Picture Rolls
By Peter Neilson
Douglas Henderson of Artcraft Music Rolls (who pushes the envelope of piano roll-making in several directions) has used immense rubber stamps to illustrate some of his rolls. If I remember correctly, there are pictures on Cinderella Soot, Portrait of a Silver Lady, the 1989 "Boston" AMICA roll and at least one of the Moxie rolls. There are probably more that I've forgotten.
He also uses smaller rubber stamps to mark performance recommendations on some of his 88-note rolls (but not usually his Duo-Arts). The marks are accents, crescendi, sforzandi, etc., that do not fit in the usual word-roll-stencil alphabet. He uses a red stamp pad for the accent marks.
The rubber stamps are not applied by some machine, as far as I know. I think that Douglas goes through each copy of a roll by hand and stamps the pictures and markings where they belong.
The pictures on the QRS "Schnitzelbank" look very much like those on a wall poster of the song that my German teacher had in high school. We occasionally took the poster to a nearby piano and sang the song. I played (by hand--didn't have a player piano then). Some high-school German teacher (if any remain) should be able to find an old copy of that poster (if any remain). The song itself seems to be more Milwaukee- German than Deutschland-German. Deutscher kennen das Lied nicht.
The words on most QRS German rolls are in poor shape. I hand-corrected my copy of Lichtensteiner Polka, which had some of the words in totally wrong places. I think the Schnitzelbank roll has a few spelling errors. (I haven't played it in five years, so I don't remember for sure.)
Peter A. Neilson
[ Editors note:
[
[ True, Germans don't know the song -- that's because it's Swiss!
[ There are "Schnitzelbank" clubs in cities like Lucerne and Basel which
[ proudly sing their own melodies to this comic routine at Fastnacht
[ (Fasching) carnival in February. Besides "whittling bench", the word
[ in Germany formerly connoted also a "roasting", as at a party honoring
[ the "roastee", where his friends "whittle him down" to the right size!
[
[ I believe the QRS pictures were copied from the same source artwork
[ as a postcard and a poster published by Mader's German Restaurant
[ in Milwaukee (perhaps the one you remember). I sure would like to
[ get one of those posters, which features the mischievous boy called
[ "Schnickelfritz."
[
[ Robbie
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