Bruckner on Piano Rolls
================== Anton Bruckner's music also found its way on to piano rolls. The firm of Hupfeld, located in Leipzig, Germany, certainly published the whole of the Fourth Symphony on roll, as early as the autumn of 1913. Since the automatic reproducing piano was so prevalent in the USA, many Americans tend to think that all piano rolls are recordings, in the sense that they represent some particular performance. That is not the case, however, and the Hupfeld, rolls, like the majority of piano rolls, were simply transcriptions from the sheet music. The attached image is of a page from a Hupfeld catalogue supplement published in the autumn of 1913. I can't be more specific, but it came between the general catalogue published in September and the Christmas supplement for that same year. They fitted the work on to six rolls, splitting the first and last movements into two each. This particular entry deals with their series of 73-note rolls, one of their proprietary standards, but they also issued Bruckner on their full-scale, 88-note series. I know that because I saw some rolls many years ago in Buffalo, but I don't have access to them now. For more information on the Hupfield DEA Reproducing Piano, click here. | ||||||
