This is a recording of an 1876 tune called “Centennial Grand March”. It’s a bit tricky, and when I first tried it on stage about a year ago it scared the hell out of me. Now that I’ve got it down it’s a lot of fun to play. I love the chromatic melodies, the way the parts tell a story, and the mood.
I got rid of the high pitched background whine in my first video by using an external iSight video camera rather than the one built into my laptop. To use an external camera you have to use iMovie 06 rather than the more recent 08 version, so I switched to 06, and it turned to be a lot better and easier to use.
Also, I got a more full and punchy sound by switching from the built-in mic to an external one, a Sure SM81.
Next Thursday, June 12, I’ll be playing on a bus –
This is the Hippodrome, the official free shuttle of downtown’s Art Walk, running every second Thursday from 6-10pm. … Art Walk’s Hippodrome will serve this popular monthly event as a floating salon, featuring live music, art happenings, readings and curated conversations.
Starting June 12, Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric, the eclectic bus adventure company whose tours reveal L.A.’s secret history, transform what’s been a sleepy free city DASH bus shuttle into something more appropriate to the Art Walk: The Hippodrome, a curated rolling salon. Art Walk visitors can still use the Hippodrome to get from Bert Green Fine Arts to The Hive — but with so many interesting things happening on the bus, they may find they don’t want to disembark when they arrive.
The Hippodrome is a customized former school bus brightly painted on the outside with lively graffiti-style scenes of beautiful women. Inside, passengers and performers sit face-to-face in a comfortable nightclub-style setting, with checkerboard flooring, cocktail tables and softly blinking lights. Every month the Hippodrome will feature interesting performers channeling the spirit of the neighborhood’s storied past.
The bus tour is part of Kim Cooper and Richard Schave’s Esotouric series of LA bus tours. Kim and Richard are supersmart lovers of LA, architecture, music, and history. The trips generally revolve around their stories of the city. These are trips for locals to discover their own home, rather than for visitors to gawk at homes of the stars.
This night is dedicated to creating a community of artists and musicians who don’t need the use of flashy lights, amps or mics. Our grandpappies didn’t need it so why do we?
The Hyperion Tavern is located at 1941 Hyperion Ave in Silverlake between Lyric and Delongpre Ave. Entry is always free and 21+!
That’s right, this scene is so old-school they’re against *microphones.*
It was written by A. G. Send, arranged for guitar by the enigmatic E. Pique, and published by J. Oettl. I didn’t find any biographical info or other work by these people.
EDWARD PIQUE, one of the oldest professional musicians on the coast, was born in the city of Prague, Austria, July 15, 1815. He early developed marked talent for music, and later studied guitar music with efficiency. He achieved such marked success that he received the great compliment of being summoned to play before the Empress of Russia and Austria, also the King of Prussia and Saxony and other crowned heads. He came to the United States in 1848, and the following year was united in marriage with Miss Frances Weller, of England, and three years later, in 1852, they came to California. On the evening of the day of his arrival Mr. Pique played for the benefit of Catharine Sinclair, the wife of Edwin Forrest, the great tragedian. Mr. Pique was under engagement to Harry Meiggs, and many years later his wife opened Assembly Hall as a dancing school, which was then located on the corner of Post and Kearny streets, where the White House now stands. This was for many years one of the most prominent terpischorean halls in the city, and was conducted by Mrs. Pique with ability and financial success. When Mr. Pique first came to San Francisco he sang in the opera, also in many of the churches and in concerts, and was always ready to contribute his efforts and voice in behalf of worthy charities. He has done much in composition, and received the prize composition at the second annual prize competition of Fairbanks & Cole, of Boston. Mr. Pique has been engaged in teaching for over forty years, and is one of the oldest teachers on the coast. He has numerous testimonial letters from members of the profession and friends, all testifying of his worth.
So now we know a lot more about about how this song happened. The guy who converted the original score to a guitar part was a 70-year-old gentleman from Austria. He was an educated musician, a European who had moved to the United States 37 years before at the mature age of 33, and had been in California for 33 years. He was an established player, was probably in semi-retirement, and would have been a natural candidate for this job.
According to C.F. Martin & His Guitars, 1796-1873, Pique knew the founder of Martin Guitars, Martin himself. Pique was a music teacher in Philadelphia in 1850 and also arranged popular songs for guitar.
The Gold Rush started in 1848 and he moved to California in 1852, so his motivation might have been to get rich quick on gold. Given that he was still doing pickup musical work like guitar arranging in his old age, I imagine the career change didn’t work out.
He lived in San Francisco, which was near the location of the dedicatee “Pianissimo”, who lived around present-day Silicon Valley.
I redid it because I’ve gotten better since then. Now I know to make a song start strong in the first couple seconds, to make the lines more fluid and improvisational, and to mash the guitar right onto the mic for a hotter recording.
After posting my Vess Ossman playlist I came across a star recording over on archive.org that I didn’t know about — a 1907 banjo version of Scott Joplin’s 1899 piece Maple Leaf Rag, which would be almost the only currently recognizeable song in Ossman’s recorded works. (The other recognizeable works are the highly lame “William Tell Overture” and “Yankee Doodle”):
Only two of Joplin’s rags were recorded commercially during his lifetime, and the first piano recording of his most famous composition, Maple Leaf Rag, was not made until 1923, six years after his death.
More typical is this arrangement by banjo virtuoso Vess Ossman. The ubiquity of the banjo and relative scarcity of the piano in early recorded music has more to do with the limitations of early mechanical recording technology than with the popularity of the instruments. The volume and focused, directional sound of the banjo, combined with its lack of sustain, made it ideal for early mechanical recordings. Instruments like the piano and violin, however, tended to sound weak and warbly.
Lucas Gonze - Centennial Grand March
Carrie Waltz, version 2
