Restoring Old Rolls and Making New Ones
By Robbie Rhodes
I spoke with Robbie Rhodes on the phone today. Robbie is a EE who put himself through school many years ago playing piano on Disneyland's "Mainstreet USA". He is an active Dixieland Jazz Pianist when not working as a "rocket scientist". He's promised to get a modem hooked up to his machine soon. In the meantime, he's taken me up on my offer to transcribe from a telephone conversation.
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Artis Wodehouse is the person who did the CD "Gershwin Plays Gershwin - The Piano Rolls", Elektra Nonesuch 79287-2. She organized the project, transcribed all the Gershwin piano rolls with the assistance of Richard Tonnesen of Richardson TX (Custom Music Rolls). Richard Brandle of Dallas TX wrote a Duo-Art emulator that took the piano roll data and turned it into MIDI with expression. Artis edited the MIDI file and then played it on a Yamaha Disclavier for the CD about 3 years ago.
Flushed with that success, she has now turned to Jelly Roll Morton. Ther are 12 surviving piano rolls recorded by Jelly Roll. Richard transcribed them at a particularly high resolution (about 300 samples/inch) and Rob Rhodes "recovered" the master roll with a Pascal program. [ I will let Rob explain exactly what recovered means in a later article ]
The MIDI files (with no expression data -- none was recorded originally) have now been given to Artis for editing and addition of expression data. The end product will be another CD to be published by Electra Nonesuch.
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Rob Rhodes just completed a music roll for a Mel Brooks Film: "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" -- Its a Mel Brooks satire of all the Dracula movies. Robbie was contacted by the film's music director to create a music roll for the player organ sequence in the movie. The music is "El Choclo - Tango". Richard Tonnesen perforated the roll. Watch for Robbie's name in the credits. The movie should be released in December.
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The "grapevine" says that Wayne Stahnke, the inventor of the Boesendorfer SE mechanism, is continuing his projects of transcribing piano roll performances of Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Wayne's taking all of those rolls and "recovering" the master rolls. The end result will be a set of Disclavier diskettes published by Wayne's company "Live Performance".
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Eric Bernhoft is creating piano rolls from the live performances of Peter Mintun and Frederic Hodges. We think they will be in Duo-Art format. He's using a MIDI velocity sensing piano. Hodges is well known as the pianist of the Royal Society Jazz Orchestra. Mintun is a long time follower of the piano stylings of Victor Arden (an Ampico artist) and Dana Suesse.
Robbie Rhodes
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(Message sent Sat 17 Jun 1995, 19:02:02 GMT, from time zone GMT-0700.) |
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