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.
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.
Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions
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Krazy Kat, A Jazz Pantomime for Piano: Original and Revised Versions
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486272603 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2013 |
| Series: | Dover Classical Piano Music |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Krazy Kat
A Jazz Pantomime for Piano
By John Alden Carpenter, George Herriman
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Howard PollackAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-27260-3
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 1897, he dutifully joined the family firm, George B. Carpenter and Co., but his relatively light business responsibilities allowed him to continue his music studies in Chicago with the brilliant German-American theorist, Bernard Ziehn, and in Rome, briefly, with Edward Elgar.
In 1900, Carpenter married Rue Winterbotham, a chic and unconventional interior designer, art collector, and socialite whose friends included fashionable painters, writers, actors, and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and who helped bring her husband into contact with some of the day's most stylish artists. The Carpenters had one child, Genevieve ("Ginny"), who inspired a number of her father's works, including Adventures in a Perambulator. After Rue's death in 1931, Carpenter wed another well-known Chicagoan, Ellen Waller Borden, with whom he long had been romantically involved. He died of heart failure at age seventy-five in Chicago.
Carpenter composed Krazy Kat during the summer of 1921. He apparently wrote the work for Adolph Bolm, the Russian dancer-choreographer who had danced with the Ballets Russes (including the role of the Moor in Petrushka) before moving to New York in 1917 and establishing his own company, the Ballet Intime, a small outfit that performed in rather modest venues. In 1919, Bolm choreographed Carpenter's The Birthday of the Infanta for the Chicago Opera and subsequently made Chicago his base of operations before finally settling in Los Angeles.
Whereas The Birthday of the Infanta enjoyed the lavish patronage of the Chicago Opera, Carpenter presumably had in mind the more limited resources of the Ballet Intime when he decided to fashion his second ballet after George Herriman's comic strip, Krazy Kat. He apparently came up with this idea on his own, although Bolm cheered the idea, having become an enthusiast of American life and culture to the point of suggesting, soon after arriving in New York, that he and composer Charles Griffes collaborate on a baseball ballet. As with The Birthday of the Infanta, Carpenter intended Krazy Kat (as indicated by its subtitle, "A Jazz-Pantomime") to make extensive use of mime—a feature that bespoke the legacy of the Ballets Russes, whose productions Carpenter surely knew, if not from Paris, then from the company's American tours.
Connoisseurs for some time have regarded George Herriman's Krazy Kat as one of the finest cartoon strips of the twentieth century. (Carpenter's ballet played no small role in establishing the comic's reputation, as it helped shape Gilbert Seldes' assessment of the strip, in his influential 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, as "the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in American to-day.") Born in New Orleans of apparently mixed white and black ancestry, Herriman (1880-1944) grew up in Los Angeles, where he began his career as an illustrator before moving to New York. After he introduced the Krazy Kat characters as part of his 1910 newspaper funny, The Dingbat Family, readers so liked these figures that the cartoonist began a separate Krazy Kat strip in 1913. Although the strip's popularity waned over time, Herriman's employer William Randolph Hearst ran the comic in his syndicated newspapers for the next thirty years allegedly because of his personal fondness for it.
Set in Coconino County in the American Southwest, Krazy Kat features three main characters: the guileless Krazy Kat, who adores the malevolent Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz, who obsessively hurls bricks at Krazy; and the protective dog Officer Bull Pupp, who strives—often successfully—to put Ignatz behind bars. "To those who have not mastered Mr. Herriman's psychology," wrote Carptenter in his program notes to the ballet's premiere, "it may be explained that Krazy Kat is the world's greatest optimist.... If Krazy blows beautiful bubbles, Ignatz shatters them; if he builds castles in Spain, Ignatz is there with the brick." (Although Carpenter considered the genders of both Krazy and Ignatz "a delightful mystery," Herriman authorities agree that whereas Krazy is, in fact, ambiguously gendered, Ignatz is decidedly male.) The strip's other animal characters include Joe Stork, a "purveyer of progeny to prince & proletarian" who typically appears with an unwelcome bundle held in his beak. Herriman's offbeat style, which involved angular graphics, surrealistically shifting landscapes, ironic captions, and linguistically playful dialogue featuring phonetic spellings, American slang, foreign phrases, ethnic dialects, and invented words, made contact with modernist currents in the serious arts, as did the strip's richly allusive content, which has been read by critics as allegorical reflections on spirituality, race, politics, and sexuality.
