Inventing Entertainment

The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Musical Industry

Brian Dolan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2009
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (Verlag)
978-0-7425-6127-4 (ISBN)

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Brian Dolan's social and cultural history of the music business in relation to the history of the player piano is a critical chapter in the story of contemporary life. The player piano made the American music industry-and American music itself-modern. For years, Tin Pan Alley composers and performers labored over scores for quick ditties destined for the vaudeville circuit or librettos destined for the Broadway stage. But, the introduction of the player piano in the early 1900s, transformed Tin Pan Alley's guild of composers, performers, and theater owners into a music industry. The player piano, with its perforated music rolls that told the pianos what key to strike, changed musical performance because it made a musical piece standard, repeatable, and easy rather than something laboriously learned. It also created a national audience because the music that was played in New Orleans or Kansas City could also be played in New York or Missoula, as new music (ragtime) and dance (fox-trot) styles crisscrossed the continent along with the player piano's music rolls. By the 1920s, only automobile sales exceeded the amount generated by player pianos and their music rolls. Consigned today to the realm of collectors and technological arcane, the player piano was a moving force in American music and American life.

Brian Dolan is professor of humanities at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of Ladies of the Grand Tour and Wedgwood: The First Tycoon.

Chapter 1 Soundscape and Memory Chapter 2 Missionaries and Museums Chapter 3 Chronic Mechanitis Chapter 4 Every Collector’s Dream Chapter 5 A Musical Morse Code Chapter 6 A Search for Identity Chapter 7 Possession Chapter 8 Expressio Chapter 9 A Race for the Rolls Chapter 10 Philosophers of the Fetish

Erscheint lt. Verlag	16.3.2009
Verlagsort	Lanham, MD
Sprache	englisch
Maße	161 x 241 mm
Gewicht	497 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Instrumentenkunde
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-7425-6127-5 / 0742561275
ISBN-13	978-0-7425-6127-4 / 9780742561274
Zustand	Neuware