The Pianola in Early Twentieth-Century British Literature: “Really it is a wonderful machine”

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, British authors consistently, almost mechanically, used the piano to characterize intense emotional outpourings. In his poem “Piano,” for instance, D. H. Lawrence imagines a “child sitting under the piano … pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings,” which causes the adult narrator to “weep like a child for the past.”¹ In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, Mr. Beebe anticipates Lucy Honeychurch’s amorous adventures by alluding to her performance of a Beethoven piano sonata: “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting.”² Myriad diversely exciting passions, as Lawrence and Forster evidence, call to us from this period via literary allusions to the piano. This essay, however, is not about that instrument: it is about the pianola. Descended from and contextualized by conventional pianos, the pianola was a turn-of-the-century upstart, a mechanical self-playing piano. In contrast to the piano, the pianola offered scarcely any emotional intensity or aesthetic radiance, yet it frequently offered an educational and at times even an entertaining instrument for musical amateurs and authors.

The evolution of the name “pianola” itself evidences this widespread, if at times prosaic, appeal. The name “‘pianola,’” as Arthur Ord-Hume has observed, “is a trade name” registered by the Aeolian Company, but it quickly came to refer, as it consequently will here, to the wide variety of brands that comprised the “genus ‘player piano.’”³ Indeed, as technology improved during the first quarter of the twentieth century, myriad self-playing pianos within this “genus” filled the market and appeared in a variety of literary genres (poetry, novels, critical writing, autobiography) until economic depressions slowed sales in the late 1920s.⁴ By 1934, in Music Ho!, Constant Lambert could already refer to the “fast-disappearing mechanical piano,” as consumers and writers lost interest in the novelty.⁵

For some, the disappearance of the pianola was a relief. Lambert, for instance, saw the self-playing piano as perfunctory, as unrefined, and as part of the general decline of Europe’s musical culture. Its chief benefits, he mocked, were that one could easily “escape from a mechanical piano by going to the next café” and that it did not pretend to the “sickening and genteel refinement” of the BBC’s general music programming, which blared almost ubiquitously from London’s wirelesses.⁶ Modernist writers contemporary to Lambert frequently shared this disparaging view and this has, perhaps, contributed to a certain reticence regarding the pianola in literary criticism. Critics generally overlook literary references to pianolas and when they do notice them tend to reinforce associations of the pianola with passivity and a suspect or degraded art. Quite recently, for instance, Regula Trillini has emphasized how pianolas enabled a “passive enjoyment” of music and has foregrounded their associations with “uncanniness” in literature.⁷ Cecilia Böjrkén-Nyberg, meanwhile, acknowledges the role of mechanical instruments in “popularising classical music in Edwardian England” but argues for an association between the “noisy machinery” of pianolas and literary portrayals of conventional instruments providing mechanical noise, what she calls “auditory waste.”⁸ From this perspective, pianolas seem little better than that other supplier of mechanical music, the gramophone, which, as Sebastian Knowles has demonstrated, represents for many modernist writers “a kind of death.”⁹

The pianola never quite connotes this level of morbidity, but many authors do use the instrument to explore the complex influences of modern commercial machines on human aesthetic reception and interpretation. Authors use these mechanical influences to critique, both favorably and unfavorably, the vitality of emerging, often middle-class audiences for classical music. Modernist and highbrow authors especially tend to portray pianolas as the preserve of not just passive but ineffective, uncritical amateurs who seek yet cannot attain even a moderate level of aesthetic sophistication or, still worse, as the tools of unrefined philistines who disastrously commodify culture. Conversely, authors more sympathetic to the time and financial constraints of the middle and working classes portray mechanical pianos as useful for familiarizing...