Greek Music Piano Rolls in the United States

Abstract

In “Greek Piano Rolls in the U.S.,” collector Meletios Pouliopoulos presents ground-breaking research on Greek piano roll recordings of the 1920s and 1930s. Player pianos were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and piano roll companies, like record distributers, issued significant quantities of Greek piano rolls to target the ethnic market. Pouliopoulos conducted interviews and explored existing catalogs to unearth the forgotten history of ethnic, and particularly Greek, music produced on piano rolls by the QRS Company of Buffalo, NY and Alector. He also correlates the production of rolls to both sheet music publications and phonograph recordings of the time, as well as to the production of music by particular artists or in some genres rarely heard today.