Conference Agenda

In 2016, Steinway premiered the Spirio, billing it as “the world’s finest high resolution player piano” (Steinway & Sons, 2025). Steinway’s Spirio represents a new chapter in the history of mechanical music, one focused on the luxury of experiencing a pianist’s performance without the presence of the performer. The Spirio continues a lineage stretching back to Votey’s 1896 Pianola and later to the reproducing piano (Chanan 1999, 73). Writing about the reproducing piano, Ord-Hume claims it is “simply a player-piano wherein the last vestiges of human control are mechanically performed. It is an instrument which may be switched on and left to play a roll of music, with the self-same certainty of the resulting interpretation as we have today [1970] when we switch on a record player” (193). While this is not entirely accurate in describing the reproducing piano, the Spirio may finally realize this vision.

Though the player piano eventually fell out of favor in the 1930s, largely due to advances in the phonograph and radio, the Spirio revives this lost tradition by positioning itself not as a competitor to recorded music, but as a luxury instrument capable of reproducing live artistry with remarkable fidelity. First introduced in 2016, it has received little scholarly attention thus far. Literature by Loughridge, Katz, and Taylor examines technology’s role in shaping musical labor, but the implications of the Spirio for performance culture remain unexamined.

This paper situates the Spirio within the history of mechanical pianos, exploring how Steinway positions it as an authentic performance reproduction, reviving debates on musical labor, the ontology of the “work,” and mechanical virtuosity. With the advent of Spirio technology, the highest symbol of prestige is no longer attending a great pianist’s concert, but rather owning that concert, performed faithfully by the ghostly in-home robot. Spirio performances even include pianists long dead, such as Rubinstein and Hess, to name just two. By eliminating the visual and material presence of the performer while preserving their artistry, the Spirio raises new questions about what it means to listen, to perform, and to experience music in the twenty-first century.

German organ tablature systems fall into two broad categories: 1) tablature that uses staffed notation for the top voice with letters for the lower voices; and 2) tablature that uses letters for all voices. Willi Apel and succeeding scholars labeled the first category “old” organ tablature and defined it as a combination of mensural notation and letter tablature. This made the second category, using letters for all voices, “new” organ tablature. These conceptions of organ tablature systems are anachronistic and suggest a distinction between staffed and letter tablature that contemporaneous musicians did not make.

Apel and Clyde William Young credit the Leipzig organist Elias Ammerbach with the invention and introduction of “new” organ tablature through the publication of his Orgel oder Instrument Tabulatur (1571). However, tablature systems using letters for all voices begin appearing in manuscripts around 1520, half a century before Ammerbach published his Tabulatur, and coexisted with staffed organ tablature systems throughout the sixteenth century.

The supposed contrast of “old” and “new” tablature further suggests that the systems operate on different principles. But sixteenth-century sources distinguish the staffed component of tablature systems from mensural notation. In the preface to Hans Buchner’s Fundamentum (1551), for example, Christoph Piperinus describes the top voice of “old” tablature as “tablature written among lines and spaces.” Together, with the lower voices in letters, this makes up the “notation style of the organist.” “Old” tablature is not a hybrid notation system combining mensural notation and letter tablature; it is a unified notation system that consistently transmits locations on a keyboard rather than pitches in aural space, whether on a staff or as letters.

This reevaluation not only challenges the conventional dichotomy between “old” and “new” tablature but also provides a deeper understanding of the practical benefits that tablature offered sixteenth and seventeenth century organists. And it shows that they conceived tablature—whether with a staff or without—differently than mensural notation.

Rudolf Serkin hated recording. “Frozen performances,” he called records, and didn’t listen to them at all. And yet he made dozens of recordings for commercial release over six decades. If we add the Library of Congress recitals and appearances at the Marlboro Music Festival, we have hundreds of hours of Serkin performing on record. Imagine Serkin’s horror were he to hear his very first recording as the world hears it today, stuck in overdrive, streaming on YouTube.

In 1928, only twenty-five and just launching his solo concert career, the young Rudolf Serkin traveled to Freiburg, Germany to record piano rolls for the mechanical musical instrument firm Welte & Sons. In choosing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, he scored two firsts: Serkin’s first recording is also the first recorded Goldberg. He would not record the Variations again.

Shortly after Serkin’s death in May 1991, Archiphon released a digital recording of his piano rolls played on the Steinway-Welte piano once owned by the inventor of the Welte-Mignon recording system, Edwin Welte himself. The computer-assisted transfer took place in the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg where the restored instrument now lives. Pristine XR released another recording of Serkin’s Goldberg piano rolls in 2015, this one realized during an exhibition in Switzerland. These two small European record labels, both devoted to preserving historically important but commercially overlooked recordings, would seem to have offered Serkin fans, Goldberg enthusiasts, record collectors, and classical music connoisseurs a great gift. But something is amiss in these two recordings. They don’t sound like Serkin. In fact, they sound uncannily unhuman.

This paper discusses the mysterious Welte recording system, traces the journey of several hundred master rolls from the Welte factory to a barn in the Black Forest to a Hollywood recording studio, and listens to Serkin’s other Bach recordings to contend that the piano engineers for both Archiphon and Pristine XR played the Welte-Mignon device at the wrong speed when digitizing Serkin’s Goldbergs. Ironically, even with the choppy distortion and insufficient sample rate, listening to Serkin’s Goldberg Variations at .75 speed on YouTube gets us closer to his historic 1928 recorded performance.