John Phillips said:

> Thomas Henden asks if there are any modern companies that cut
> Themodist rolls.  There are at least two in the U.K., Thomas:
> Southport Music Rolls and Perforetur Rolls.  The latter company
> even put a Metrostyle line on the rolls I bought from them.
> These rolls are not cheap but many of them are pieces of music
> never transcribed to music roll before.  I don't have
> their addresses here at work but I can find them at home if
> necessary.  I bet Dan Wilson replies to Thomas' query too, with
> much better information than I have provided!

Well, I will if you say so, John, but Southport is Malcolm Robinson
and a single machine in a bedroom who makes one roll a night and
is very picky about issuing rolls that aren't totally right; and
Perforetur is Rex Lawson's own classical marque. I think the
Metrostyled rolls were actually a series of accurate replicas made
by Southport of a 1920s Aeolian UK special series of pieces composed
for the Pianola, for which the country was scoured for originals.
I had two originals but I didn't like the music on any of the others
so never bought any.

Southport is available from Frances Broadway and Perforetur from Mike
Boyd; the addresses were been given in (let me check) MMD 960801:
•
  Frances Broadway ("Roll Bid Enterprise" - postal auction)
  39 Sydner Road  (NB Sydner not Sydney)
  Stoke Newington
  LONDON
  N16 7UF     tel +44 171 254 6145
              fax +44 171 249 0130 (dedicated line)

  Michael Boyd
  Universal Music Co
  18 Cinque Ports Street
  Rye
  East Sussex TN31 7AD   tel +44 1797 223688
•
Southport rolls are mostly new medleys in hotel-lounge or cocktail-bar
soft jazz style recorded by pianists in the vicinity of Blackpool, the
great seaside resort on the Irish Sea. The paper is slightly hygroscopic
so a damp liver like me needs to bag them with silica-gel sachets to
keep them the right width - in the USA they'd be fine.

 [ Try dry wine for a damp liver.   ;)  -- Robbie

Perforetur is an idiosyncratic list of classical pieces ranging from
Mozart to Nancarrow but including some seminal Rachmaninov never done
by the old companies - notably the two-piano Suite No 2 Op 17 of which
a superb recording was made in the 70s by Ashkenazy and Previn, and
the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini which wasn't composed until 1934,
4 and 3 rolls respectively. I have mentioned the Pineapple Poll suite
by Sullivan here before. These are not "hand-played" but cut from
score so you have to know how they go to get real enjoyment from them.

There aren't more than about twenty avid classical buyers so
Perforetur is in a bit of a lull at present. Mike Boyd does do some
more popular titles, some of them excellent 88-note Themodist versions
of Ampico dance music and some transcribed onto computer disk from
score. He just calls these "88-Note" and hates doing any promotion so
you more or less have to go to Rye and break the door down. Usually
he's busy rebuilding pianos, the perforator is cold and still and it's
a matter of seeing what he has in stock. A lot of Perforetur titles
exist on disk but not in actual rolls. (He owes me half a Rachmaninov
3rd concerto movement and a prototype from a disk by me of Brahms's Op
9 Schumann Variations from three years ago, so he's not going to get a
better notice than this until he delivers !)

Rex Lawson's first Perforetur list was actually cut by QRS on their
Duo-Art machine. He is now designing a computer interface for Keystone
and hopes to be able to get a regular subscription list going with
their aid. He can be contacted directly at:
•
  64A Honor Oak Park
  LONDON
  SE23 1DY  and phone messages can be passed via Denis Hall,
           +44 (0)181 462 3384
•
Incidentally, I have some rolls here on the Hot Piano Classics label
(issued by Paul Johnson who is a MMD subscriber) which are effectively
Themodist rolls: maybe Robbie can tell us more about these as he is
cited as the pianist !

Dan Wilson

 [ Noteurs comment:
 [
 [ The first Themodist roll I made was chopped with the knife and,
 [ regarding the snakebites, I resolved "never again."  Subsequent
 [ rolls were assisted by the computer; I wrote a program to generate
 [ the snakebite accents according to the accented notes in the
 [ Midi file.
 [
 [ This proved especially effective on a roll of the novelty xylophone
 [ piece, "Triplets".  With the Themodist operating the solo part
 [ distinctly stands above the piano accompaniment.  As indicated by the
 [ composer, the piano plays a different syncopation from the solo (57%
 [ vs. 75%), thus authorizing the slight time differential between piano
 [ and solo notes. Note that the xylophone solo and the piano accompani-
 [ ment _both_ receive accents independently, as in a live performance.
 [
 [ Robbie Rhodes