"If music be the food of love, play on." – William Shakespeare
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – When you really think about music, you begin to recall that music has always been with us – from the beat of our mother's heart to ancestral flutes, and on into the present.
Music can be found on elevators and in symphony halls; it's in the movies we watch and on our devices.
Then there's the whole world of music in nature, with its melodious bird song, singing breezes, as well as the refrain of harmonious creek song as it bubbles over boulders in its path.
Each culture has always had its own form of music. This music has spanned millennia, reaching back more than 55,000 years.
There have always been a number of influences on a particular culture's music, such as technological advances, socio-economics and even a culture's climate figures into the music equation.
In prehistoric times the tribal peoples of North America were able to make use of their surroundings to utilize bones and branches or twigs for clappers and flutes – and, of course, their own voices.
In ancient Greece music factored into their theater and into choruses.
The diversity of music and modes of playing it are vast. There is classical traditional music which followed the ending of the Roman Empire, cathedral music performed in enormous churches, the Gregorian chants of the Medieval era, and on and on.
What some of our Lake County pioneers may have enjoyed is piano music.
Later on, the player piano or pianola was enjoyed, several of which may be found in our local museums around the county.
The pianola was patented in 1897 by American E. S. Votey. These amazing pianos each held a pneumatic operating mechanism that played piano tunes on premade music rolls.
When the pianola arrived on the scene there was a flurry of large advertising campaigns to signify the arrival of the $250 music machines.
This self-playing piano machine was more than a novelty, however. It perforated paper rolls really rolled out the tunes!
There was a time in America when around half of the pianos in the population's homes were of the player piano type.
There were several companies that manufactured player pianos.
In Germany Edwin Welle devised a piano that had play-back capabilities so that performances could be listened to again and again.
The Aeolian Co. was a popular manufacturer as well as Ampico Co. Ampico was an abbreviation for American Piano Co.
After a time, song words were added to the paper rolls, allowing for singalongs to occur beside the piano.
Sales of the player pianos peaked at about 1924, when upgrades to the recordings played on phonographs occurred.
Then, after the radio became popular, and next, the 1929 stock market crash caused sales of the beautiful pianos declined further.
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also formerly wrote for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.
Lake County Time Capsule: Music 101 and the player piano
- Kathleen Scavone
- Posted On