AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday morning 113
“KITTEN ON THE KEYS”: FROM PLAYER PIANOS TO
POETISM, OR HOW NOVELTY PIANO CAME TO PRAGUE
Derek Katz
University of California, Santa Barbara
Jazz, Ragtime and American dance music permeate the life and works of Erwin Schulhoff,
from the foxtrot that begins the 1919 Fünf Pittoresken for piano to his writings about jazz for
der Auftakt in the mid-1920s and his performances as pianist for the cabaret orchestra of the
Liberated Theater in the early 1930s. These compositions and activities are rich in aesthetic
and political associations. The earliest works, written under the sway of the George Grosz
circle in Berlin, were intended as Dada provocations. After returning to Prague in 1923, Schulhoff
attempted both to fuse popular and art musics and to provide a musical component of
the “laughing world” promoted by Karel Teige and the Prague Poetists. Schulhoff’s sources for
his conception of jazz ranged from the music that he danced to in bars to the symphonic jazz
of Paul Whiteman. Around 1926, though, Schulhoff’s main enthusiasm was for the “novelty
piano” style of Zez Confrey, to whom the first of Schulhoff’s Jazz-etuden was dedicated, and
whose “Kitten on the Keys” was the basis of the toccata that concludes the set.
Although only present on the peripheries of recent histories of jazz and ragtime, Confrey’s
rags were enormously popular and influential in the 1920s. Confrey shared top billing with
George Gershwin at Whiteman’s notorious 1924 Aeolian Hall concert, and “Kitten on the
Keys” sold over a million copies within a year of its publication in 1921, eventually becoming
the second best selling rag of all time. For many composers and critics, like Aaron Copland,
Gilbert Seldes and Henry Osgood in America, and Schulhoff, Alfred Baresel and Theodor
Adorno in Europe, Confrey’s compositions were representative of the best and most recent
developments in jazz piano. Although his rags eventually sold well as sheet music, Confrey
wrote his most famous works while in the employ of the QRS piano roll company. Their
heritage as fodder for player pianos is preserved both in titles like “You Tell ’em Ivories” and
by rapid tempi and flashy figuration that foregrounded the automatic mechanism and supradigital
dexterity of the player piano. Confrey referred to his style as “Modern,” and it shared
the harmonic characteristics, including chromatically descending parallel ninth chords and
extended passages in parallel fourths, of “modernistic” jazz compositions by composers from
Matty Malneck to James P. Johnson; characteristics that were loosely derived from European
Impressionist compositions.
Schulhoff’s infatuation with novelty piano provides an addition to standard accounts of
the transmission of jazz and dance music from America to Europe and of jazz’s functions as a
social signifier. Schulhoff depended on sheet music and etude books, exploiting a repertoire
attractive for its associations with mechanical reproduction and use of stylistic devices derived
from European art music. This allowed Schulhoff, however briefly, to create music that both
paid homage to jazz as part of the fashionable modern life promoted by the Prague avantgarde
and that was consistent with the more hermetic stylistic modernism of the art music
world.