File name: Zez Confrey - Kitten on the Keys
File author: Gennarino
File uploaded: Oct 09, 2011
File category: Sheet Music
"Novelty Piano" was a popular piano musical genre in the early 1900s, successor to ragtime and contemporary to jazz. Its early composers were mostly pianists recording rolls from parts of Chicago, at the large companies QRS and Imperial.
The pioneer of this style was Charley Straight, whose compositions were recorded on rolls some time before the genre exploded, especially by Edward Elzear (Zez) Confrey, who worked at QRS.
In 1921, in fact, Zez Confrey composed the famous "Kitten on the Keys" (the kitten on the keys), inspired by his grandmother's cat observed going up and down the piano keyboard.
The innovation introduced by Confrey was to distribute the sheet music simultaneously with its phonograph recording - something previously avoided by publishers because it was considered harmful to sheet music sales - and the success was immediate. The popularity reached by this composition led Confrey to publish other works including "You Tell 'em, Ivories", "Dizzy Fingers", "Coaxing the Piano" and "Greenwich Witch".
About a year later, as was usual, a funny song was recorded to the music of "Kitten on the Keys", which tells of:
a catchy melody that spreads throughout the country and everyone can buy it, imagining a kitten up and down the keyboard; it's not easy at all, in fact, it seems there is someone who tried to sing it for an entire day, but, caught in an enigma, they remained choked up inside! And pianists spend even four hours trying to master the secrets, but they fumble on the keys and one can do nothing else but play it fifty-seven thousand times!
The style remained at its peak for a decade, only to be later supplanted by the growing popularity of jazz and Big Bands, which slowly moved the piano into a more decentralized position on the stage!
Although Novelty has structural and stylistic similarities with Ragtime, there are also notable differences due mainly to the different commercial methods adopted to spread the styles. Ragtime was sold in sheet music form and therefore had to remain fairly simple in rhythmic structure and phrasing so that it could be played by an intermediate pianist. The arrival of the player roll first - and then the phonograph - allowed instead for the distribution and sale of music performed by expert musicians, and thus the style was characterized by increasing compositional richness: a series of flourishes and pyrotechnic musical embellishments appeared (partly also inspired by European art trends of the time), which appear more suited to white tradition, whereas in Ragtime the characteristic staggering sound, resulting from syncopation, appeared too far removed from their European reminiscences.
But after this parenthesis, Black musical forms regained dominance and there was no more history.
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