Pianoflage (Bargy)

Description

This arrangement of Roy Bargy’s insanely catchy novelty ragtime piece from his Eight Piano Syncopations collection captures all the cheerful and playful goodness without all the difficulty! While the original is leveled for early advanced performers, this arrangement is within the grasp of intermediate performers, while sounding almost completely identical to the original!

Roy Bargy wanted to become a classical concert pianist but could not travel to Europe for the study needed, and he became an arranger and composer for the Imperial Piano Rolls company, writing pieces to compete with the novelty ragtime works of Zez Confrey. Later, he became pianist and music director for several artists, including the Benson Orchestra and Jimmy Durante.

There are only a small handful of challenging places in this intermediate arrangement, and those places are the ones that are largely untouched from the original. James L. King III takes some liberty with the rhythmic notation, putting everything into swing instead of using Bargy’s dotted-eighth-sixteenth patterns: students are encouraged to listen to Bargy’s own recording of the piece and piano roll realization to get interpretation ideas for performance.

The entire form of the piece is present in this arrangement (Intro A B B Intro Trio Trio Intro A) making it a definite recital length showstopper!

While the cover is based on a pun between the made up word “pianoflage” and “camouflage,” the title is really a pun on the word persiflage, which means “light and witty conversation.”

Key: C major, F major

Mood: lighthearted, fun-loving, sparkling, untroubled

Pedagogy: swing rhythms, syncopation, triplets, ragtime stride, accents, chromatic scales, first and second endings. ottava marks.