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    Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions
    Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions
    Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions
    Ebook101 pages20 minutes

    Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions

    By John Alden Carpenter, George Herriman and Howard Pollack

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    About this ebook

    This is the first single-volume publication of both the out-of-print original and revised versions of KrazyKat, a unique "jazz pantomime" for piano. Based on George Herriman's hugely influential newspaper comic strip that chronicled the adventures of a lovelorn feline, this comic production represents a landmark in American music. The seldom-staged work debuted in 1922 at New York City's Town Hall, and a 1940 revival employed the revised edition.
    John Alden Carpenter's score abounds in lyric warmth, harmonic charm, and rhythmic vitality. He created this unusual theatrical work for a ballet company headed by a former Ballets Russes performer. Cartoonist Herriman designed the production's scenery and costumes, and he drew a series of madcap illustrations that are reproduced in this edition. Jazz lovers, collectors of rare music, and intermediate- to advanced-level pianists will want a copy of this facsimile publication, which features the composer's original Program Notes and an illuminating Introduction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 17, 2013
    ISBN9780486272603
    Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions

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      Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano - John Alden Carpenter

      www.doverpublications.com

      INTRODUCTION

      In the early decades of the twentieth century, John Alden Carpenter (1876–1951) emerged as one of America’s foremost composers, thanks to such successful works as the song cycle Gitanjali (1913, to poems by Rabindranath Tagore); the tone poem Adventures in a Perambulator (1914); the Concertino for piano and orchestra (1915); and three ballets, namely, The Birthday of the Infanta (1919, after an Oscar Wilde short story), Krazy Kat (1921, after the comic strip of George Herriman), and Skyscrapers (1925, to an original scenario). This last piece—premiered not by Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes as Carpenter had hoped, but rather by the Metropolitan Opera in 1926—represented the pinnacle of his career. Thereafter, his reputation began to decline, although to this day Gitanjali maintains a toehold on the repertoire.

      During his lifetime, Carpenter’s music attracted such distinguished musicians as singers Kirsten Flagstad, Eleanor Steber, and Conchita Supervia; conductors Otto Klemperer, Serge Koussevitzky, Fritz Reiner, Artur Rodzinski, and Bruno Walter; and pianist-composer Percy Grainer, who adopted the Concertino as one of his signature pieces. The appeal of Carpenter’s work could be explained in part by its lyrical warmth, harmonic charm, rhythmic vitality, formal mastery, and discreet assimilation of such advanced composers as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky as well as by its absorption of the American vernacular, including Native American song, African-American spirituals, ragtime, tango, and eventually blues and jazz. The presence of popular music elements in particular gave his music a distinctive stylistic profile, one that anticipated, as musicologist William Austin observed some years ago, the work of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.

      The youngest of four boys, John Alden Carpenter grew up a child of privilege in a booming and vibrant Chicago, the descendant of an old American family that could be traced back to his namesake, the legendary pilgrim John Alden. His father, George, presided over a prosperous shipping-supply company, and his mother, Elizabeth, was an accomplished mezzo-soprano. The family kept homes both in town and in suburban Park Ridge, where the composer was born. In his formative years, Carpenter studied piano with Amy Fay and William Seeboeck in Chicago and then composition with John Knowles Paine at Harvard. After graduating from Harvard in

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