Piano Rolls and Gender Roles: Decoding the American Player Piano in Historical Context

This dissertation presents a gender-based historical investigation of the player piano during its heyday (1900-1928), focusing on its connections with advertising and the piano roll industry. Broadly influenced by Actor-Network Theory, I contend that this self-playing instrument (in its many forms), with regard to the cultural category of gender, had agency, acting as a medium of communication and a site of negotiation. Specifically, this refers to gender expression and mediation as presented within the frames of player piano advertisements and via performances by female musicians in the piano roll recording studio.

Benefiting from archival research – advertisements, piano rolls, music reviews, photographs, paintings, player piano manuals, sheet music and other primary source material – and situated within the subfield of critical organology, my research is organized through case studies. The first is a reading of the gender codes in player piano and piano advertisements from multiple piano/player piano companies (as well as paintings featuring the piano). The second examines the lives and musical careers of piano roll artists Edythe Baker (1899-1971) and Pauline Alpert (1905-1988). Consisting of biographical summaries (that are the most comprehensive to date in the literature) which incorporate analyses of two performances by these women in the Duo-Art recording studio, this case study utilizes examples of Baker and Alpert’s piano arrangements. Based on Tin Pan Alley tunes, these pieces were written in the piano novelty style – a distinct “White”-dominated musical genre with roots in the popular piano rag.

Framed by background research that includes a detailed historical account of the player piano, the findings of this dissertation are conclusive. Within the context of player piano advertising and female performance in the piano roll studio, the player piano, as a non-human actor enmeshed within a social network of human intermediaries, had a role to play in the expression and mediation of ideas about gender that both contested and conformed to early twentieth-century gender norms in American society.