Eventually fascination with the player-piano gave way to more contemporary musical ideas and mechanisms.
The era of the parlor piano virtuoso was long since over, and although the masterpieces of “classical” and “romantic” composers dominated the repertoires of most major orchestras, as well as the majority of the recorded ‘symphonic’ music available in the latter half of the 20th century, new forms, new instruments, and radical ideas of composition had challenged norms and permanently altered the status quo.
In 1973 composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein initiated a lecture series at Harvard University. Although the context of his material was broad and encompassed much of almost three centuries of western musical canon , his primary focus was on the theme, “Whither Music?”. In order to guide his listeners on this pedagogic journey, Bernstein played the piano in addition to taped versions of musical works. “Whither Music?” was an engaging six-part lecture series presented by a thoroughly knowledgeable professor, and yet it could hardly achieve more than prodding the listener to pursue the notion independently. For while Bernstein taught and played, music was rapidly undergoing a transformation brought about as much by technology as by generational rejections of staid forms and practices.