As a technological intruder, the player piano inhabited a liminal space between the manual and the mechanical as well as between unmediated musical experiences and the mechanically mediated consumption of sounds. Gabriel García Márquez's literary portrait of the arrival of the pianola in Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude functions as a metaphor for the reception and cultural legitimization of player pianos in Latin America during their heyday in the 1910s and 1920s. I support my discussion with brief analyses of original works for player piano, each representing a different stage of the player piano's rise, peak, and fall: 1) Igor Stravinsky's Étude pour Pianola (1917), 2) Alfredo Casella's Trois Pièces pour Pianola (1921) and Paul Rather than seeking clarity, the proposed paper sheds light on one problem within the discourse on absolute music: its shifting status after the advent of mechanical reproduction. In this paper I will show how the player piano revises standard definitions of absolute music - music about music, defined by Ashby (2010), Bonds (2014), Dahlhaus (1995), Goehr (1992), and others - by suggesting a performance without the present, laboring body and fallible emotive interpretation of a human pianist. Mechanical music reshapes the definition of absolute music by allowing composers to explore music without the pianist-as-mediator influencing the musical product. But the absolute offered by mechanical music - a performance unfettered by the live performer - uncovers a new and previously unimagined aesthetic space, a space free of physical and expressive human limitations. In 1854 Eduard Hanslick discusses absolute music as music that speaks only through sound the performer " coaxes the electric spark out of its obscure secret place and flashes it across to the listener " to animate the work (1986, 49). The player piano promises a new kind of absolute music to its listener, free from a performer's personal, affective influence or error, but the achievement of absolute music remains elusive even in its mechanical execution. As such, it represents one particularly vexing step on music's path from an exclusively human and a-mechanical endeavor, to a mechanically recorded, stored, and mediated experience. The player piano reneges on one of the basic promises of musical performance: the fallible performer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |