Peter Phillips

A chance meeting in 1976 with Australian musicologist and reproducing piano roll aficionado Denis Condon (1933-2012) set Peter Phillips on a life-long journey developing technologies to make these historic recordings playable. An engineer and lecturer by profession, Peter is also a pianist with a profound love of the piano. Acquiring an Ampico reproducing piano in 1977 brought about the development of a means of recording Ampico rolls as digital data using a pneumatic roll reader, In early 2000, Peter began construction of a roll reader that could record all types of reproducing piano rolls, later recording the entire Condon collection. To make the roll recordings playable on a contemporary digital instrument was a task, often referred to as emulation, that Peter began working on in 2013. This required developing accurate models of the expression regulating systems of the various types of reproducing pianos. This work is detailed in his PhD thesis from Sydney University, completed in 2017. Peter recently worked with the Sydney and Cincinnati S.O. to bring Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to the concert hall stage using his MIDI files of Gershwin’s 1924 Duo-Art roll recordings of the work. In 1978, the Duo-Art vorsetzer he built was used to make recordings with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra of Percy Grainger playing the Grieg Piano Concerto. He has given talks at numerous conferences and remains an active figure working with universities and other specialists in the field.