Elektra Nonesuch 9 79287-2
Realized by Artis Wodehouse
1. Sweet and Lowdown
(George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin) (3:30)
(from Tip-Toes) Fox Trot, arranged and played by George
Gershwin, April 1926 Duo-Art 713214
2. Novelette In Fourths
(George Gershwin) (2:24)
Salon Selection, played by George Gershwin, 1919
Welte-Mignon 3968
3. That Certain Feeling
(George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin) (2:45)
(from Tip-Toes) Fox Trot, arranged and played by George
Gershwin, April 1926 Duo-Art 713216
4. So Am I
(George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin) (4:14)
(from Lady, Be Good!) Ballad, played by George Gershwin,
September 1925 Duo-Art 102625
5. Rhapsody In Blue
(George Gershwin) (14:22) arranged and played by George
Gershwin
Part 1: played January 1927, Duo-Art 70947 (issued
1927)
Part 2: played May 1925, Duo-Art 68787 (issued 1925)
6. Swanee
(George Gershwin and Irving Caesar) (2:17)
One Step, played by George Gershwin, February 1920 Duo-Art
1649
7. When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get
‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em, You
Don’t Want ‘Em
(George Gershwin and Murray Roth) (1:57)
Fox Trot, played by George Gershwin, September 1916
Universal 202864
8. Kickin’ The Clouds Away
(George Gershwin and B.G. DeSylva) (3:20) (from Tell Me
More)
Fox Trot, played by George Gershwin, July 1925 Duo-Art
713122
9. Idle Dreams
(George Gershwin and Arthur Jackson) (2:59) (from
Scandals of 1920)
Fox Trot, played by George Gershwin, August 1920 Mel-O-Dee
203579
10. On My Mind The Whole Night Long
(George Gershwin and Arthur Jackson) (2:30) (from
Scandals of 1920)
Blues – Fox Trot, played by George Gershwin, August
1920 Universal 203577
11. Scandal Walk
(George Gershwin and Arthur Jackson) (3:15) (from
Scandals of 1920)
Fox Trot, played by George Gershwin, August 1920 Mel-O-Dee
203583
12. An American In Paris
(George Gershwin) (16:35)
played by Milne and Leith, June 1933
Part 1: Duo-Art 74678
Part 2: Duo-Art 74688
___________________________________________________
George Gershwin recalled that one of his first musical
memories went back to the age of six: “I stood outside
a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping
through Rubinstein’s Melody In F. the particular jumps
in the music held me rooted. To this very day I can’t
hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on
125th street, standing there barefoot and in overalls,
drinking it all in avidly.”
The player piano was a central force in American musical
life between 1900 and 1930. Referred to variously as
automatic pianos, pianolas and reproducing pianos, players
of all types were found not only in penny arcades, but in
homes, concert halls, restaurants, saloons, stores –
virtually anywhere music was heard. Player pianos are normal
acoustic pianos except than an internal piano-playing
mechanism works as a computer using air pressure instead of
electrical energy. The paper piano rolls are the
“software” used to activate the notes to play. A
punched hole in a paper piano roll causes a corresponding
note to play as it goes across a “reader”; a
five-note chord has five perforations, and so on. Air
pressure in player pianos is established by foot-pumping the
bellows to exhaust the air. In later models, the bellows
were motor-driven.
Gershwin’s second contact with a player piano was more
sustained than the chance encounter in the penny arcade. At
around the age of 10, he began teaching himself to play at
the home of a friend who had a player piano. Slowly
foot-pumping through a roll, the boy placed his fingers over
the keys as they were depressed by the roll-playing
mechanism. This method of learning was so successful that
when a piano intended for brother Ira Gershwin was hoisted
into the family’s flat, Ira recalled that “No
sooner had the upright been lifted through the window of the
front room then George sat down and played a popular tune of
the day I remember being particularly impressed by his left
hand.”
This incident triggered formal piano studies for Gershwin
who by then was 12. Is progress was so rapid that by the age
of 15, he quit high school and took a position with a large
publishing house, Remick, in New York’s Tin Pan Alley.
There he worked as a song-plugger, demonstrating the
company’s tunes for prospective performers who
routinely visited the publishing house searching for catchy
new material. Gershwin was at the piano daily for hours at a
time, transposing and embellishing to enhance the appeal of
the tunes. Eubie Blake recalled hearing about Gershwin:
“James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts told me of this
very talented ofay [white] piano player at Remick’s.
