[ In 010112 MMD Grahame Code asked for anecdotes about
 [ Australian pianists who made piano rolls.

Grahame, don't forget Emse Dawson, the Ampico artist, who interested
me because her story combines two of my interests, player-pianos and
mental/psychic/spiritual healing.

She had a chronic back problem and heard about Christian Science
healing.  Christian Science being poorly developed in Australia at
the time, she emigrated to the USA and signed up with Ampico.  Happily,
Christian Science delivered, and she was free of the back problem after
a year or two.  The full details are in "The Barden Interviews"
somewhere in the AMICA Bulletin back numbers.

For Percy Grainger stories, you only have to go to the Grainger Museum
in Melbourne.  After one visit there in 1978, I was able to fill a
whole article in the (London) Player-Piano Group Bulletin with them.

Especially germane to automatic pianos was his interest in coding his
own Duo-Art rolls (in which he conferred with Josef Hofmann who was
likewise interested) and his later exploration of what he called "free
music", for which, having unsuccessfully tried to produce atonal music
from rolls savaged with razor blades, he constructed Heath Robinson
machines with coils of cardboard whose edges drove wheeled arms which
controlled the frequencies of electronic tone generators.

The BBC has a black & white film of him playing the piano in one of
their studios, not long before his death, which I found captivating
and I think still have on video somewhere.

Dan Wilson, London