[F_MINOR] the ghost in the machine??? [was"] Re: [F_MINOR] GG the ghost! Is this for real?

[Robert Merkin <bobmerk@earthlink.net>]

Last year I took my beloved website out into the backyard and shot it.
Enough already of 20 e-mails a month from college boys asking for my advice
on how they too can drive Ferraris, drink champagne, acquire satyriasis,
date gorgeous movie starlets, and live off fabulously wealthy heiresses
like the Dominicano gigolo Porfirio Rubirosa.

But this Ghost Performance by GG ... has someone perhaps resuscitated
another Welte Player Piano????

Deep in its guts you'll find a very obscure GG quote! GG was mesmerized by
the Welte!

But read the Leoncavallo quote. The Welte player piano was Spooky! The
ghost in the machine!

(I dedicated this to my brother Maury, the one in the family who had the
discipline to learn how to play a musical instrument. But I can play the
theremin!)

Hi Kate! Sorry I've been a lousy correspondent! Hi everybody! Sorry I've
been a lousy correspondent!

Bob

News, Weather & Sports from Vleeptron:
http://vleeptron.blogspot.com

=====================

A Strange, Vanished, Magic Mystery Machine ... The Welte Piano

for my brother Maury

About eight years ago, I screeched to a halt in front of one of my favorite
guilty pleasures, a summer tag sale. In my college town, you never know
whether the bounty will be forty years of Readers Digests, National
Geographics, Lawrence Welk records and old nursing textbooks, or rare
treasures. Tag sales are the last place Old Slide Rules go before they come
to my house.

The hostesses were two attractive, thoughtful-looking sisters in their mid-
to late fifties. It took only seconds to see that their father had recently
died, and they were cleaning away the material things of his long life with
bittersweet regret, but it had to be done.

Very interesting things were leaving his life and going to strangers for a
song. One item that caught my eye was a set of cassette tapes to accompany
a walk through Paris for English-speaking tourists. When I asked its price,
one of the sisters thought for a moment, and then took it back; in his last
years, when he could no longer travel, her father would often play the
tapes and transport himself back to his beloved Paris. She couldn't let it
go.

In a boxed set were three long-playing 33-1/3 phonograph records, issued in
1963, each in its original sleeve, with the promise of  few scratches and
little imbedded dust. A lot about the packaging suggested a collection of
classical music of no particular distinction -- homogenized highbrow for
the lowbrow. The kiss of death was its publisher, the Book-of- the-Month
Club, and the gaudy scroll title, "Legendary Masters of the Piano." Things
did not look promising, but I snooped further. A large 24-page booklet was
still in excellent condition, and it told a story.

It was a story I'd never heard before, about a visionary inventor from the
dawn of the 20th century, and his strange, forgotten machine, which claimed
to have captured not just perfect recordings, but the very hearts and souls
of the greatest European pianists of his day. The ballyhoo for these
records was so intense that it was hard to tell which would jump out of my
speakers, Beethoven or Barnum.

But the list of pianists was not chopped liver: Ravel, Grieg, Mahler,
Richard Strauss and many more -- all who lived, played and then died during
the phonograph's technically hopeless infancy. We should either have none
of their recordings at all, or things so assaultive to the ear as to be
historical embarrassments.

A quote from Leoncavallo (the composer of "Pagliacci") caught my eye:

"The Welte is an astounding invention. Hearing it reproduce the performance
of an artist one knows induces a kind of uncanny
feeling. This was the case when I heard it 'play' my friend (Alfred)
Grunfeld; in fact, I could almost see and hear him again, when I was having
happy times in Vienna."

The sisters were willing to let this one go. I was very lucky that day.

***********

Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. From that moment, we
begin to archive a permanent  record of the way the world sounds, just as
an archive of the way the world looks dates from the introduction of
photography in 1835. Abraham Lincoln lived between the two great inventions
of permanence. There is a rich legacy of photos of Lincoln; but not a word
of his distinctive, squeaky, high-pitched voice was ever captured. (As a
child, Carl Sandburg had heard it imitated by men who'd heard Lincoln
speak; as an old man, Sandburg liked to repeat the performance.)

The playback quality of sound recordings was ghastly and comical until the
late 1930s, when electrical microphones, recording studios and
signal-processing vacuum-tube electronics achieved a sophistication that
could record and play back with reasonable, consistent, often even
satisfying fidelity. This was the era when 16-year-old Billie Holiday was
hired to record a few dozen popular songs with a hastily assembled New York
City jazz ensemble to supply product for the newly-introduced juke box.
Between the remarkable musicians, Holiday's amazing voice and sensibility,
and a technology that no longer tormented and embarrassed artists, a magic
was pressed into steel and vinyl that still mesmerizes us sixty years later.


Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) as Radames in Aida by Giuseppe Verdi.
(Image filched from La Scala Restaurant, Mendecino, California.)

Before that, everything is an embarrassment and a collection of not much
more than squawky curiosities. The greatest victim and our greatest loss
was Enrico Caruso. The voice of a lifetime, in his prime well after the
introduction of the phonograph (which his recordings made a popular
success), but all his recordings hopelessly distorted and compressed by the
mechanical sound-collector horn, into which he and his backup orchestra had
to shout. It is a tribute to the passion of his dramatic style that
something of his magic escapes this primitive prison and torture-chamber
and touches the heart even today; like many artists to follow, he must have
quickly mastered the technology he was dealing with intimately, and taught
himself to wrestle it to a draw.

During the Age of Squawk, Hiss and Distortion, one instrument and artist
alone found a narrow escape tunnel to fidelity and clarity, bypassing the
hopeless phonograph entirely -- piano and pianist. In 1863, Fourneaux
invented the player piano.

It was certainly not an easy idea to come up with, but Fourneaux recognized
that the piano was one of the few purely digital instruments, and a crude
but impressive record/playback system might be built by looking on the
piano as a machine that did only 88 different but very similar things. By
Fourneaux' time, several digital machines had achieved great success and
sophistication to give him inspiration and even some pre-existing,
off-the-shelf  solutions. One of them, the pride of his native France, was
the Jacquard Loom, which controlled immensely complex color weaving
sequences precisely with digital holes punched (or not punched) in stacks
of punch cards. The piano roll is an adaptation of the Jacquard principle.

By the time of the birth of ragtime ("ragged time") and jazz -- musical
forms that do their magic with syncopation, odd, unexpected placements in
time of successive notes and chords -- the player piano was more than ready
for them, and we have a great, intimate and sublimely pleasing heritage of
original performances by masters like Scott Joplin and, two decades later,
George Gershwin.

    Tuesday 15 September 1896, 5:30 pm, near Waco, Texas USA.
    Scott Joplin wrote the theme song. About 30,000 people paid $2
admission.
    Two dead, dozens injured. That's red-hot locomotive boiler metal flying
through the air.
    The photographer who took this picture lost his right eye.

Fourneaux's player piano could capture the exact placement of the right
notes in time. But the analog, continuous components of piano playing were
far more difficult to capture: attack, sustain, decay and volume control,
all the nuances of foot and finger which make great piano performances. So
our heritage of Scott Joplin's rolls are only digital skeletons of his
performances. They're superb at conveying his compositional ideas (sheet
music conveys syncopation intentions very poorly compared to hearing the
composer play), but we can't even guess what his playing really sounded
like. (Much of his playing was for brothel patrons. One delightful tune,
the Crush Collision March, was commissioned for a planned public train
wreck; the tune builds in anxiety and suspense to an epic musical
catastrophe. Children love to listen to it and pretend they're the
locomotives.)

The player piano was, above all, a great commercial success. However pricey
a saloon-keeper might think it was, he knew instantly that he could skip
the salary, beer, lunch breaks and temperamental outbursts of a piano
player. Those who thought about improving the player piano knew that if it
could be done at all, the answer would be costly, and the marketplace
demand consequently unenthusiastic.

Edwin Welte was one of the few engineer-inventors who chose to ignore the
marketplace constraints and explore the pure possibilities of piano
recording and playback. As a result, he is barely a footnote in the history
of music recording. Few of his machines were built before World War I, and
almost none after. (One, built for a relative of Welte in 1928, is
apparently currently for sale for about $5,000, with a few dozen surviving
rolls.)

To the extent that circa-1900 player pianos could capture more than just
the note in time, they did so with mechanical systems that made the key and
pedal actions stiff, and distracted the artists. Welte's first breakthrough
was to use electrical systems to passively eavesdrop on key and pedal
pressures without intruding on the sensitive artist-key-pedal interface.
The keys of his recording piano not only operated the hammers, but plunged
carbon rods into a trough of mercury beneath the keyboard, so minute
changes in resistance (the rod's depth in the mercury, the key's depth) and
nuances of duration could be electrically sensed. That signal in turn could
be amplified and used to operate motorized roll cutters, which now could
record far more than just the right note at the right moment. The pedals
were connected to similar mercury sensors. The slightest finger and foot
pressures were now able to be recorded with precision. The pianist could
now ignore the recording process and just play as he or she normally did.

