Confrey By The Waters of Minnetonka piano roll score

Artis Wodehouse has transcribed Zez Confrey's (1895-1971) 1926 Ampico piano roll 68091 arrangement of Thurlow Lieurance's song, "By the Waters of Minnetonka." She has arranged it for two pianos. Having a musical score of a roll rendition is a unique way to study the roll arranging art that developed in the United States during the 1910s through the early 1930s. Confrey was a preeminent exemplar of this uniquely American musical art form. Regarding the origin of the song itself, around 1909, Lieurance acquired a portable cylinder recording device from Edison Records, and carried it with him whenever he went to visit Indian performers. In October 1911 he recorded a Crow (Apsalooke) (maybe Oglala Lakota Sioux) singer, Sitting Eagle, also known as Mortimer Dreamer, then living on the Crow Reservation in Montana. From this recording he took the melody for his song "By the Waters of the Minnetonka". He set it to a harp-like accompaniment, and it was published by Theodore Presser in 1913 as "an Indian love song" with words by J. M. Cavanass, becoming an instant success and going through several editions; it was also frequently recorded in the years before 1950.[ (Courtesy Wikepedia) Confrey's refreshing roll rendition of the tune -- a set of variations -- incorporates many of the Novelty/Ragtime licks for which he was justly famous and that evoke the echo effects and the reflection of the sun in the water that the Lieurance setting suggests. The sound source for the Confrey roll heard on this video is taken from Wodehouse's 2003 recording on the Warner Classics label, entitled "Zez Confrey Piano Rolls and Scores". For this project, Wodehouse read the original rolls into MIDI format, and they were recorded from a Yamaha Disklavier playback of this data. For more information about Confrey's rolls, go to "Time to Remember Zez Confrey" by Artis Wodehouse at academia.edu