Mechanical Music

Mechanical music is music performed by self-playing instruments rather than human performers: music boxes, barrel and fairground organs, calliopes, orchestrions and, most importantly for the recording era, the player piano and reproducing piano. Because the performance is encoded in pinned barrels, punched cards or paper rolls, mechanical instruments preserve performances with machine exactitude and can execute figures beyond human capability. The category spans nineteenth-century domestic music boxes, the piano rolls cut by ragtime and classical pianists in the 1900s-1920s, and *Conlon Nancarrow*'s player-piano studies, composed directly for the machine.