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I Cry to (for) Pianolas






11.08.25The first time a pianola moved me to tears, I remember it clearly: at the Museum Voorlinden, on a November day in 2023. Then again, on a November day in 2025, a pianola at the Pianola Museum in Amsterdam did the same.
 Its notes should have been mechanical, precise, robotic, but they were so human, with breaths, tenderness, and dynamics. The way the keys moved, with intention and with emotion, was as if it longed to be real. So much passion, so much desire to live, to feel, to exist beyond its strings and mechanisms. The way it tried to take on a life of its own. When I was watching the pianola play, especially at Museum Voorlinden, with the people walking in the back with umbrellas in the rain, it took on center stage, as a proper performer, and the people became the background music.

And I felt pity. I was more moved by it than by an ordinary performance, precisely because of the fragility of this borrowed life given to inanimate objects. The temporary life it takes on, gifted by us, that it cannot keep. There was a sense of odd cruelty in me as a listener. It was performing for me and there is a gratitude instilled into every note, carefully hammered into the strings, thanking me for witnessing its existence. When a person of flesh and blood plays, even when the piece ends, they remain. But the pianola, after its song, falls back into silence, waiting once again for someone to bring it back.

I thought about the people who punched the holes in the piano rolls. That was their discretion, deciding how the music should be played and how it should be experienced. In a way, it was also taking on the life of the composer, long after they had passed. So the pianola was, also in a way, living longer than any human could.

And that exact juxtaposition of the pianola’s existence, its transient immortality, might be the exact reason why it moves me. It is both ephemeral and eternal, fragile and enduring. For a moment, it is alive. And then it is gone. And yet in that brief, borrowed life, it can take on a different emotion, a different voice, and a different story. The pianola lives, dies, and lives again, over and over.



AMIE TIAN