Piano Style Research Articles

“When I Say Get It”: A Brief History of the Boogie

One night was laying down. heard mama and papa talking. heard papa tell mama to let that boy 'Cause in hive, and to come out. --John Lee Hooker, Chillen We love to on a Saturday night. --T. Rex, I Love to [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I like to Madonna proclaimed in the title track of her 2000 release, Music: it's like riding on the wind and never goes away. The boogie-woogie--or just for short--born one hundred years before Madonna sang its praises, had survived into a new millennium and, as far at least as that pop songstress was concerned, would be around forever. The (at any rate, a by that name) had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century among black piano players in the rural South, had migrated to the city, and had been embraced in turns by white pop-crooners, middle-class concert-goers, jazz pioneers, and electric hillbillies. It had helped give birth to rock 'n' roll and had lent its name and at least some of its ethos to glam rockers, disco dancers, and gangsta rappers. By the time reached Madonna, by then a long way from its roots, the was not just a musical idiom--indeed, was no longer that at all--but a kind of drug, an oxygen and Holy Spirit: it touches everything I'm in, Madonna sang, apparently using the phrase interchangeably with music itself; got to have every day. Whatever was, this seemed to be at once everything and nothing, impossible to pin down, define, or explain: the wind. (1) The first documented appearance of the phrase was in the title and lyrics of a 1928 recording by pianist Clarence Smith. The record, Top's Boogie Woogie, reflected an upbeat and low-rumbling, improvisation- and percussion-heavy style of piano playing that had followed migrants like Smith from the South into the urban centers of the North. (Smith was born in Troy, Alabama, began his career in Birmingham, and by the early 1920s relocated again to Pittsburgh). The thing was blues, perhaps, but a distinctive subset of the blues. Another Alabama-born pianist, Charles Davenport, later claimed to have introduced Smith to the term boogie-woogie, though Smith had already mastered the style. In an interview in the 195os Davenport recalled first witnessing a Pine Top performance, years earlier in a Pittsburgh honky-tonk, and telling the pianist: Boy, look here, you sure have a mean boogie-woogie. Pinetop, Davenport said, didn't know what he was playing nohow, but he happily adopted the phrase, incorporating prominently into that breakthrough 1928 record. For the next few years Smith, Davenport, and others recorded a number of tunes in the same thumping style, popularizing both the sound and the name. With the spread of 78-RPM records, the label boogie-woogie, or the abbreviated boogie, would quickly come to eclipse the other names by which that previously had been known. (2) If the boogies of Pine Top and Cow Cow and their piano-playing contemporaries shared a common sound, that sound would seem absent altogether from the twenty-first-century boogie-woogie put forth by Madonna. Musically, her recording had little to do with the boogies that had gone before, but certainly, some thread of the original remained. Madonna's musical bearings, and her notion of what was to harkened back not to the Pine Top era so much as the disco dance culture of the 1970s: was perhaps the most ubiquitous word in the disco lexicon, and by the early 198os the term was synonymous with dance--or even with movement itself. To say, Let's boogie in the 197os or '8os could mean, Let's dance, Let's get on, or simply, Let's go--let's get out of here, let's move. (Evoking this last connotation, NASCAR announcer Darrel Waltrip has become famous for beginning each race with his trademark Boogity, boogity, boogity--let's go racing, boys! …

Selected Piano Solos, 1928–1941 (review)

