The Piano Man
By Kate Hofstetter
Larry Norman met his first player piano when his parents rented a lakeside cottage back in the 1950s. It took just one rainy afternoon and a handful of music rolls for him to fall in love.
In the 1970s, Norman began collecting rolls and bought his first player piano. Today, with an estimated 20,000 rolls, four player pianos and one player reed pump organ, Norman’s Smith Mountain Lake home sounds like a carnival, a cathedral, vaudeville, or a concert hall, depending on his mood or requests from wide-eyed visitors.
Norman figures there’s not enough time left in his life to play his complete collection, but he’s trying.
In 1993, as an engineer with General Electric in California, Norman was sent to Salem, Virginia, on temporary assignment. He was later offered a permanent position and ended up at the Lake.
“This is Arthur,” Norman said, pointing to a life-size stuffed rag doll with a sheet of music in his hand. Arthur sits in a prominent position in Norman’s music room. “Can you count all the instruments?” he asked with a smile.
Including three grand pianos, there are at least 41 instruments displayed in the room that features an entire wall of player piano rolls. Each one appears to be antique.
A candelabra lights a 1923 Knabe Parlor Grand player piano while twin candelabras adorn a 1928 Charles Stieff Baby Grand on the opposite wall. Buried under antique brass horns, Sesame Street characters, a stack of 78 rpm records and, of course, rolls and rolls of music, is a baby grand Weber with a “Concertola.” This rare instrument is designed to play multiple rolls from a remote machine.
“It doesn’t work,” Norman said with a dismissing wave of his hand.
The workings of a player piano boggle the mind. Briefly, on an 88 note duo art piano – meaning it is played by roll or hand – a music roll is fed across a tracker bar with 88 holes, one for each key. Tiny rubberized tubes lead to each key and are connected to a pneumatic that, by letting out air, sends up a rod which strikes the designated key. On most players, a person pumps foot pedals to create enough vacuum so the piano works. The pianos owned by Norman are all electric – called reproducers – and more complicated.
When Norman became owner of the Knabe, it needed complete restoration. The family who owned it used the open back to display houseplants, which rusted the wire. Mice had damaged keys and chewed the rubber tubing. He did all the mechanical restoration himself.
It is cheaper, Norman said, to buy a working player piano than it is to rebuild one. Working players can be bought for as little as $2,000. The Knabe took him more than a year to restore, but had he hired someone to do it, it would have cost more than $3,000.
In the dining area is a beautiful upright Steinway. It is fully electric and was built in 1914, one of only 400 upright players. Rolls for the Steinway are quite scarce, but Norman has about 5,000. How does he find them?
“They find me,” he claimed of all his music rolls. He also has a nice collection of Welte music rolls which he said are “extremely rare.” The Welte factory in Germany, which was among the top producers in the world, was wiped out during World War II. They managed to save many of the original Welte rolls by storing them in caves until after the war.
When you have all these piano rolls, it is important to know how to repair them, said Norman, who has a special table for repairing rolls. The edges most often need to be repaired with paper tape, however, occasionally parts in the middle must also be mended or a leader repaired. He has written a booklet explaining how to do this.
Norman can also duplicate rolls. He has found a woman in Texas who has computer software that will punch out the holes (five rolls at a time). Norman prints his own box labels and roll leaders on his computer. This capability led him to form his own company called Roller Tunes, and he sells worldwide. He also has a company called Larry’s Music Roll Auction, which, he said, nets him about 2 cents per hour.
Among Norman’s favorite clubs for player piano and roll music enthusiasts are The Music Box Society (mbsi.org) and the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors’ Association (amica.org). To learn more about Norman’s companies, visit his web site at home.earthlink.net/~rollertunes or email him at
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