For years, David Fairbanks Ford knew a player piano was in his future.
As the founder, proprietor and ringmaster of the Main Street Museum, Ford has spent most of the last three decades living on the border where material culture meets the fantastical. A piano that plays music on its own fits squarely on that line.
“I knew I would like it so much, I would become obsessed with it,” Ford said
Not that the piano would require a lot of work, although it has, but that it would be transfixing, a machine that had its heyday a century ago yet is still relevant today.
“COVID was also perfect for it,” he added.
For the past few months, Ford has been operating the player piano every Friday evening from around 6 to around 10. The museum has been mostly closed to visitors, so he set up a PA system with speakers in front of and behind the converted firehouse at 58 Bridge St. that the museum calls home, so passersby could hear the music. This week, for the monthly First Friday art walk around White River Junction, the rolls fed into the player piano will have a French accent. David won’t mind if I call it April Fools’ Day in Paris.
What Ford and museum volunteer and board member Joie Finley are up to with the player piano is lighthearted and entertaining, but as with much of what the museum does, there’s a more serious purpose in the background. In addition to cataloging more than 2,000 piano rolls, the paper rolls that tell the player piano what tune to play, Ford and Finley are opening a window onto a form of music making that is at once largely forgotten, and surprisingly current.
In the first three decades of the last century, player pianos were big business, and they provided opportunities for African American and female composers to record popular music, Ford said in a phone interview. The most prolific maker of piano rolls was J. Lawrence Cook, a Black man born in Tennessee in 1899 who is credited with recording between 10,000 and 30,000 piano rolls in a career that spanned most of the 20th century. (He died in 1976.)
Cook worked mainly for an outfit called QRS, which is still in operation and still selling piano rolls. The Main Street Museum’s collection contains a lot of music from the first half of the 20th century, and earlier, but it also includes some Blondie and Britney Spears. On the QRS website, you can find ABBA and Elton John, among many others. In technological or cultural terms, it’s hard to think of an analogy. A Jodi Picoult novel translated into Latin, perhaps.
The museum’s shelves are so crammed with piano rolls that even to glance through the titles takes a while. I wrote down the names of more than a dozen companies that sold piano rolls: MelOdee, Roadway WordRoll, Vocalstyle, Klavier, Supertone, Play-rite, Imperial song record, Rythmodik. Most of the boxes also bear the names of the pianist who recorded it.
Last Friday night, as is usually the case, the first hour of music came from Stevie Pomije, who moved from Boston to White River Junction a couple of years ago. He plays the player piano with his fingers on the keys. The theme last week was music from movies and TV, and included a player piano performance of Danny Elfman’s brilliant theme song for The Simpsons.
The piano sits on the museum’s stage. It’s an Aeolian and was offered to the museum by a retired Claremont fireman, who was doubly pleased that the instrument would live in a former firehouse. Ford went and looked at it not long after the start of the coronavirus pandemic; he remembers wearing a mask at the time.
The piano needed work, and Ford sent it to Bruce Stevens, who repairs, tunes and restores pianos, player pianos and pump organs at a shop in Wells River, 1,001 Keys. The Vermont Humanities Council provided funding for the repairs. It’s now in working order, though Pomije complained while he was playing it on Friday that a couple of the keys were sticking.
To operate the machine as a player piano, Ford wound a roll into it then sat on the piano bench and worked a pair of foot pedals that move a bellows. The workings of the piano, visible next to the roll, look like a quieter and more graceful version of a haybaler, mechanical arms working up and down.
“There’s something great about seeing the action there working the way it did when it came off the factory floor,” Ford said.
The technology that makes the player piano work prefigured IBM’s early punch-card computer, as well as other forms of analog recording, Ford said.
But the music is what it’s about. Before Pomije arrived, Ford played a few songs and he and museum habitue Chico Eastridge sang along. There’s only one place in the Upper Valley where a person is likely to overhear a question like this: “You want to hear the Minnesota fight song, Chico?” And hear it he did.
The Main Street Museum plays music on Friday nights from around 6 to around 10. Otherwise, the museum is open by appointment. To arrange one, text 802-356-2776 or email info@mainstreetmuseum.org with the word “tour” in the subject line.
Two Rivers Printmaking Studio holds a reception for Jes Raymond, who’s best known as an Americana musician who performs with her husband, Jakob Breitbach, and as a member of The Blackberry Bushes, from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday. The reception opens “What I Owe Wonder,” a show of Raymond’s block prints, on view through April.
If you stop in to White River Junction on Friday evening, make sure you take a walk along South Main and Gates streets to see what Scavenger, Long River and Kishka galleries have to offer.
Norwich Bookstore starts a busy April slate of readings and author talks on Friday with a reading at 7 p.m. Friday by Edith Forbes, from Tracking a Shadow: My Lived Experience with M.S. Forbes, the author of four novels, including Alma Rose and Nowle’s Passing, has been living with multiple sclerosis since 1993. For more information about this another other events, go to norwichbookstore.com.
