Gallery

Reactions to the Record II

About the Symposium

During January 14-18, 2009, the Stanford Department of Music hosted its second international symposium inviting renowned musicians and scholars to explore the vivid styles of performance heard on the earliest recordings and player piano rolls. This unique gathering of performers, musicologists, composers, and enthusiasts celebrated a Golden Age of performers on records and film. The symposium explored styles that began to vanish with the First World War, the roots of these styles in the nineteenth century, and present-day responses and reactions. The symposium was a forum for experiment and dialogue—should we (can we!) revive these lost approaches for performance today and in the future?

Events included eight concerts, lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations of historic phonographs from the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, an improvisation contest, and world premieres of newly discovered audio and video documents of historic performers. The symposium began the afternoon of January 14th and ended with the Sunday evening concert (January 18th) by Rex Lawson on pianola. Distinguished scholar and pianist Charles Rosen performed on Friday evening and gave a talk on Saturday morning. Distinguished author Joseph Horowitz gave a talk on Friday afternoon. Friday's midday concert featured an improvisation contest between pianists on themes submitted by the audience.

Reactions to the Record II Symposium was sponsored by SiCa through grants for Curricular Innovation in the Arts and Arts Programs and Events.

About Rex Lawson's Lecture/Recital: "The Player Piano and Its Music"

The situation in which the player piano finds itself with regard to the world of academic music study is most unusual. Since the Second World War it has largely been the preserve of collectors, who mostly have no musical or academic training, and attitudes towards its music have frequently been molded by instruments of poor tonal quality, by the musical tastes of a generation that grew up loving Elvis Presley, and by writings that have almost never been subjected to any process of peer review.

Faced with this elusive world of a lost technology, musicologists have all too readily accepted second-rate writings and recordings as though they represent the ultimate truth about the instrument. Poor quality CDs and unproven theories have been quoted to portray the reproducing piano as a lost cause, incapable of any faithful reproduction of performances, and the gigantic repertoire of nonrecorded rolls has been almost universally misunderstood, along with the place of the pianolist in the world of music. Rex Lawson will attempt to peddle the truth.

About Rex Lawson

For over thirty years, Rex Lawson has been at the forefront of pianola music throughout the world. He has performed in some fifteen countries in Europe and North America, broadcast on hundreds of occasions and is well represented on both LP and CD. From Carnegie Hall to the Last Night of the Proms, with conductors from Pierre Boulez to Sir Andrew Davis, he has brought the pianola back to the very highest level of international concert-giving.

Concurrent with these professional musical activities, Rex has been very active in bringing an element of scholarship to the world of the player piano. He and Denis Hall founded the Pianola Institute in 1985, and together they edit its annual . Rex writes the website at www.pianola.org, which is widely regarded as the authoritative source of information about the history and music of the different types of player piano. Rex Lawson lives in south-east London with a wife who manages orchestral conductors, and a collection of some 11,000 music rolls.