NewsletterRethinking the Rhapsody
by Richard Crawford
New Music Notes
by Carol J. Oja
Time to Remember Zez Confrey by Artis Wodehouse
Behind the Beat
with Mark Tucker
Widening the Lens II
by Daniel Kingman
Reviews
A Centenary Moment?
by Stephen Banfield
Gershwin on Disc
by Edward A. Berlin
Country and Gospel Notes
by Charles Wolfe
Time to Remember Zez Confrey
by Artis Wodehouse
In the introduction to his 1932 Song-Book, George Gershwin gives faintly patronizing, somewhat bemused credit to his pianistic predecessors–in fact, his colleagues–for their contributions to the ragtime, stride, and novelty piano styles upon which his own approach was based:
The evolution of our popular pianistic style really began with the introduction of ragtime, just before the Spanish-American War, and came to its culminating point in the jazz era that followed upon the Great War. A number of names come crowding into my memory: Mike Bernard, Les Copeland, Melville Ellis, Luckey Roberts, Zez Confrey, Arden and Ohman. . . . Each of these was responsible for the popularization of a new technique, or a new wrinkle in playing. Some of my readers will recall various of these procedures, of which a number were really but stunts. . . . Confrey’s contribution has been of a more permanent nature, as some of his piano figures found their way into serious American composition.
Gershwin’s veiled attempt to consign these artists to the dustbin of history glosses over the fact that, in 1932, nearly all remained musically active.
The most accomplished was the gentle genius Edward Elzear “Zez” Confrey (1898-1971), Gershwin’s exact contemporary. True, by 1932 Confrey’s great early novelty piano solos had already been published, but a host of his more contemplative compositions were yet in the offing. In addition, Confrey would maintain a performing career throughout the 1930s. Perhaps most important, Confrey’s influence as an innovator in the player-piano roll idiom would continue to be felt, despite the general demise of the roll industry itself. The unprecedented musical potential inherent in the player piano had required a new sort of artist, one willing to explore and exploit the divide between the piano as a hand-played instrument and the piano as a mechanical music-making device. Confrey and a select group of other arranger/pianists cultivated that no-man’s land. Due to their artistry this terrain bloomed forth with unexpectedly inspired and profoundly witty man/machine musical double entendres.
Gershwin’s silence in his Song-Book introduction regarding the significance of the piano roll idiom seems peculiar. But by 1932, Gershwin had severed his relationship to the roll industry, fleeing to vastly more remunerative radio work. Meanwhile, to the larger public, player pianos had become technological has-beens. Yet, in a new reading of the historical record, Confrey’s roll work emerges as a potent influence on the performance and compositional styles of Gershwin and his contemporaries. In addition, Confrey’s novelty innovations and his unique slant on the solo piano salon piece can now be seen as a by-product of his creative activities as a roll arranger.
An Irish-American product of the Midwest, Confrey attended the Chicago Music College while playing side gigs with a pop band formed with his brother. Thus Confrey, like Gershwin, straddled the classical/vernacular divide. After a Navy stint during WWI, Confrey began work as an arranger for the QRS Piano Roll Company. Between 1918 and 1924 he made over 120 rolls for QRS (over his lifetime he was to make over 170 rolls for various companies). During this time, Confrey published his most famous piano solo, Kitten On The Keys, which sold over a million copies. This quintessential novelty piece, along with a half-dozen other piano solos published between 1921 and 1923, established Confrey’s world-wide reputation. On the basis of the popularity of his unique keyboard idiom–called “Jazz” during the 1920s–Confrey was asked to perform on the 1924 Whiteman program that included the premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. This was as close as Confrey and Gershwin would get professionally. After that, their paths diverged. While Confrey tried his hand at songwriting with modest success, his greatest gift was in the realm of small-scale, solo piano composition. Unlike Gershwin, who stopped making piano rolls after 1925, Confrey remained active in the industry until its demise around 1930.
A pop roll arrangement aimed to deliver a memorable rendition of the tune, thereby encouraging listeners to purchase the sheet music as well. But in order to ignite additional interest in the rolls, skilled arrangers added notes, interpolating within and around the tune piquantly contrasting styles and riffs. Knowing what we do about the young Gershwin’s fascination with a wealth of musical idioms and techniques, it is easy to see why making roll arrangements provided an important secondary activity during his apprentice years. For Confrey, in contrast, roll arranging was at the heart of his music making. The music he created for this newly-founded idiom was a shining light of the era.
Confrey’s genius as a roll arranger had roughly four facets: first, his ability to develop and expand the scintillating novelty devices of which he appears to have been the primary innovator; second, his judicious deployment of a wide range of styles–including novelty–that resonated with the public and served as the basis for many of his published piano solos; third, his infectious musical wit; and fourth, his understanding of how the player piano’s expanded potential for note density and previously unimaginable rhythmic motifs opened new possibilities beyond the limitations of human performance.
An example of Confrey’s mastery of the piano roll is his arrangement of Thurlow Lieurance’s so-called Indian melody, By the Waters of Minnetonka (1915). Around the turn of the twentieth century, in America’s quest for musical definition, some influential commentators and composers seized upon Native American music as a possible basis for serious composition. “Indian” music became a minor fad, and Lieurance’s sentimental melody emerged as among the most popular of the genre. Stripped of its original faux-Lisztian accompaniment, the tune is the theme for Confrey’s four-variation roll arrangement.
Confrey’s command of player piano scoring results in a tour-de-force arrangement where one piano suggests two pianists at two pianos. A two-piano transcription can readily be made of the introduction and first two variations. However, by variation three, executing the two piano parts is not so simple. The intense syncopations of the secondo melody, accompanied in the primo treble with highly syncopated and articulated chord/octave alternations (suggesting dappled light reflected from water) push the arrangement to a level of difficulty challenging even for professional pianists:
The final variation begins innocuously enough with a call and response pattern featuring a readily playable stock Confrey novelty lick:
But as the variation moves to its rapturous conclusion, Confrey carries this figure to a nearly unplayable extreme, freeing it to cavort at dizzying speed all over the treble, while the secondo part romps about the lower half of the keyboard in ways no human performer, strictly speaking, can execute:
Through the new musical possibilities of the player piano, Confrey creates witty incongruities. The listener both sees and hears ideas plausible for human hands to execute, but not by a single pianist. Confrey then develops these musical figures beyond what even two humans could possibly play. The machine finally takes flight into a musical dimension beyond the strictly physical.