Swipesy Cakewalk (piano comparison) - Scott Joplin and Arthur Marshall (1900)

Details

Description

As many of you know, I recently received the gift of a beautiful grand piano from my friends Barbara Wiseman and Jeremy Borum. Lots of you have left comments wondering if I would still sometimes play my upright piano or requesting a comparison between the two instruments, so I thought it would be fun to play the same song on both pianos to demonstrate and experience the stark contrast in sound quality and style they have to each other.

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions! I am really loving my new piano so much, so right now I'm extremely partial to the range of expression and richness in tone it offers me, but I know some people might prefer the simpler stark sound of the upright for ragtime.

Also, some of you have mentioned the new piano being out of tune. Really I think it's just a few of the strings which were new and so they stretch more easily, especially during the move. Jeremy is coming on Tuesday to tune it, so that will make a big difference.

I chose Swipesy Cakewalk because it has far fewer octaves than most Joplin pieces and right now I'm really trying to work on playing with much more relaxed wrists and arms and shoulders, and I have noticed that when I play full octaves I get very tense. Partly this is because my hands aren't big enough yet and partly it's just an issue of technique. I think in this video I can see lots of places where I am far more relaxed and then other places where there is still a lot of tension.

The piece was composed by musical duo Scott Joplin (who likely composed the trio) and young composer Arthur Marshall (who probably composed the rest of the piece with oversight from Joplin). It was most likely written in the late 1890s when Joplin was living with the Marshall family and teaching Arthur composition.

In a 1960 interview, Marshall said that the title of the song was chosen after he and Joplin had just delivered the music to the publisher's office when two newspaper boys began quarreling outside. One swiped a newspaper from the other, and the publisher, upon observing this, suggested that they name the work "Swipesy".