A01=Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg
Author_Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg
Beethoven Hero
Category=AVRG
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=JBCC1
Category=PDX
Chopin
Chopin's Music
chopins
Chopin’s Music
discourse
Discourse Networks
domestic music-making
Early Popular Visual Culture
early twentieth-century fiction
Edwardian Fiction
Edwardian literature
end
Energy Conservation
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
fiction
Franz Liszt
gender and music
guest
howards
Lucy Honeychurch
maurice
Maurice Guest
mechanical music devices
Mechanical Virtuosity
mechanisation of musical performance
music
music technology history
networks
Piano Player
Piano Rolls
Player Mechanism
Player Piano
Player Piano Roll
Programme Music
rolls
Sinister Street
Sol Fa
Sonata Form
Tonic Sol Fa
Tonic Sol Fa Movement
Traditional Pianism
Vladimir De Pachmann
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780367880262
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 12 Dec 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In her study of music-making in the Edwardian novel, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg argues that the invention and development of the player piano had a significant effect on the perception, performance and appreciation of music during the period. In contrast to existing devices for producing music mechanically such as the phonograph and gramophone, the player piano granted its operator freedom of individual expression by permitting the performer to modify the tempo. Because the traditional piano was the undisputed altar of domestic and highly gendered music-making, Björkén-Nyberg suggests, the potential for intervention by the mechanical piano's operator had a subversive effect on traditional notions about the status of the musical work itself and about the people who were variously defined by their relationship to it. She examines works by Dorothy Richardson, E.M. Forster, Henry Handel Richardson, Max Beerbohm and Compton Mackenzie, among others, contending that Edwardian fiction with music as a subject undermined the prevalent antithesis, expressed in contemporary music literature, between a nineteenth-century conception of music as a means of transcendence and the increasing mechanisation of music as represented by the player piano. Her timely survey of the player piano in the context of Edwardian commercial and technical discourse draws on a rich array of archival materials to shed new light on the historically conditioned activity of music-making in early twentieth-century fiction.
Cecilia Bjorkén-Nyberg is Senior Lecturer in English at Halmstad University, Sweden.
