Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
MEW
THE
VOL. LXX1II. No. 4
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman BUI, Inc., at 373 4th Ave., New York.
July 23, 1921
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What Is a Reproducing Piano?
F
OR nearly ten years the music industries of this country have had before them that particular develop-
ment of pneumatic science which aims to reproduce the playing of an artist in all its details. There has
come into the market first one and then another highly perfected and wonderfully ingenious instrument.
There has been a great deal of very excellent publicity, and the results, musically and otherwise, have
been actually marvelous. Yet a situation has now arisen which bids fair to destroy much of the value that has
become attached to the work of the great manufacturing companies whose energy, genius and money have gone
into this highest development of the player art.
By common consent the name "reproducing piano" has become attached to these instruments of which
we are speaking: to pianos, that is to say, which are able to give, by means of special and extraordinarily in-
genious mechanism, and in connection with special music rolls, equally ingenious, adequate representations of
the playing of specific artists. These artists identify themselves with the music rolls in which their art has
been embodied and preserved. They guarantee the authenticity of that on which their name has been placed,
and they invest the reproducing piano with a value and authority which it could not possibly obtain in any other
way.
But our trade, like other trades, is sometimes less careful than it is enthusiastic. Carelessness and
indifference are leading to a too general misuse of the term "reproducing piano." This term is to-day being-
applied carelessly and indifferently in trade circles to any kind of a player-piano which may be equipped with
automatic expression devices. It is losing its exclusive significance and is taking on a common, undistinguished,
often literally contradictory meaning.
It is perfectly true that a genius is usually an irritable person, but it is not therefore true that every irri-
table person is a genius. It is true that every reproducing piano is equipped with automatic expression devices,
but it decidedly does not follow that therefore every player-piano equipped with automatic expression devices
is a "reproducing piano."
The term "reproducing piano" may be ambiguous. Most descriptive terms of a technical nature suffer
from this defect. But it is the term that has been adopted by common consent, to describe one special, limited
and highly advanced development of the player art. In common justice, as well as in common sense, it should
be preserved inviolate.
The trade, for the sake of justice, should condemn unqualifiedly the use of the term "reproducing
piano" in connection with any instrument save one which is guaranteed to give the personally authorized and
edited translation of the playing of an artist, and to the music rolls of which are attached the names of the
men and women responsible for them in their entirety.
For the sake of its own interests the trade cannot afford to have the name value which now belongs to the
term "reproducing piano" deliberately tampered with. To do so would mean its loss of prestige and its ulti-
mate destruction.
These statements are not meant to cast reflection on any person or group of persons. Almost entirely,
we think, the inaccuracy has arisen through carelessness rather than through any desire to make a misstatement.
Men often think loosely, and their words are but reflections of their thoughts. Nevertheless, the mistake must
not be persisted in. Now is the time to correct it.
The public must be guarded against the manifest error of supposing that the term "reproducing piano"
is an elastic term. On the contrary, it is a very restricted term—a term rigidly limited in its meaning. For the
sake of all concerned, and of every interest the music industries have in preserving values, let the inaccurate use
of the term "reproducing piano" be forthwith abandoned.