There is interesting music in the saloon scene in the great movie,
"High Noon". A piano is playing a highly syncopated "Buffalo Gals"
in can-can counterpoint to Lloyd Bridge's Moment of Truth. The
arrangement is syncopated in a way no music was until decades later.
I'd bet the actual music used by the movie was a piano roll, perhaps
cut just for the movie. A very low note in the heat of the tune
(e.g., hard to play by hand), and evenness of note dynamics, sounds
like a roll.
It mightn't be historically accurate to feature a player piano (it
was not shown per se), nor the degree of the arrangement's syncopation,
but the song itself is certainly of the period, the late 1800s.
Johnny Lite
|