Editing Player piano (section)

=== 1900–1910 ===
[[Image:Pneumatic piano.png|thumb|left|upright|220px|The mechanism of a player piano.<ol style="margin-left:1.5em;">
<li><!-- 1. --> Pedal.
<li><!-- 2. --> Pedal connection.
<li><!-- 3. --> Exhauster (one only shown).
<li><!-- 4. --> Reservoir; high tension (low-tension reservoir not shown.)
<li><!-- 5. --> Exhaust trunk.
<li><!-- 6. --> Exhaust tube to motor.
<li><!-- 7. --> Air space above primary valves.
<li><!-- 8. --> Secondary valves.
<li><!-- 9. --> Striking pneumatic.
<li><!-- 10. --> Connection from pneumatic to action of piano.
<li><!-- 11. --> Piano action.
<li><!-- 12. --> Pneumatic motor.
<li><!-- 13. --> Trackerboard (music roll passes over trackerboard).</ol>]]

Votey advertised the Pianola widely, making unprecedented use of full-page color advertisements. It was sold initially for $250, and then other, cheaper makes were launched. A standard 65-note format evolved, with {{convert |11+1/4|in|mm|adj=mid|-wide}} rolls and holes spaced 6 to the inch, although several player manufacturers used their own form of roll incompatible with other makes.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Chicago Coin-Operated Piano and Orchestrion Rolls |url=https://www.mechanicalmusicpress.com/history/articles/cgorolls/cgo_rolls.htm? |access-date=2025-04-27 |website=www.mechanicalmusicpress.com}}</ref>

By 1903, the [[Aeolian Company]] had more than 9,000 roll titles in their catalog, adding 200 titles per month. Many companies' catalogs ran to thousands of rolls, mainly consisting of light, religious, or classical music. [[Ragtime music]] also featured.<ref>{{Cite web |title=notes - Westfield Center |url=https://westfield.org/conferences/pianola/schedule/notes.html |access-date=2025-04-27 |website=westfield.org}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Aeolian Piano Rolls (1903) |url=https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/aeolian-piano-rolls-1903/ |access-date=2025-04-27 |website=The Public Domain Review |language=en}}</ref>

Melville Clark introduced two important features to the player piano: the full-scale roll which could play every note on the piano keyboard, and the internal player as standard.

By the end of the decade, the piano player device and the 65-note format became obsolete. This caused problems for many small manufacturers, who had already invested in 65-note player operations, ultimately resulting in rapid consolidation in the industry.

A new, full-scale roll format, playing all 88 notes, was agreed at an industry conference in [[Buffalo, New York]] in 1908 at the so-called [[Buffalo Convention]].  This kept the 11{{frac|1|4}}-inch roll, but now had smaller holes spaced at 9 to the inch. This meant that any player piano could now play any make of roll. This consensus was crucial for avoiding a costly [[format war]], which plagued almost every other form of entertainment medium that followed roll music.

While the player piano matured in America, an inventor in Germany, Edwin Welte, was working on a player which would reproduce all aspects of a performance automatically, so that the machine would play back a recorded performance exactly as if the original pianist were sitting at the piano keyboard. Known as a Reproducing Piano, this device, the [[Welte-Mignon]], was launched in 1904. It created new marketing opportunities, as manufacturers could now get the foremost pianists and composers of the day to record their performances on a piano roll. This allowed owners of player pianos to experience a professional performance in their own homes on their own instruments, exactly as the original pianist had played it.

Aeolian introduced Metrostyle in 1901 and the Themodist in 1904, the Themodist being an invention which was said to bring out the melody clearly above the accompaniment.<ref name="New York Sun">''New York Sun'', 14 March 1909.</ref> Sales grew rapidly, and with the instruments now relatively mature, in this decade a wider variety of rolls became available. Two major advances were the introduction of the hand-played roll, both classical and popular, and the word roll.
* Hand-played rolls introduced [[musical phrasing]] into the rolls, so that player pianists did not have to introduce it through the use of tempo controls, which few felt inclined to do.
* Word rolls featured printed lyrics in the margins,<ref name="Sanjek 1988 3">{{cite book|author=Russell Sanjek|title=American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Volume III: From 1900-1984|url={{Google books|EzVesnkLEtUC|page=29|plainurl=yes}}|volume=3|date=28 July 1988|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-802127-8|page=29|oclc=300414899 |access-date=July 28, 2022}}</ref> making it simple to use players to accompany singing in the home, a popular activity before radio and disc recordings became widely available.

The other major advance was the arrival in America of two commercial rivals for the Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano: the [[Ampico]] (from 1911 but fully 're-enacting' by 1916) and the Duo-Art (1914). Artrio-Angelus also introduced a reproducing player from 1916. When World War I came in 1914, German patents were seized in the US. In England, Aeolian had a huge factory and sales network and easily outsold the Ampico. Other makers of Reproducing systems, Hupfeld Meisterspiel DEA (1907) and Philipps Duca (c 1909), were successful in Europe. Hupfeld perfected an 88 note reproducing system, the Triphonola, in 1919, and around 5% of players sold were Reproducing Pianos.

In America by the end of the decade, the new 'jazz age' and the rise of the fox-trot confirmed the player piano as the instrument of popular music, with classical music increasingly relegated to the reproducing piano. Most American roll companies stopped offering large classical catalogs before 1920, and abandoned 'instrumental' rolls (those without words) within a few years.

In England, the Aeolian Company continued to sell classical material, and customers remained willing to contribute to performances by following directions printed on the rolls and operate the hand and foot controls themselves. Sydney Grew, in his manual ''The Art of the Piano Player'', published in London in 1922, said that "it takes about three years to make a good player-pianist of a man or woman of average musical intelligence. It takes about seven years to make a good pianist, or organist, or singer".<ref>Quoted in Leikin, Anatole. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=cSSgCwAAQBAJ&dq=player+piano+sydney+grew&pg=PA10 The Performing Style of Alexander Scriabin]'' (2016), p.10</ref> Word rolls never became popular in England, as they cost 20% more than non-word rolls. As a result, post-World War I American and British roll collections looked very different.