They said he was good enough to learn some of those terribly
difficult tricks that only a few of us could
master.”
Gershwin’s keyboard skills led him to make piano
rolls, beginning when he was a song-plugger and continuing
through his early career as accompanist to vaudevillians and
as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway. Before the late
twenties, only a player piano could compete with live
performance for sonic presence. The phonograph was still in
its infancy, and the old 78 discs produced a thin, bass-weak
sound. While Gershwin was growing up – he was born in
1898 – player pianos and piano rolls became a huge,
lucrative and lavish industry. Happily, Gershwin’s
roll-making years trace the rise of the player piano; of the
approximately 130 rolls he made, the first was issued in
1916 and the last in 1927. Unfortunately, improvements to
the sound of the much less expensive phonograph and radio
undermined the popularity and perceived affordability of
player pianos. During the late 20’s the once thriving
roll industry declined, crashing decisively at the onset of
the Depression in 1929. As with many other smart and
successful musicians of the era, Gershwin went on to make
disc recordings and to host his own radio program.
Making piano rolls that were spin-offs of his other keyboard
work was a relatively easy way for Gershwin to make some
quick extra money. Pop piano rolls had to be made and
released very quickly because they capitalized on the
popularity of tunes that had recently been released as sheet
music. Intended either for singing or dancing, stereotyped
formats and stock devices permeated the medium. Still, roll
arrangers were always looking for new musical tricks to
amaze and excite the prospective purchaser. One such trick
was to overdub; many more notes could be encoded into a roll
than a single pianist could lay down by hand. The result was
a full, busy and exhilarating sound. Overdubbing can be
heard in sections of That Certain Feeling, Sweet and
Low-Down and Kicking The Clouds Away on this recording as
well as in the Rhapsody in Blue and An American In Paris,
where it is used to mimic the full orchestra.
Gershwin recorded two types of rolls. The first – his
perfection, Mel-O-Dee and Universal rolls – was
designed for playback on player pianos equipped with levers,
knobs and/or buttons that the player pianolist foot-pumping
the roll could interactively manipulate to creat an
expressive performance. The pianolist could often see a
dynamic line ranging from soft to loud printed on the roll
and follow it to guide the interpretation. The second and
more technologically sophisticated type of roll –
Gershwin’s Duo-Art and Welte rolls – were called
reproducing rolls. These were intended for playback on
instruments called reproducing pianos that could
automatically execute dynamics.
Gershwin’s piano roll performances have a different
relationship to his live performance than do his recordings
made via microphone and put on phonograph disc. Gershwin and
his many roll editors over the years jointly assigned
dynamics and determined if roll-arranging tricks were to be
used. While some of Gershwin’s rolls (Swanee, When You
Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, So Am I and
On My Mind The Whole Night Long) were mostly the result of
hand-playing, the others seem to be an amalgam of his hand
playing, his own arranging ideas about scoring, and the
arranging style of the editor with whom he was working at
the time the roll was made. Nevertheless, the best pop music
roll arranging reached the level of artistry. These
arrangements could very effectively mimic the rhythmic
vitality of live performance as well as introduce keyboard
pyrotechnics the likes of which a single performer could not
achieve. When we compare Gershwin’s disc recordings of
That Certain Feeling and Sweet and Low-Down to those tunes
on his rolls, we hear much shared material and a sense of
family resemblance between the performances in the two
mediums. This observation also holds for many sections of
his roll recording of the Rhapsody as they compare to his
truncated Columbia disc performance of 1924.
ABOUT THE ROLLS
Gershwin’s apprentice work as song-plugger,
accompanist and rehearsal pianist provided him with a wealth
of music by others that comprises the majority of his piano
roll arrangements. But in the meantime, the young musician
was amassing his own portfolio of tunes. For instance, the
rough and ready roll of When You Want ‘Em You
Can’t Get ‘Em – a rarity dating from
September, 1916 – was his own arrangement of his first
published song. Later, after the smash hit of Swanee,
Gershwin began to make more arrangements of his own music.
These culminated in the ambitious Duo-Art rendition of
Rhapsody In Blue.