Carpenter never elaborated on his reasons for picking Krazy Kat as the subject for a ballet, but his daughter Ginny's enthusiasm for the strip apparently played a part. (On a trip to Los Angeles in 1917, the composer arranged for his then twelve-year-old daughter to meet the cartoonist. "She curtsied prettily when she was introduced," recalled Carpenter, "and said, as she had been taught, 'I'm very pleased to meet you.' Herriman grinned broadly and answered, 'Miss Carpenter, you're very easily pleased.'") From the start of his career, Carpenter had shown a penchant for childlike subject matter, and his program for Adventures in a Perambulator—a score that Walt Disney planned to use for his aborted sequel to Fantasia—contained some striking similarities to the Krazy Kat strip.
Still, the notion of a comic-strip ballet was plainly novel, and Herriman understandably expressed surprise when Carpenter approached him about collaborating on such an enterprise. "I've never had any idea that these few humble characters of mine would ever have been asked to mingle with the more aristocratic arts," he wrote to the composer, "and I must say it is all very shocking to me. I can't imagine K. Kat, I. Mouse, O. Pupp, and J. Stork cavorting and pirouetting en ballet to save my life. However, let's hope the audience doesn't get their cue from Ignatz and pack a few bricks in with them—with evil intent." Whatever his reservations, Herriman agreed to work with Carpenter on the scenario (which appeared in the premiere program in the composer's own words) and to design the scenery and costumes (which consisted of bodysuits and masks).
The ballet opens with a sleeping Krazy onstage. Officer Pupp passes by on his beat, and Bill Postem, a "canine relative" of Pupp, posts an advertisement for a grand ball that evening. (An early review decribed Postem as "drunk on his own paste.") Krazy wakes, sees the poster, espies and dons a ballet skirt, and clumsily begins to dance. Joe Stork enters and leaves behind a mysterious bundle. Krazy "triumphantly" carries away the pack, opens it, and, discovering a vanity case, prepares for the ball. Ignatz enters ominously, but Officer Pupp chases him away. The oblivious Krazy finishes his makeup and does a Spanish dance. Ignatz, now disguised as a Mexican catnip merchant, enters with a catnip bouquet for Krazy. Sniffing the catnip, Krazy goes into a "Class A fit" and, incited by Ignatz, dances a "Katnip Blues." At the climax of the dance, Ignatz "throws off his disguise," hurls the inevitable brick, and rushes off. The stunned Krazy has a "moment of ecstatic recognition—Ignatz Dahlink" and sinks back to sleep as Officer Pupp strolls by. "Krazy sleeps. Krazy dreams. Indomitable Kat!"
In response to the cartoon medium, Carpenter created a compact score of about ten minutes divided into brief episodes comprised of short sections, a plausible analogue to strips and panels. (The "Katnip Blues," with its two foxtrot tunes, forms the only extended number.) Moreover, the composer orchestrated the whole for a small pit orchestra consisting of flute (doubling on piccolo), oboe, clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, tenor trombone, percussion, piano, harp, and a modest contingent of strings. Along these same lines, he kept the textures light and held any weighty emotions in check, emphasizing, rather, wit and whimsy.
The comic strip further encouraged Carpenter to showcase a jazzy musical idiom. He even subtitled the work, as mentioned, "A Jazz-Pantomime" (thereby becoming one of the first composers to use the word "jazz" in the title of a concert work). What he meant by jazz, then a newly coined term, remains open to speculation, but he seems to have had in mind an agglomeration of music that included jazzy popular song and jazzy dance band arrangements as well as the sort of improvised music by mostly black singers and instrumentalists that in time became known as real jazz. Of these related styles, he presumably had most familiarity with jazzy popular song and ballroom music (he expressed special admiration for Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin), but he reportedly visited some of Chicago's so-called "black-and-tans," in which case he probably would have encountered some real jazz as well. Indeed, just a few blocks north of Carpenter's home on Rush Street lay Bert Kelly's Stables, a popular club that featured some of the time's best jazz musicians, including King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, and other New Orleans musicians who had moved to Chicago.
