Hi, MMDers:  Here's a link to a Honolulu Star-Bulletin article about an
upcoming concert featuring MIDIized Rachmaninoff in Hawaii.  It's nice
to see articles in the news featuring reproducing pianos and their
rolls, but once again, we find an author relegating "musical hobbyists"
as those who seemingly stopped collecting, restoring and preserving
reproducing pianos and their ancient, decaying and obsolete paper roll
technology away back in the early 1990s.

The article hints that all this "old tech" has somehow ceased to exist,
and that we are now blessed to be living in a new era: one of MIDIized
classical roll music played on the only instrument in the world fit
(and fitted) to play it: the magnificent Boesendorfer.  The author
solicits your comments.

Since I appreciate the history and wonder of reproducing pianos (but
am not lucky enough to own one) let alone expound upon their merits,
I will leave said comments to those passionate MMDers who may be able
to more fully inform the author, a Mr. Burl Burlingame, on the virtues
of the Ampico, Duo-Art and Welte-Mignon, as well as their mouldy old
rolls.  You'll find the link here:

http://www.starbulletin.com/features/20081107_keys_to_the_past.html 

Cheers,
Mark Forer