Word: pianos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sanders Theatre will also undergo renovations. The major focus of planners has been the theater's antiquated stage, which will be replaced by a larger version with rising rear sections for choral performances. A piano lift will also be installed...
...Piano rolls were not recordings; they were perforated rolls of paper capable of reproducing sounds that had been either hand-played by a pianist or simply punched by a roll editor, such as Frank Milne, whose spectacular four-hand arrangement of An American in Paris concludes the CD. Early rolls, played by a device called a Pianola, which fit over a conventional keyboard, were primitive affairs, capable of reproducing notes but little else; much depended on the Pianola's operator, who manipulated knobs and levers and pumped a foot bellows to make the contraption work. Later player pianos...
...Gershwin's recordings," says Wodehouse, a Stanford-trained pianist and musicologist who got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1989 to work on the project. Using a rare 1911 88-note Pianola, in conjunction with a new Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of super-player piano that converts a performance into computer information, she was able to realize the earlier rolls. Wodehouse personally operated the Pianola and painstakingly fiddled with the rolls until she was satisfied with the performances. "I put in dynamics and accents," says Wodehouse. "I played the rolls over and over again, maybe...
...have this great piece of fate that someone was able to use technology in an utterly musical fashion like this," says Nonesuch general manager Robert Hurwitz. "When people hear it, they don't realize the role of technology, and they don't think it is a piano roll...
Wodehouse's efforts have been cheered by her fellow aficionados. "The ones I've heard have a live feeling, as if Gershwin were there," says Trebor Tichenor, a ragtime pianist and scholar in St. Louis, Missouri, who owns one of the largest private collections of piano rolls in America. Agrees collector Michael Montgomery, whose archives contain 100 of the extant Gershwin rolls: "It is the most careful, scholarly, faithful, high-integrity job that has ever been done with piano rolls...