The score's connection to jazz and jazzy popular music surfaced most clearly in the "Katnip Blues," with its snappy syncopations and blue notes. The influence of jazz—in particular, the kind of "sweet" jazz popularized by such bands as those of Paul Whiteman and Isham Jones— also could be discerned in the work's instrumentation and scoring, as well as in its irreverent humor, as in its ironic allusions to Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun for the dozing Krazy Kat, "Yankee Doodle" for Officer Pupp, and Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" in the "Katnip Blues." Such kidding extended to those directives for the musical snippets included alongside the Herriman illustrations in the score's 1922 published piano version, including "Pizzi-katto," "Kantando," and "Villainously." In an early review of the work, the eminent critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote, "Something of the humor of the jazz-band got into his [Carpenter's] Krazy Kat score."
Otherwise, the score, with its harmonic elegance, delicate orchestration, Viennese and Spanish waltzes, and its touch of the Far East here, Native America there, largely spoke the cosmopolitan post-impressionist language of Adventures in a Perambulator and the Concertino. At the same time, the music, in particular the music for Ignatz Mouse, contained an expanded vocabulary related to Sergey Prokofiev, who by this time had become a familiar presence in Chicago and a friend of Carpenter's.
Frederick Stock, the adventurous director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, first presented Krazy Kat in concert format on December 23, 1921. The pantomime proper premiered on January 20, 1922, at New York's Town Hall as part of a recital co-sponsored by the Ballet Intime and Poldowski's Concerts Internationaux de la Libre Esthétique. The five-person cast included Bolm as Krazy Kat, Bella Kelmans as Ignatz, and Ulysses Graham as Officer Pupp. The distinguished French-American flutist-conductor George Barrère—who coincidentally had played flute in the premiere of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, here parodied—led the pit orchestra. Herriman's designs included black-and-white cartoons on rollers at the back of the stage, with one of the dancers rolling up the scenery as the action progressed.
Although the critics largely thought Bolm unsuited to the role of Krazy Kat—many would have liked to have seen the vaudevillian Fred Stone or the silent film star Charlie Chaplin mime the part—the ballet generally received good reviews. Carpenter's publisher, G. Schirmer, brought out a version arranged for piano by the composer, illustrated by Herriman, and for a few years the dance enjoyed some circulation, including a spot in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922. But the work quickly became the sort of piece more spoken about than actually seen or heard.
In 1939, the conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony, Fabien Sevitzky, wrote Carpenter that he wanted to revive the piece, to which the composer responded, "This score was written some years ago and I was never satisfied with it. I really think that I would prefer not to have it offered publicly again until I have an opportunity to rewrite it. I feel sure that I can make it more interesting than it is in its present form." Further encouraged by Sevitzky, Carpenter accordingly revised the score in 1940.
Carpenter thoroughly revamped the work. Most dramatically, he substituted parts of an obscure piece, Oil and Vinegar, that he had written in 1926 (apparently for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra) for the "Katnip Blues." The composer presumably felt that this somewhat jazzier music came closer to Krazy's intoxicated ecstasy than had the original "Katnip Blues." He instituted many other changes as well, such as omitting the allusions to The Afternoon of a Faun, and making some of the individual sections more self-contained, with the apparent aim of creating a piece less dependent on an accompanying pantomime—that is, less like cartoon music—and more amenable to a concert rendering. He further adjusted both the work's instrumentation and orchestration, including replacing the alto saxophone with a soprano saxophone.
Sevitzky and the Indianapolis Symphony gave the first performance of the revised Krazy Kat on November 15, 1940. In 1948, G. Schirmer published a piano arrangement of this retooled score (but retained the Herriman illustrations from the 1922 reduced score, so that the musical snippets sometimes referred to passages that had been deleted). The pianist Rudolph Ganz championed this reduction, occasionally performing the music with Herriman's illustrations on lantern slides that Carpenter had commissioned especially for concert purposes. The revised version was recorded as well: first excerpts by Richard Korn and the Hamburg Philharmonic, then the complete ballet by Calvin Simmons and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But again, the score failed to take hold.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Krazy Kat by John Alden Carpenter, George Herriman. Copyright © 2012 Howard Pollack. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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