keyboards. There was also the option of reaching either upward or downward to play the same adjacent note. Many experts extolled the keyboard. It was not only easier for beginners and amateurs but permitted new music with otherwise unplayable chords and arpeggios. Its only real problem for the performer, common to other designs with uniform key sizes, was tactile and visual confusion. The hands can navigate a conventional keyboard just by following the familiar layout of black and white keys. The Jankó keyboard needs more complex cues.27
At first, Jankó made striking progress. Leading newspapers reviewed his London and New York demonstration recitals respectfully. Piano companies in Europe and the United States began to sell production models in the early 1890s. A conservatory in Berlin gave courses in the Jankó piano, and the inventor’s teacher, Hans Schmitt, published études especially for it. Several prominent European pianists adopted it, and Liszt expressed interest. Enthusiasts formed a Jankó Association in Berlin. In 1891 a leading industry journal, the Musical Courier, serialized a long technical exposition of the keyboard’s advantages. Few inventions in the arts have been so acclaimed shortly after introduction.28
Slowly Jankó’s celebrity faded. There were technical problems. While his original design had a stiff action, especially when keys in the upper banks, with less leverage, were struck, another inventor improved it. Evaluating the modified action in 1911, the inventor, manufacturer, and historian Alfred Dolge called it “epoch-making.” But Dolge had to acknowledge the resistance of most pianists, teachers, and music publishers. Jankó’s innovation posed the same difficulty as the Clutsam keyboard: few performers could take their pianos on tour, and many provincial concert halls had no access to innovative instruments. Jankó’s real predicament was deeper. He had invented an interface that, according to many musical authorities, worked too well.29
In sports, as we saw in Chapter One, sheer performance usually wins disputes over style, as the crawl, the safety bicycle, and the reactive resin bowling ball illustrate. But music is not just a proficiency contest. Turn-of-the-century music critics, like many today, deplored the rise of purely technical skill at the expense of musical intelligence and expressiveness. As one skeptic, Constantin Sternberg, wrote in the Musical Courier in 1891, “‘No! no more technique; sense, meaning, feeling!’” was “the cry of the masses, of the music lovers, and even of those pianists who happen to be at the same time musicians.” The Jankó keyboard seemed to foster the professionals’ empty showiness and the amateurs’ false brilliance. More recently, Edwin M. Good has noted a more subtle flaw in the design. Nineteenth-century composers had written for the standard keyboard. Their challenging passages, demanding manual acrobatics, intimidated piano students. But there was a positive side to their difficulties. The tension and struggle of the pianist to control the instrument and hit all the right notes contributed to the excitement of concert and serious amateur performance. The music was not only hard, it was supposed to be hard. To remove the tension by making playing easier and more natural was to break the music’s spell. Perhaps a great composer could have shown the hidden expressive possibilities of the keyboard without falling into the flashy virtuosity critics were condemning. None appears to have tried.30
The Jankó movement thus lost almost all its cadre of manufacturers, publishers, performers, and teachers by the 1920s, leaving only a few instruments in the leading museum collections of Europe and North America. Dolge reproduces a carte de visite photograph of Paul von Jankó, by 1911 a section chief in the Turkish state tobacco monopoly in Constantinople—no doubt a comfortable position but hardly the dream career of the young polymath he had been in the 1880s. He wears a round astrakhan cap and a coat with an astrakhan collar, matched in texture by an expansive mustache and neatly trimmed beard. His sad eyes look away into the distance. His disappointment underscores the power of established skills in the face of innovation. His nemesis probably was not just the resistance of professional musicians to new fingerings. It was the foundation of the Western piano repertory in the very shortcomings of the traditional keyboard. And if Jankó’s admirers protested that exceptionally challenging, unheard-of new music could now be written for the new keyboard, the rejoinder was obvious. The amateurs would have as much agony with the new post-Jankó material as they did with the standard keyboard and the old repertory To beginner or professional, a technology is meaningful only in its effect on a body of techniques.31
No keyboard innovation since Jankó’s has come as close to commercial success. Hopeful amateurs still have not given up. One of England’s leading orthopedic surgeons, Graham Apley proposed a new arrangement in 1991, in which black and white keys alternated and each major scale began either with one or with the other. The next year, Henri Carcelle won France’s leading prize of its kind, the Lepine Inventions Contest, with a similar keyboard alternating short and long keys, linked to a new notation system that presented scores vertically rather than horizontally. Yet these inventors faced the same roadblock as Jankó; the doubt that any advantages of innovation could justify the agony of reeducation.32
TECHNOLOGY PRESERVES THE KEYBOARD
Curiously, new music has not seriously challenged the conventional keyboard; if anything, it has unexpectedly extended its life. Just as the acoustic piano was going through its mid-century troubles, new generations of electric instruments were emerging, some emulating pianos and organs, others expressing new sounds. If there was ever a time for a radically new interface, for a physical device that would make a clean break from the past, it was the dawn of the electric age, the late nineteenth century. Succeeding decades saw the prime of artistic iconoclasm, the ferment of movements from futurism to surrealism. Yet none of these changes seriously challenged the familiar arrangement of keys.
The piano keyboard dominated the first years of electronic music. When the American inventor Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell’s unsuccessful rival for priority in the invention of the telephone, introduced a “musical telegraph” in 1876, he activated his row of oscillators (really buzzers) with piano-style controls. The English physicist William Du Bois Duddell discovered how to make the carbon-arc lamps of the day produce tones—controlled by the familiar device. The most majestic electronic instrument ever, Thomas Cahill’s Telharmonium, had 145 customized dynamos generating currents of different audio frequencies that were picked up by acoustic horns attached to telephone receivers. It was sixty feet long, weighed two hundred tons, and needed to be housed on the ground floo
r of its own building. And it used keyboards, too, though these were specially constructed with thirty-six rather than twelve notes per octave and not many musicians cared to retrain for it. (Lee de Forest, inventor of the triode tube and of the method of amplification used even in today’s radio and television, built an Audion piano of his own with a conventional keyboard but was not a serious musical experimenter.)
In the early days of electronic music there were great hopes for new styles of performance that could bring out the striking sounds of the new instruments instead of emulating acoustic pianos and organs. The most famous (and mysterious) pioneer of this trend was Leon Theremin, the first inventor to observe that the earliest triode tubes—the basis of modern electronics and broadcasting—could be controlled by the human body’s storage of electrical charges. Working for the Russian military during World War I, he found that the natural capacitance of a person approaching an electrical circuit could affect it and emit a signal, making it a sentinel or, as he called it, “radio watchman.” The musician’s body became part of the machine, absorbing and releasing energy wirelessly High-frequency oscillators using de Forest’s tube design turned out to be highly sensitive to capacitances of the body. By changing the position of the hand with respect to the antenna, the operator could produce a continuously rising or falling tone. This was the first instrument played without physical contact—or rather, almost without it. Initially, a foot pedal controlled volume and a switch in the left hand helped separate notes. To make operation more dramatically touch-free, Theremin added a second antenna, controlled by motions of the left hand.33
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