Geelvinck Pianola Museum
Intimate Jordaan museum with over thirty thousand historic piano rolls and self-playing pianos from the early twentieth century.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Geelvinck Pianola Museum in Amsterdam opens in a 1916 New York recording studio, where the Spanish composer Enrique Granados cut a set of piano rolls just after his opera's premiere at the Met, recordings that turned out to be his last before a ferry crossing home went wrong. It traces the pianola's rise as the era's dominant listening technology, with composers from Stravinsky to Debussy recording rolls of their own. The museum, housed in a former Jordaan police station, holds over thirty thousand of these paper strips, each waiting to be pressed back into motion.
This audio guide was created using AI.