Welte's next problem was a human rather than an engineering one. A perfect
piano recorder needed perfect playing; he had to link his machine with the
greatest keyboard masters of his day. Schlepping the sensitive machine all
over Europe was out of the question. Instead, he lured artists to the
machine by installing his recording piano in a spaceous, beautiful,
comfortable castle on the Rhine and throwing a party for several years for
any and all of Europe's great pianists. (Musicians like parties and free
food and rent in neat castles.) The guests were encouraged to cut a roll
whenever the spirit moved them. The outlandish promise that their
performances would be preserved in perfect detail forever did not escape
them.

While the party lasted -- from 1905 to 1913 --  the ivories were tickled
by, among many others, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saens,
Gabriel Faure, Edvard Grieg, Alexander Scriabin, Gustav Mahler, Richard
Strauss, and Ignace Jan Paderewski. They played their own compositions, and
those of the dead masters, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.
These are particularly important because they captured nearly extinct
styles and schools of playing that contained vestiges of styles dating to
the very invention of the piano. In Glenn Gould's words, the Welte rolls are

"... both enormously rewarding and deeply disturbing ... because many of
these performances are hard to reconcile with the architectural notions
which our own generation prize most highly ... one is made deeply aware of
the transitory nature of interpretative ideals, and one is even led to ask
fundamental questions about the nature of stylistic concept as viewed by
the performer."

In 1914, the leaders of the most civilized, rational, cultured, scholarly
and deeply religious nations on Earth decided to annihilate each other's
populaces, Europe, and as much of the rest of the world as they could. The
terror lasted until 1918. Welte's piano party was over. After the war, the
pre-war rolls of the masters got very little play or attention on the very
few playback machines in existence. The whole Welte achievement vanished
without an echo. Then, after barely a twenty-year breather, Europe decided
to annihilate itself and the world again.

By the end of World War II, Welte was now only a dimly hinted legend.

In the late 1940s, a California radio executive named Richard C. Simonton
decided to hunt this unicorn. He travelled to devastated, tense postwar
Germany, did some inspired snooping, and in a barn in the Black Forest
found some Welte rolls and the ruin of a Welte playback machine. With
borrowed portable recording equipment, he saw the task was hopeless, so he
abandoned the playback machine, and smuggled the rolls through hostile and
suspicious Cold War checkpoints to Germany's American Zone, and from there
back to the United States.

A Texas geologist, Kenneth Caswell, had reconditioned a Welte playback
machine as a labor of love. Simonton and Caswell then contacted a record
industry executive, Walter S. Heebner, who had access to state-of-the-art
recording studios.

   The Welte Vorsetzer poised at the keyboard of Steinway Concert Grand No.
61,
   Los Angeles, winter 1962-63. Notice the absence of a human.

I've kept this mysterious Welte playback machine as a little surprise. It's
not a piano at all. Its proper name is the Vorsetzer -- the Thing That Sits
In Front of the piano. It's an electromechanicalrobot with eighty-eight
fingers and three feet. You roll it up to the keyboard of any piano in the
world, stick a roll in it, turn it on -- and the ghost of a dead genius
starts to play. Like the ghost of Leoncavallo's old pal from his happy
Vienna student days.

Vorsetzer (left) and Steinway keyboard.

During the winter of 1962-63, Heebner and Simonton brought Caswell's
Vorsetzer to a Los Angeles studio, where it was rolled up to the keyboard
of Steinway Concert Grand No. 61. (Steinway pianos have distinctive sounds,
actions, personalities and reputations. People talk about them the way
others talk about baseball players.) One after another of the salvaged
rolls was fed into the Vorsetzer, and out of Steinway 61 poured the ghosts
of Mahler, Strauss, Paderewski, Ravel ... and into very modern microphones,
electronics and tape recorders.

To say these performances are unavailable today is probably an
understatement, but for all I know, there may be an obscure CD of the
1962-63 recordings of the Welte rolls. Or maybe, after the
Book-of-the-Month issue, the tapes were stuck in a vault. And forgotten. Or
lost. Or maybe they ended up at a tag sale. Or were erased for blank tape.
(We did have the very interesting, stammering voice of computer pioneer and
WWII code-breaking genius Alan Turing in a taped radio interview from the
early 50s, but some years after his death, someone at the BBC erased it to
make blank tape for something important.)

On some very obscure Web newsgroups (like Extinct Media), there's just a
tiny bit of gossip about Welte rolls and Vorsetzers. The format in which
the rolls were cut seems to be called Red Welte; perhaps the rolls
themselves were red. Welte himself urged that the rolls be stored in rigid
humidity- and temperature-controlled conditions to prevent physical
distortion. During the winter you were supposed to store them over pans of
water.

UPDATE: I've just learned there was also a Green Welte roll format, and
that there was an American branch of the Welte automatic piano factory,
which (like Bayer aspirin) was seized and appropriated by the United States
government during World War I. So doubtless there are/were many Welte rolls
of the greatest American pianists also.

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