Fatha Hines. Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941. Edited by Jeffrey Taylor. Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., 2006. (Recent Researches in American Music, 56.) (Music of the United States of America, 15.) [Frontispiece (Earl Hines, 1928); foreword (Richard Crawford), p. xi; acknowledgments, p. xiii-xiv; essay Earl 'Fatha' Hines and the Art of the Jazz Piano Solo, p. xv-l; 4 plates; recording sessions, transcriptions, crit. commentary, p. 1-121; apparatus, p. 123-30; literature cited, p. 131-33. ISBN 978-0-89579-580-9; 0-89579-580-9. $96.] As early 1923, on a few scratchy recordings behind singer Lois Deppe, Fatha Hines (1903-1983), not quite eighteen, was already demonstrating an impressive mastery of early stride-piano style along the lines of James P. Johnson. On these early sides Hines was even exhibiting indisputable signs of the powerful right hand octaves that along with the rapid tremolos soon to follow came to be known the trumpet style. The left hand rhythmic surprises present on the occasional solo herald a jazz artist who would continue to surprise and delight listeners for the next sixty years. A few years later Hines's recorded legacy took flight when the still precocious pianist teamed with Louis Armstrong and His Hot Fives and Hot Sevens in Chicago for nineteen historic recordings in 1927 and 1928, among them West End and Muggles and the sui generis duet Weather Bird. Only days before the latter two sessions in December 1928, Hines traveled to Long Island, New York, to make his first solo recordings, eight performances on four 78 rpm discs for the QRS label, including two of the twelve performances transcribed in the volume under review, Blues in Thirds and Stowaway. At the new Grand Terrace on Chicago's South Side on his twenty-third birthday, Hines capped this amazing month when he launched the orchestra he would lead from the piano until 1939. During the Grand Terrace years, the man described by Gunther Schuller in The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (The History of Jazz, 2 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 292) as one of the two supreme pianists of our time would not record another solo side. In fact, for most of the period encompassed in volume 15 of the esteemed series Music in the United States of America (MUSA)-Earl Fatha Hines, Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941, superbly edited, ably transcribed, and thoughtfully annotated by Jeffrey Taylor-Hines worked primarily a band leader. Although Hines had one of the finest bands of the thirties, a band that left representative recordings and is given respectful treatment in comprehensive surveys of big-band jazz, Hines and His Orchestra has been eclipsed by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basic, Benny Goodman, and Andy Kirk, bands that regularly featured outstanding name-brand soloists and arrangers. Hines's premier soloist, Budd Johnson, was lesser known in his day than soloists such Cootie Williams, Lester Young, or Goodman, and remains probably more obscure today. In addition, Hines's eclectic array of arrangers, led by Johnson, precluded the band from establishing the kind of personalized sonic identity enjoyed by other top bands. In the early 1940s, Hines briefly enjoyed the presence of Coleman Hawkins and vocalists Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan, but the 1943 band that introduced future bop icons Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker fell under the cloud of the 1942-44 recording ban brought about by a dispute between the American Federation of Musicians and the recording industry over radio and jukebox royalties. Consequently, the legacy of this band is silence. Although his influence on jazz pianists was profound and often acknowledged, Hines followed Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson proprietary inventors of jazz piano style. He never developed or cultivated the showmanship and reputation a singer to match Waller's high profile in the jazz world in the late 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, and his eclectic and unpredictable style contrasted markedly with both the steady, smooth, and easy swing of Teddy Wilson and the ubiquitous pyrotechnics of Art Tatum. …

Horacio Vaggione and the piano: An introduction to his mature piano style

Vaggione's writing for the piano exhibits a baroque-like integrity of style and form. The key elements: pointillism, two-part writing, block chords, silence and the use of pedals are first examined separately, and then in combination. Finally, an effective learning method for the challenge of combining piano with electronics is suggested.

Haydn and the English classical piano style

Journal Article Haydn and the English classical piano style Get access Bart van Oort Bart van Oort Teaches fortepiano and lectures in historical performance practice at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague. He has performed widely in Europe and the United States and made concert and lecture tours through Australia and New Zealand. His recordings include solo repertory and chamber music his ensemble Musica Classica. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXVIII, Issue 1, February 2000, Pages 73–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/XXVIII.1.73 Published: 01 February 2000

Haydn and the English classical piano style

Haydn and the English classical piano style

Musically enhanced computer keyboard and method for entering musical and textual information into computer systems

A musically enhanced computer keyboard (12) (FIG. 3) having a portion 106 (FIG. 5 ) resembling a partial piano style keyboard having a standard "QWERTY" alpha-numeric key arrangement (102) and a modified function key row arrangement (108). Musical information is entered by using the modified function key row (108) (keys (110) through (128)) as the piano style keyboard's black keys and using the symbol and number keys (130) through (158) as the piano style keyboard's white keys. Textual information is entered by depressing an "Alt" key (168) while concurrently depressing a musical note key (keys (110) through (128)) which causes a textual character associated with the particular key being depressed to appear on a display monitor.

