No Hands

Conductor Franz Waxman raised his baton, and the orchestra sailed into the opening bars of Stravinsky's piano concerto. Then he gave the nod for the first piano passage, and the piano came right in on cue. The audience at last week's International Music Festival in Los Angeles did 2,000 double takes: though the piano bench was vacant, the music was coming out loud and clear.

The instrument was a player piano, and the unseen fingers that pounded the keys belonged, in a way, to Stravinsky himself.

The absent Igor had made a piano roll of the concerto's first movement in 1925, was in Europe at the time of this pianistic hanky-panky and missed hearing Stravinsky playing Stravinsky (see Music ).

Peppermint & Rolls. As the unmanned Steinway eerily picked its note-perfect way through the concerto in Los Angeles, thousands of other pianolas* were making rumpus rooms, rathskellers and taverns resound all over the U.S. Most of them--foot-pumped jobs with no concert-grand pretensions--were being played for the sheer rinky-tink fun of it by people who own either vintage instruments rescued from dusty oblivion or brand-new 1962 models, bought in a shiny showroom. The player piano is coming back into its own again to the tune of Moon River and The Peppermint Twist. And, once again, people are clustering around and singing the old favorites as the hyphenated lyrics C'Va-len-cia! In my dreams it always seems I hear you softly call to me .. .") roll past like a speech on a presidential TelePrompTer.

Macy's in Manhattan carries a 2,500-roll library, sells about 200 rolls a week, compared with ten rolls a week two years ago. Most of the rolls are old standards (After the Ball, Ain't We Got Fun, The Old Rugged Cross), but new numbers from Broadway musicals and the transistor hit parade are added each week. The source of Macy's supply is the Q.R.S. Co. in The Bronx. Lone survivor of the once more than 50 U.S. roll makers, Q.R.S. sees brighter days ahead. Its artist-in-residence, J. Lawrence Cook, turns out the rolls by playing on a special piano rigged to a device like an IBM machine, which punches the proper holes in a master roll. Then the master roll is placed on the production perforator, which can punch out more than 30 finished rolls at a time. A second manufacturer, Aeolian Music Rolls of Glendale. Calif., joined the roll-making ranks 1 1/2 years ago, is currently turning out 1.500 rolls a day. In Palisades Park. N.J., ex-Tugboat Captain John Duffy, 39, who deals in both new and rebuilt player pianos, has seen his business grow from a kitchen-and-basement operation to a 14-man organization in four years. Duffy grossed $220,000 in 1961 and expects to go to $500.000 this year.

Shoulders & Shading. In cabarets and coffee houses across the land, pianolas are twanging away. Barney's Market Club in Chicago is typical. Says Co-Owner Harry Schwimmer: "When we have a banquet or a bachelor party, they don't play cards after dinner like they used to; they congregate around the piano, throw their arms around each other's shoulders, drink their beer, puff their cigars, and rip off the good old songs.'' But the pianola's biggest comeback is in the parlor. Many buyers are women who recall the pleasure of pumping one as a child and want to share the fun with their own kids. In suburban Elmhurst, 111., Mrs. Janet Carman, a banker's wife and mother of four children, recently bought a reconditioned player.

Says she: "We just love it. Our seven-year-old twins bring in all their friends on weekends, and they sing away for hours.

It's the funniest thing to wake up on a Saturday morning and hear these wee little voices coming from the basement singing Pretty Baby." The idea for the player piano seems to have originated with a Frenchman named Fourneaux who patented a player operating on pneumatic principles in 1863.

Through the years, they were modified and improved until--at the peak of their heyday around 1923 when 205,556 were sold in the U.S. alone--player pianos could not only play loud and soft by themselves but could reproduce every nuance of shading and expression of a Paderewski or a Gershwin (both of whom sat down at a special recording piano and cut rolls on the Duo-Art label).

The Hardman, Peck Co., which makes most of today's new player pianos, no longer turns out electrically driven concert grands or giant uprights (people refuse to give them house space though their tone is beyond compare). They feature player spinets with foot pedals only, feel that pumping out the music is a genuine part of the nostalgia that is their stock in trade. Says one foot-pumping purist: "It gives you a sort of feeling of satisfaction .. . like natural childbirth."

* "Pianola," once a trademark of the Aeolian Co.. long ago became a generic term for all player pianos, has been revived again recently by Hardman, Peck Co.

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