Pianolist's Library Rolls
By John Phillips
In response to Bryan Cather's enquiry about Pianolist's Library rolls, I dashed down to my roll collection this morning before heading for work (late as usual).
I've got 30 or 40 of these and I found these categories and box colours (colors for you US manglers of the Queen's English!)
Classics of Symphony and Sonata Black
Grand Opera Light Maroon
Frederic Chopin Black
Richard Wagner Purple (that's appropriate!)
Modern Masters Black
Salon Music Maroon
No category - lots of these Maroon
My wife says that she would put Burgundy wherever I have put Maroon.
All the boxes I looked at say Made in USA. They are Aeolian Co. rolls. They all have gold printing and are in boxes with false bottoms, so that all rolls are the same height on the shelf.
As far as I know, PL rolls are just Metrostyle-Themodist rolls in a fancy box, with a fancy leader. Maybe they were produced with an appealing packaging to tempt people to buy them as gifts. Most of the ones that I have are in good shape, which indicates that either the purchasers really cared for their rolls, or that the roll was a gift to a family member who was less than enthusiastic about pedalling classical music. I'm always pleased to find them, although I wish 9 of them weren't salon music by Ethelbert Nevin!
The roll described by Paul Johnson isn't a PL roll. It's a World's Music or Audiographic roll. These are rather higher-class rolls, with lots of musicological information printed along the roll. I believe that they are Duo-Art Audiographic rolls without the Duo-Art coding, but I'm sure that one of our UK members knows more about this.
Some of these rolls come in the same beautiful dark maroon (burgundy?) boxes with gold printing as do D-A Audiographic rolls. Others come in black boxes with bright yellow World's Music labels with a map of the world thereon. The rolls themselves all look the same.
It takes quite a bit of pedalling to get to the start of the music on one of these rolls, because there is a wealth of printed information about the composer and the music, and also the committee who selected the rolls, that is supposed to be read first. Some of the rolls, intended as instruction rolls for children, check out whether you have done your reading properly, because right at the end, you come across a set of questions! Fortunately there isn't a special mechanism that locks the reroll until they are answered properly. These particular rolls also often have tiny single perforations at intervals along the extreme right hand edge. These perfs mark the beginning of each bar of the music. It was possible to buy an attachment for your player that was actuated by these perfs and that made a light flash. This was supposed to improve the instructional value of the roll by indicating each bar to a class of children.
I have heard that the Aeolian Co. in the UK lost a lot of money over Audiographic rolls and that they never recovered the costs of a very expensive printing press they had to purchase to print all the various markings on the rolls. Again, how about enlightening us, UK subscribers?
They are very classy rolls. It's a pity that on many of them the gold roll-box printing is so faded that it is illegible. I suppose the metal content in the ink has oxidised. I just wonder if some reducing agent sprayed or wiped over the box might restore it.
John Phillips. |
(Message sent Fri 27 Sep 1996, 01:56:50 GMT, from time zone GMT+1000.) |
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