String instrument emulator and method

A music emulator for emulating guitar sounds uses non-guitar like devices, as for instance a piano style keyboard, for input. Input from the keyboard within a time window is defined as simultaneous and entered into a note list. A signal is derived from the note list indicative of the chord played on the keyboard. In addition, notes in the note list can be extended to form a full chord whereby as few as three notes constituting a chord input at the keyboard are extended to a greater number of notes as, for instance, the six strings of a guitar. This signal is then outputted at a time rate which is extended with respect to the input time window whereby the output emulates a guitar strum including an arpeggiation or strumming effect of a guitar like sound. Chord extension is achieved by analyzing the notes in the note list as to their pitch and generating further notes which are outside the typical one octave range of a keyboard chord and extend to the typical four octave window of a guitar.

Earl Hines's Piano Style in the 1920s: A Historical and Analytical Perspective

On November 10, 1923, the Starr Phonograph Company ran fullpage ad in the Pittsburgh Courier, announcing the issue, on the Gennett label, of the first recording by Lois Deppe's Serenaders. DEPPE'S GENNEIT RECORD IS HERE: A Real Treat by Pittsburgh's Only Recording Race Artists proclaims the ad, which goes on to describe Congaine, one of the tunes on the disc, as a keen, snappy fox trot composed by Earl Hines, piano soloist with the Serenaders (Deppe's Gennett Record 1923, 2). Both Deppe and Hines had already been local celebrities in Pittsburgh for several years, and no doubt they were considered hometown heroes by some on this particular day. But fans who visited the music stores on Wylie Avenue could not have known that these two modest sides would mark the beginning of one of the longest and most influential recording careers in jazz. Only handful of other jazz musicians-Duke Ellington was one-matched Hines in longevity and influence. Hines's work of the 1920s set jazz piano playing on new course that was to have profound implications for later developments in the music. Yet, as Gunther Schuller (1989, 264) has recently pointed out, perhaps too much emphasis is placed on the revolutionary aspect of his playing. Hines's style, however much it may have startled (or even baffled) his contemporaries, hardly sprang from nowhere. For all its stunning innovation, his work was nonetheless firmly grounded in long and rich tradition of American music making.1 To emphasize this fact is not to diminish Hines's genius in the least; on the contrary, the examination

Oris skladateljstva hrvatskoga glazbenika Ive Prišlina (1902–1941)

Oris skladateljstva hrvatskoga glazbenika Ive Prišlina (1902–1941)

JOHN FIELD AND THE FIRST NOCTURNE

DURING John Field's years in London (I793-I802) a number of pieces by him for piano solo were published, some anonymously., They were mostly rondos and variations on popular tunes, and contained no hint of individual style of writing for piano that he was to develop later on. His Three Sonatas, Op. i (i 8oI ), though they have many interesting qualities, are close to idiom of his master Clementi, to whom they were dedicated. After Field left London, no new music by him appeared for six years. Then from about i8o8 a thin trickle of pieces for piano solo, piano duet, and piano and strings began to issue from publishers in Russia. With end of Napoleonic period, communication between Russia and Western capitals opened up. There was a spate of publication of music by Field between I814 and I823, led by Peters and Breitkopf & Hartel at Leipzig. This included not only first eight nocturnes, beginning with Trois Nocturnes printed by Peters in I8I4 (Hopkinson 24A, 25A, 26A),2 but first five piano concertos and other substantial works as well. It is most unlikely that this pattern of publication reflects rate of Field's creative activity. Between I802 and i8o8 he was in his early twenties, free at last from Clementi's domineering influence, and was pursuing an active career as a concert pianist. This was probably very period in which he developed his personal brand of romantic pianism. The great difficulty has been to establish dates of composition of his nocturnes and other important works. Until this has been done, it is idle to speculate about Field's priority in inventing new pianistic devices, where Dussek, Hummel, Weber and even Beethoven compete for his honours. Some writers have pointed to Field's First Piano Concerto, in E flat major, as work in which he first slhowed his idiomatic style of piano writing. Patrick Piggott in a recent book, called slow movement of this work the first of Field's pieces in what was to become his nocturne It is certainly true that work was performed by Field at London on 7 February I799, and that score, published by Breitkopf & Hartel in I8I4, is full of passages in Field's mature style. Indeed they are almost incredibly advanced