Each of the selections chosen for this recording marks
important points in Gershwin’s development as a
composer and illustrates his pianistic mastery. Apart form
the charming but juvenile When You Want ‘Em You
Can’t Get ‘Em, there is Gershwin’s
performance of Swanee that reveals much more about his
forceful virtuosity as well as the deft harmonic touches
which became a hallmark of his style. Another rare roll is
his out-and-out blues treatment of On My Mind The Whole
Night Long, an extraordinary and prescient performance that
gives us a good idea of how the composer played circa 1920.
Tow other previously unrecorded rolls are Idle Dreams and
Scandal Walk, Gershwin’s arrangements of tunes he
wrote for the Scandals of 1920. The Scandals featured
elaborately staged dance numbers with the mostly-female
performers in fanciful and provocative costumes. Just such
exotic stage pageantry is conjured up by the orientalism of
Idle Dreams, whereas Scandal Walk may have been a roll cut
for a grand player piano the top of which served as a dance
floor for lead singer-dancer Ann Pennington! On CD for the
first time is his roll of his solo piano composition,
Novelette in Fourths. How the then (1919) little-known
composer convinced the Welte Company to issue a roll of this
unpublished original piano solo is a mystery.
Finally, with the great success of Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
and the musicals, Lady, Be Good!, Tip-Toes and Tell Me More,
the roll industry giant, the Aeolian Company, accorded royal
treatment to the composer. First, Aeolian issued a solo
piano 2-roll set of the Rhapsody. Aeolian also put Gershwin
in collaboration with their great pop roll editor, Frank
Milne, and Gershwin recorded what proved to be four stunning
Duo-Art roll arrangements of some of his most popular tunes
at the time: That Certain Feeling, Sweet and Low-Down, So Am
I and Kicking The Clouds Away.
The last selection on this CD is Frank Milne’s 2-roll
arrangement of An American In Paris. Cut in 1933, it is one
of the most impressive and powerful roll performances of the
era. After the crash of the piano roll industry, the
severely curtailed Aeolian Company kept Milne on as its lone
roll editor and ceased using performing artists. According
to Milne’s children, by that time and probably much
earlier he was so skilled at arranging that he did not need
to us a recording apparatus to generate the performance.
Much as a composer notates a score, he prepared roll masters
by drawing lines on a roll of special graph paper which
served as a template for perforating the holes. The roll of
An American In Paris is identified, however, as being played
by Milne and “Leith.” We now know that
“Leith” was one of Milne’s pseudonyms; to
put an arrangement of this complexity forward to the public,
it had to be represented as a 4-hand performance.
We have no evidence that Gershwin supervised Milne’s
arrangement of An American In Paris but the arranger had
previously worked with Gershwin on his late Duo-Art song
rolls. Milne’s version of An American In Paris
ingeniously evokes not only the full sonority of an
orchestra but also the vitality of a live performance.
About The Disklavier and Technology
The piano used to play the rolls for this recording is a
9-foot Yamaha Disklavier grand piano. This instrument was
chosen because its computer capability offered unprecedented
opportunities to refine the performances. In addition, this
particular Disklavier piano is a high-quality full-sized
concert grand producing a richness of sound and dynamic
range which until now has been unusual for piano rolls
recorded for CD.
Yamaha Disklavier pianos are capable of recording any
performance played on them note-for-note as well as
reflecting the nuances of interpretation. To accomplish this
task, Disklaviers are fitted with a computer and optic
sensors that record a hand-played performance on floppy
disk. On playback from the disk, the Disklavier’s keys
move up and down like the old player piano.
A rare 1911 88-note Pianola was used for this project for
those of Gershwin’s rolls requiring a
pianolist’s interpretive intervention. During the
heyday of the player piano this comparable piano-playing
device was also available for roll playback. A heavy, bulky
machine, the Pianola is equipped with expression levers and
felt tipped fingers and can be rolled up to any piano.
It’s fingers are positioned over the keys, and a roll
is inserted. Foot-pumping activates the roll to move the
fingers; the pianolist can play with expression by skillful
foot-pumping and manipulating the expression levers. When
the 1911 Pianola operated by Artis Wodehouse played the
rolls on the Disklavier, the Disklavier in turn recorded in
the same way it does any live pianist. The best takes of
each roll captured on disk were then further edited to
improve the interpretation. Finally, the 9-foot Disklavier
was taken to the auditorium of The Academy of Arts and
Letters in New York City where it played Gershwin’s
rolls from a floppy disk for the microphone, as if
Gershwin’s ghost were present at the session.
