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Player Piano Music in "High Noon"
By Johnny Lite

There is interesting music in the saloon scene in the great movie,
"High Noon".  A piano is playing a highly syncopated "Buffalo Gals"
in can-can counterpoint to Lloyd Bridge's Moment of Truth.  The
arrangement is syncopated in a way no music was until decades later.
I'd bet the actual music used by the movie was a piano roll, perhaps
cut just for the movie.  A very low note in the heat of the tune
(e.g., hard to play by hand), and evenness of note dynamics, sounds
like a roll.

It mightn't be historically accurate to feature a player piano (it
was not shown per se), nor the degree of the arrangement's syncopation,
but the song itself is certainly of the period, the late 1800s.

Johnny Lite


(Message sent Wed 1 Aug 2001, 13:53:19 GMT, from time zone GMT-0400.)

Key Words in Subject:  High, Music, Noon, Piano, Player
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