The title of this week's entry is from Stop Player. Joke No. 4, William Gaddis's first stab at writing a cultural history of the United States and what he called "the false democratization of the arts" through exhaustive focus on the player piano. Aside from the material we're reading this week, Gaddis never made it past the research and note-taking stages; Agapē Agape, his last published work, voiced his own deep regrets (by way of a thinly-veiled fictional self) over this unfinished project in the months before his death.
Here's an excellent web resource on the player piano's history (along with technical descriptions and other miscellany), adding up to a much greater complexity than Gaddis cared to admit:
Once the player piano had reached market saturation, one strategy adopted by certain manufacturers was to shift away from the instrument's populist appeal and toward the prestige of association with serious composers writing specifically for the instrument, such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, and George Gershwin.
A recurring theme throughout the history of modern (and particularly, electronic) music was a belief that instruments as they currently existed were inadequate; again and again, composers doubled as inventors and programmers in the development of instruments, technologies, and interfaces for the realization of new sounds. Nicolas Collins's essay does a fine job of outlining some of the key issues and challenges that composers have faced; one his own innovations is demonstrated below:
Here's a short video about Reed Ghazala, whose circuit-bending work is based on the playful modification of cheap electronic instruments and toys; the popular/avant-garde distinction that we once thought was clear is no longer so:
And finally, the composer/inventor Trimpin and his Fire Organ:
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