A new music concert will take place tonight at USC. Or maybe that should be a new old music concert. Either way, it will bring out of mothballs a technology whose heyday was the 1920s and '30s, when it was a main source of home entertainment before being eclipsed by radio and the record player: the player piano.
"The Player Piano Project," featuring 23 works by composers from five countries, is the brainchild of USC composer Veronika Krausas, who was inspired after her landlords gave her a player piano a few years ago for Christmas. They had tried to sell it, but nobody wanted to buy.
"It was a beautiful instrument, and it seemed a shame to have it as just a piece of furniture," says Krausas. "So I got the idea, why not ask all my friends who are composers to write some music for it? It was a wacky, far-out thing to do."
The composers, it turned out, agreed.
"The whole point of writing for a player piano is that you can do things that a human can't do, sort of like an octopus playing the piano -- not only an octopus but an octopus on speed," says Ceiri Torjussen, who got permission from John Williams to arrange the latter's "Raiders March" from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for the program.
"I thought it would be hilarious to use a theme from my childhood, which I really loved and which people know, but skewing it to the point almost of unrecognizability," Torjussen says. "It's a pretty complex piece. There are two or three different tempos going on simultaneously, and also speeding up and slowing down in obscene ways. I tried to write a piece that wasn't playable by a human."
In fact, a player piano makes music using a pneumatic mechanism, driven by foot pedals, that depresses the instrument's keys by reading notes programmed on a rotating, perforated roll of paper.
A human operator can sit at the keyboard and play additional notes while the roll is rotating and, by manipulating levers below the keyboard, can add accents, change tempos and apply the sustain and soft pedals. Dynamics can be changed by varying pressure on the foot pedals.
Later models, like the one Krausas has, use electric motors to keep the air flow going -- although the motor makes a constant background hum.
"There's this nostalgia for these wonderful contraptions, a nostalgia for the days before everything was digital or put together overseas," says Brian Current, another of the composers Krausas contacted. "I always wanted to make player pianos a part of my music somehow. This was the opportunity."
