Conference Agenda

As the first-known American mechanical instrument collector, Harvey Roehl (1924—2000)’s enduring contributions to the preservation and study of player pianos have earned his reputation as a pioneer in the field of mechanical music history in the United States. As the founder of Vestal Press in 1961, Roehl created a publishing house that became synonymous with mechanical music scholarship, producing a large collection of books and manuals dedicated to the history, restoration, and cultural significance of player pianos and other automatic instruments. His pioneering work, Player Piano Treasury: The Scrapbook History of the Mechanical Piano in America, remains a cornerstone in the field, but his impact extended well beyond this single publication.

This paper explores Roehl’s efforts to chronicle the history and mechanisms of the player piano, focusing on his meticulous documentation of technological innovations and his dedication to preserving historical materials. Under his leadership, Vestal Press published a range of influential works, including The Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments by Q. David Bowers and various reprints of rare technical manuals, trade catalogs, and advertisements. These publications provided enthusiasts and researchers with invaluable resources for understanding and restoring mechanical music instruments.

Roehl’s commitment to fostering a broader appreciation of player pianos and related technologies helped revitalize interest in these instruments during a time when they were at risk of being forgotten. This paper highlights Vestal Press’s unique role in shaping the mechanical music community, its contribution to advancing scholarship, and its influence on the preservation movement. By examining Roehl’s publications and collections, the presentation will illuminate the critical intersection of music, technology, and cultural history that defines the player piano’s legacy in the United States.

With the introduction of incandescent electric lighting in the 1880s, women began to play brazenly with newly direct forms of stage illumination. Dancers and singers performed with battery-powered lights attached to their bodies and hair. And from the 1890s, Loïe Fuller and her many imitators experimented with bold projections of colored light against silk costumes, most famously in their Fire Dances. The result was an audiovisual phenomenon in which women, in a reversal of prior practice, were directors of light.

The illuminated woman had come to bear unsavory connotations in the late 19^th century. Tropes included the prostitute alone under a streetlight, or the music hall coryphée, lit from below by hellish gas footlights. Performers in flammable tulle, meanwhile, had suffered horrific accidents from catching on stage lamps. Electric incandescence, however, promised safety and was often personified as a fairy-like, feminine figure. This paper proposes that the light dances of Fuller and others challenged and toyed dramatically with assumptions about women as vulnerable objects of illumination, and about electricity as magic. In their simulations of fire, these women rendered themselves both manipulator and victim, conjurer and flame.

While ample research has been carried out on Fuller, few have examined the sonic dimensions of these Fire Dances, and even fewer the wider context of the light-based dances that preceded and followed her. Taking Britain as a case study, I uncover new details about electric light performances of the late 19^th century, including the scenarios in which they appeared and the music used. In so doing, I reveal a moment in which audiences revelled in aestheticized, musicalized flame – made possible by artificial light – as a demonstration of human control over nature.