Label Type
exhibit signageLabel
Player Piano
Ragtime Automatic Music company
Post-1971
This beautiful dark walnut instrument functions as both a player piano and a standard piano. You may have heard it in MOAH’s Learning Center.
Player pianos are so named because they can play themselves. A pneumatic or electro-chemical mechanism operates the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls that contain the notes to be played and are inserted in a cabinet beneath the keyboard. As the rolls unravel, the mechanism reproduces the music. This instrument uses rolls that contain several pieces of music.
This model of piano always contained a 24-note glockenspiel, bass and snare drums, a cymbal, a tambourine, a volume control, and coin operation or free play selector. (Some of these instruments are visible through the glass beneath the keyboard.) Other pianos mimicked accordions, bass guitars, calliope (flute) pipes, guitars, banjos, and even salsa whistles. Control levers and buttons are used to help customize a performance.
Player piano development dates to the late 1800s. Their popularity waned in the early 1920s, when phonograph records began to replace them. Player pianos often were used in homes for family sing-alongs, and eventually became fixtures at venues including theme parks, casinos, and bars.
MOAH’s player piano is from a California company, Ragtime Automatic Music (also known as Ragtime Automated Music), that was founded in a Modesto basement in 1971. Because the inside of our piano carries the label of the Lester Piano Co., a Philadelphia company that ceased production in the 1960s, it probably was modified through a conversion kit that Ragtime sold for about $5,000. Ragtime’s handmade products were shown in craft fairs, antique shows, and county fairs. Eventually they became common in pizza and ice cream parlors, Sharper Image stores, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums. For a while they even had a monthly gig as prizes on The Price Is Right television show!