brettworks

Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented, like MIDI information, note control data. When a perforation passes across a piano’s tracking bar, the corresponding note on the instrument is mechanically triggered.

Piano rolls then, are like proto-MIDI scores by which to trigger note-perfect acoustic instrument renditions. When we listen to an old piano roll that’s been digitized to direct a MIDI-equipped piano, it’s like the ghost of the original player is in front of you. This is the sense I have listening to Peter Phillips’ recordings of piano roll performances captured as MIDI–in this case, a piano roll of Ravel playing his own music. If this really is Ravel–who was, by the way, considered more gifted as a composer than pianist–his presence makes the composition all the more beautiful.