Trying to repair a broken tracker bar on your player piano? If so you probably already know about the Mechanical Music Digest, which has been operating an online bulletin board for mechanical music obsessives since 1995. The MMD interface isn't the easiest to use, and even if a lot of the posts are of interest only to true gearheads and trainspotters, interesting cultural nuggets pop up all the time.
Browsing this evening I learned that the community is discovering YouTube as a way to disseminate information about mechanical musical instruments and related events in video form. Check out, for example, this very interesting and helpful documentary on how player piano rolls are made. Or this tv segment of a performance of the American Photoplayer that would make Spike Jones smile. More on the Photoplayer is available here.)
There is also a perplexing number of videos composed of a tightframe shot of the front of a player piano or nickelodeon in operation. (See for example this one.) Notwithstanding appearances in Renoir's Rules of the Game and television's The Simpsons (alongside a cameo by baseball star Jose Canseco, who runs into a burning building to save one!), mechanical music instruments have never made for a particularly captivating on-screen presence, and so I wonder what's behind the impulse to do such a thing.
One impetus could be the longstanding collective project visible in such forums as the MMD to document these pieces of otherwise dead media and to trace the subtle evolution of the technologies that distinguished one from the next. Collectors have for years recorded performances of mechanical music on records and CD's, and so this can also be understood as an extension of the tradition of translating old media into new. Other videos appear to be made not by collectors, but by nonspecialists for whom the novelty of the gadgets is comparable to that of their great grandparents when encountering them for the first time over a century ago.
Still, seeing these instruments on video highlights the coldness of the mechanical music performance that can go missing in a pure audio recording or in the experience of watching a mechanical instrument in a "live" setting. Here the piano is the star of the show, but even in the midst of the most raucous number is stone-faced and impassive, protecting the secrets of its cold virtuosity deep inside the box.
