University of Texas at Austin
Phantom Fingers at Work: Selling the Player Piano in a Changing Musical Marketplace
As sales figures for sheet music, phonograph records, and piano rolls confirm, by the early twentieth century, music was a commodity to be sold and consumed. Despite its rapid commodification through mechanical reproduction (player piano) at the turn of the century and sound recording (phonograph) in the 1920s and 30s, most scholarly research neglects the former in favor of the latter. Yet the player piano allegorically presents a particularly vivid image of industrialized labor in the twentieth century — the instrument renders its own player invisible as the keyboard records a palimpsestic imprint of the performing body’s movements. The highly skilled hands of the pianist fade away and the instrument’s phantom hands take over, not only in playing the player piano, but also in selling it.
In this paper I discuss different advertising approaches for the player piano as evidenced through several print advertisements from the player piano’s heyday (circa 1900-1929). I organize them into four categories, all based on the primary representation of labor in each. The first, perfect labor, highlights advertisements appealing to people through the machine-like perfection of the player piano’s performances; the second, gendered labor, promotes player pianos as a labor saving replacement for women’s labor at the keyboard; the third, educational labor, sells the player piano as a pedagogical instrument, capable of teaching children to play the piano; and finally fourth, stored and reproduced labor, markets the player piano as a device that stores and reproduces musical labor as an own-able, and stockpile-able commodity. Many advertisements draw from two or more categories, and each category highlights a different aspect of the cultural attitude toward labor. Moreover, the presence or absence of a laboring human body reveals much about musical labor and its value in this time of rapid change, mass production, and mechanical reproduction.
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Allison Wente recently passed her dissertation defense for her PhD in Music Theory from The University of Texas at Austin, where she is a Graduate Continuing Fellow. She holds a B.A. in Music from Muhlenberg College and an M.A. in Music Theory from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on mechanical instruments and recording technologies, specifically the player piano in early twentieth-century America, and her research explores the displacement of labor, technological mediation, and the differences between analog and digital technologies as they materialize in early recording media.