Hello to everyone! Let me start with little bit of recap, just as an
introduction, as I have to clear my mind.

Frank Milne, after joining Aeolian in 1919-20, practically monopolized
Aeolian's rollography as far as popular music was concerned. Much is
learned from Artis Wodehouse's interview with Milne's son, Alexander
"Farquhar" Milne (1913-2013).

Paraphrasing, he (Frank Milne) chose the music to be arranged and to
be offered for sale to the public, looking obviously for the "hits",
while having everything under control. That's why much of Aeolian
Duo-Art and other cheaper 88-note brands by Aeolian have the typical
flavor of Milne's style.

After one catalogues thousands of piano rolls and listens to almost
all (read 'many') of them, you get nauseous (in a good way!) about how
conforming and relatively standardized the style always is. Practically
at least 80% to 90% of pop music passed under Milne's hands and brain,
and he was often the one who put his hand, personally, to the stencils.

Also from the interview with Milne's son, it is known that Frank
Milne was completely captivated by Pauline Alpert's skills and so they
greatly influenced each other. (Milne fully learned her style, but not
only). I am firmly of the opinion but honestly sure that a good portion
of the rolls played and credited to Pauline Alpert are nothing more
than arrangements by Milne. Feel free to ask me the roll numbers for
evidence and comparison.

There might be another matter, being that written arrangements (scores,
drafts, sketches etc.) were provided by influential and famous pianists
of the day, and later brought back on piano rolls by Milne himself or
at least being heavily edited by him to conform to the "Aeolian sound".

That's not news since the same thing happened at Ampico for Vincent
Lopez's arrangements, where he was not always the one who practically
made them. He would provide the arrangement, maybe written and sketched,
which was materially brought back on rolls by Adam Carroll and Edgar
Fairchild. And I'm of the opinion that something similar was happening
with credited arrangements by Richard Rodgers, speaking for the
Ampico... We will see.

I will now try, for the purpose of completeness and to get an idea,
to make an exhaustive list of Milne's pseudonyms over the time. They
are many, and in my list there are also famous names which, however,
never recorded for Aeolian (i.e., Walter Donaldson), but only served
to increase the prestige of the brand, like in this case, as well as
the number of working arrangers speaking for "minor/conventional"
pseudonyms. As I said, famous musicians probably could have provided
their own arrangements, but I honestly doubt it for some of them (i.e.,
still Donaldson) being Milne building that pieces on purpose.

The list is in the next article of this series.

Thanks,

Luca Pastore