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Pianist Artis Wodehouse, known for her transcriptions of piano music by George Gershwin from performances recorded by him, has moved on to his piano rolls. Here she tells of her experience in trying to harness computer technology to assist in the transcription process; she leaves it to an associate, George Litterst, to fill in some details of the technology involved - which we find fascinating, and believe you will, too.
George Gershwin left high school at the age of fifteen to become a song-plugger for the Tin Pan Alley publisher Jerome Remick, playing Remick's tunes for performers in search of new music for their acts. Simultaneously, he marketed his pianistic skills to the thriving piano-roll industry: at about age seventeen, he began to make piano rolls, mostly arrangements of tunes by others. Gershwin free-lanced this way for ten years, during which time he made about 120 rolls. After 1926, when his fame as a songwriter was thoroughly established, he went on to more remunerative and musically satisfying activities and made no more rolls.
I got interested in transcribing Gershwin recordings some years ago, and in 1987 Warner Bros, published a collection of eight improvisations by Gershwin that I'd taken off discs. Piano rolls were another matter, but I believed their music could somehow be transformed, using computer!; echnology, into scores. The Gershwin rolls had become fairly obscure, but the noted roll collector Michael Montgomery made available to me his cache of Gershwin items (thought to be the most inclusive in the world), and I applied for - and got - an NEH grant to gotewoxk with them. I believed that, if I could find the proper technologies, computers could save me time and, more important, increase my accuracy in transcribing the Gershwin piano rolls.
The first step was to get the rolls...