The latest Sonos software comes with a 30-day trial of Napster. People of a certain age (my age) will forever associate the word “Napster” with the brief digital music free-for-all that was the Internet circa 1999. So it is, but this Napster is a different beast. Along with the new legitimacy, it seems, came a surprisingly vast library of quality classical music. It’s searchable, digitized, and ready for instant playback.
So it is a little odd that through this medium, I have discovered and become enamored with another format for music distribution that is over 100 years old: the player piano roll. Back in the heyday of air-operated player pianos, the most sought-after rolls were “hand played”—that is, created by a pianist performing on a special recording piano which transcribed the performance to paper. A number of musical luminaries of the age agreed to have their own playing immortalized in this fashion. Among them are some favorites of mine: Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, and Saint-Saëns. Decades later, someone would get the crazy idea of converting these scrolls into MIDI files, loading them into a Yamaha Disklavier concert grand, wheeling it into a concert hall, and recording the results. The idea of listening to a 100-year-old piano performance faithfully reproduced by levers, gears, and paper on one end and hard drives, microprocessors, and wireless signal transmission on the other end is mind-boggling. But Rhapsody in Blue sure sounds great when Gershwin plays it.
Earlier, while listening to the composer’s performance of Danse Macabre, I was reminded of a terrifying dream I had some years ago near Halloween.
I was being chased (in typical scary-dream fashion) down a darkened street by a pair of bearded Frenchmen, who were none other than Paul Cézanne and Camille Saint-Saëns. “Say my name!” one of them shouted.
“Say-sawn? Sey-zahn?” mumbled I.
“Your French is despicable!” the other shouted back, in a despicable French accent.
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