The Player Piano & Edwardian Novel

NEW TECHNOLOGIES interrupt and unsettle. Cecelia Björkén-Nyberg’s The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel recovers the player piano as a disruptive technology that contributed to shaping debates about the value of music. Through her study of the different manifestations of the device (which allowed users to play complex virtuoso pieces with relative ease aided by rolls of music and a machine), Björkén-Nyberg engages in debates from the turn of the twentieth century about what constituted music. A thoroughly researched and informative study of material culture, this is a truly illuminating interdisciplinary book combining cultural history with literary analysis.

Weaving together analyses of fiction, music criticism and records of material culture, the book is remarkably interdisciplinary, drawing out the different ways the player piano was produced, received and discussed in literature by well-known novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, E. M. Forster, Max Beerbohm, and Compton Mackenzie, while also drawing on the work of E. F. Benson, James Huneker and M. E. Francis. In the book’s various chapters that shift the focus between “The Engineer,” “The Performer” and “The Composer,” there are illuminating insights into how the player piano may have shaped expectations about the precision and quality of performances: “the hyperbolic discourse of pianistic precision in which the player piano was marketed turned perfection into a quantifiable entity.” With the development of the player piano, music and technology were brought together in what Björkén-Nyberg argues was a unique manner. While the union of music and technology has a long history, Björkén-Nyberg argues that the player piano has enduring relevance for thinking through the mediation of art. It widened access to music—its capacity for “reducing fatigue” and “sidestepping musical literacy” meant it played a part in the “democratisation of music”)—but for some it produced disconcerting and unwelcome changes in musical culture.

Literature, music reviews, advertising, and records of experiences of the player piano are recruited to contribute to a wide-ranging methodology through which Björkén-Nyberg explores how this new technology disrupted the way people engaged with, played and related to music. The player piano, Björkén-Nyberg argues, undermined easy distinctions between music (as produced by humans) and noise (produced by machines or defined as mechanical sound). There is a clear rationale behind the decision to confine the book to the Edwardian era: discussions of and negotiations with mechanical “noise” would become very different after the outbreak of the First World War. The book does however reach back into the nineteenth century to provide history and context, and occasionally extends beyond the strictly Edwardian with its analysis of Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915), Mackenzie’s Sinister Streeet (1913–1914), and Forster’s Maurice (written 1913–1914).

Chapter one combines the history of the player piano in its different manifestations with a survey of its contemporary critiques. It utilises the theories of Kittler, McLuhan and Barthes to highlight some of the ideological, artistic and authorial issues raised by the instrument. The player piano had an impact on individuals’ performances, since “the performer was liberated both from the act of intellectually memorising [or reading, presumably] the music and that of quite physically making the music through the expense of muscular energy. Thus, for the performance of music the player piano brought about a radical change”. Yet it did not have a consistent impact on performance or artistry, according to Björkén-Nyberg. The piano rolls had different results, producing sometimes variously standardised performances, while the lack of tempo indication meant that performances from the same roll could be different each time. The rolls often deviated from the traditional score, since the piano rolls often “failed to give the expression”: “they omitted not only needless information but information that was actually necessary in an artistic context.”

A central premise with which chapter one begins is that Edwardian novels act as storage spaces for Edwardian music. Björk...