Gershwin’s reproducing rolls were prepared quite
differently. Using a piano roll reader, Richard Tonnesen of
Custom Music Rolls converted the paper rolls into computer
files which specified the location and length of each hole
on the roll. Computer programmer Richard Brandle wrote a
computer simulation of the reproducing pianos which
translated the computer files into MIDI representing the
notes, their duration and position in time and relative
loudness as executed by the old reproducing pianos. The
resulting performances could be played on any Disklavier
from floppy disk. Placed in front of the recording
microphone, the Disklavier concert grand then played
Gershwin’s reproducing rolls from floppy disks for the
CD recording.
Both the Rhapsody In Blue and An American In Paris were
edited beyond the Brandle-Tonnesen Duo-Art conversion to
refine and enhance the interpretation. For the recording of
An American In Paris, a second 7-foot Disklavier grand piano
was used in tandem with the 9-foot instrument. Both pianos
playing together made it possible to render an accurate and
more expressive rendition of this mammoth arrangement.
– Artis Wodehouse
___________________________________________________
Also Available
A selection of Gershwin’s rolls will be available on
disk from Yamaha for playback on the Disklavier. Warner
Publications will also be releasing a book of six of the
rolls heard on this CD, transcribed and arranged for one or
two pianos.
Acknowledgments
This recording only came to fruition with the generous
assistance of many. They are: Yamaha Corporation of America
for equipment and help in editing the rolls, Edmund
Wodehouse, Nancy Hager and Brooklyn College, The National
Endowment For The Humanities, Michael Montgomery, Janet
Tonnesen, Randolph Herr, Joseph Patrych, Jeff Volkaerts of
Yamaha for his editing assistance, Ezequiel Vinao for his
assistance editing the Rhapsody In Blue and An American In
Paris, Cathy MacBride of Yamaha, Eric Johnson of Yamaha
Concert and Artists Services, Pro Piano, Judy Welsh, Jim
Callahan, Burt Whelan, Richard Groman of Keystone Music
Rolls Company, Ernest Ulmer, George Litterst, Jeffery Wood,
Willard Burkhardt, Sal Mele, Steven Chapman, Michael Miccio
and Richard Smith
Produced and Engineered by Max Wilcox
November 1992 and February and June 1993 at The American
Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City
Yamaha Disklavier DCFIIIS
Cover photograph courtesy of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin
Trusts
Design: John Williams Costa
George Gershwin’s performances contained in this
recording is licensed by the Gershwin Family.
Original piano rolls courtesy of Keystone Music Roll
Company
Tracks 1, 3, 4 © 1925 WB Music Corp for the United
States. Chappell & Co., and New World Music Company
(Ltd.) administered by WB Music Corp., for the British
Reversionary Territories. New World Music Company (Ltd.)
administered by WB Music Corp., for the rest of the world.
All rights reserved.
Track 2 © 1993 George Gershwin Music. All rights
administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved.
Tracks 5* and 12** © 1924* © 1929** WB
Music Corp for the United States. Chappell & Co. for
the British Reversionary Territories. New World Music
Company (Ltd.) administered by WB Music Corp., for the
rest of the world. All rights reserved.
Track 6 © 1925 WB Music Corp. and Irving Caesar Music
Corp., for the United States. Chappell & Co., and WB
Music Corp., for the British Reversionary Territories. New
World Music Company (Ltd.) and WB Music Corp., for the
rest of the world. All rights reserved.
Track 7 © 1916 PolyGram International Publishing,
Inc. All rights reserved. Track 8 © 1925 WB Music
Corp., and Stephen Ballentine Music for the United States.
Chappell & Co. and Warner Bros. Inc. for the British
Reversionary Territories. New World Music Company (Ltd.)
administered by WB Music Corp and Warner Bros. Inc. for
the rest of the world. All rights reserved.
Tracks 9, 10, 11 © 1920 WB Music Corp for the United
States. Chappell & Co. and WB Music Corp. for the
British Reversionary Territories. New World Music Company
(Ltd.) administered by WB Music Corp., and WB Music Corp.
for the rest of the world. All rights reserved.
All selections ASCAP.
