Since there is a lot of activity on this subject I thought I should
add my experience.
Sometime in the late 1970s my cousin sent me a copy of the George
Gershwin - Michael Tilson Thomas recording, as he knew I had several
reproducing pianos. I was living in Endicott, New York, at the time.
In 1980 David Agard, conductor of the BC Pops Orchestra in Binghamton,
New York, was visiting and I played one of my Ampico reproducing
pianos. I also told him that I had rolls of George Gershwin playing
the "Rhapsody in Blue", but they were Duo-Art rolls and I had not,
as of yet, started restoring my Steinway XR. I also showed him the
Michael Tilson Thomas recording. He wanted to do it. I laughed it
off and forgot about it.
That summer I received in the mail the brochure containing the
following season's concert schedule and in it was the "Rhapsody in
Blue with George Gershwin at the keyboard". I ignored it again.
Three months before the concert Dave called me asking what it would
take to get my Steinway restored.
I decided I had better take this seriously. I removed the player
mechanism, all the strings, the metal plate and sent the case and bench
out to an antique refinisher recommended by Harvey Roehl. I took the
keys over to a friend's house to use his milling machine to cut the
tops off of the keys. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that, but at least
we now have pretty white keys. I ordered new hammers from Steinway,
new strings, new tuning pins, felts, etc. I was told that the person
restoring the case lost a lot of sleep getting it done. It cost $2000
-- a good deal.
I finished all of the player parts except the stack which I had on my
bench ready to dismantle. I started taking it apart, and then I made
one of the best decisions of my restoration life. I decided I would
never make it in time and put it back together. Let it be known that
the piano is still operating on the original unrestored stack today.
I bought another copy of the Duo-Art rolls and spliced the two
together. David did his thing with the Scotch tape and marked the
edited roll with conducting marks with a felt tipped pin. We did
the concert with our fingers crossed and un-voiced Steinway hammers.
Of course, the roll slipped as you know it would.
The concerts took place on February 14, 15, 1981. I made a video of
the concert as I had one of the first VHS video tape recorders, and
a friend from IBM had a camera. It is really poor video, but there
is a link to it below. I believe if we had done what Art Reblitz
described in his Colorado Springs concerts, David would have been able
to conduct a much improved concert.
Shortly after that event, I got a call from Newton Wayland wanting to
borrow our piano roll. He was going to conduct the St. Louis Symphony
doing the Gershwin. I sent him the roll (I believe in the Boston area)
and didn't hear any more about it until Harvey Roehl handed me an audio
cassette of the concert, which I still have. The note on the cassette
was signed "WTS" which I assume was Bill Singleton [St. Louis player
piano tech]. According to his note, they used his Steinway OR for the
concert on March 28, 1982. I don't think they used my roll, but I never
got my roll returned.
I moved from New York to Colorado in 1995. I have met many collectors
since moving here, one of which is Dick Kroeckel. I noticed inside his
9' 6" Steinway Duo-Art is Newton Wayland's signature. I have never
been able to get Newton Wayland's contact information, but I now know
he passed in 2013. I would still like the roll if anyone knows what
happened to it.
After digging through my old videos and locating the footage of the
Binghamton, New York, concert, I found lots of automatic music videos
which I added to my YouTube channel. Links are below.
Bill Decker
Longmont, Colorado
bill@uncledouble.net.geentroep
[ Link to the Rhapsody concert video:
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZC2iR_6Cu0
[ Link to my YouTube channel:
[ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCymDnF_hsqBgRs2nAc4vnfQ?view_as=subscriber
[ "B.C." stands for Broome County in B.C. Pops Orchestra. Conductor
[ David Agard recalled later, "We did a Gershwin program and used
[ piano rolls. The piano played the rolls without a person sitting
[ at the piano. We Scotch-taped some notes in the rolls. It was the
[ hardest concert I ever did. But I got calls, and other musicians
[ wanted to know how I did that."
[
[ Ref. "Bygone Binghamton: Remembering People and Places of the Past
[ -- Volume Two", (C) 2012 by Jack Edward Shay, pages 137-138
[ https://books.google.com/books?id=Sk-v5juCuCcC
[
[ -- Robbie
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