White Christmas - Irving Berlin (Based on a piano roll by Frank Milne)

The piano arrangement I have chosen to play today is based on a piano roll made by Frank Campbell Milne, one of the most important piano roll arrangers of the piano roll era. A friend of mine helped me adapt the arrangement to be playable for my smaller hands because there are many large intervals in the original piano roll. Frank Milne lived from 1887 until 1959 and was one of only a few masters of player piano roll arranging. His work with piano rolls was from 1912 through 1946, for several important piano roll companies of the time including Aristo, Aeolian, Aeolian-American, Ampico, and QRS. He worked directly with George Gershwin when Gershwin was making his piano rolls, and he knew many important pianists from the 1920s, including Paderewski and Josef Hofmann. Milne was so skilled as a roll editor that in the same way that a musician can write sheet music, he was able to prepare roll masters by marking the lines on special graph paper that would be used as a template for the holes punched in the actual piano roll, rather than actually playing the notes himself on the piano, although he was also skilled at making rolls by playing the songs himself. As for the song itself, White Christmas was written by Irving Berlin for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Introduced by Bing Crosby, it topped the Billboard chart for 11 weeks and returned to the number one position again in December 1943 and 1944. His version would return to the top 40 a dozen times in subsequent years. The song would later feature in another Crosby film, the 1954 musical White Christmas. Although Crosby dismissed his role in the song's success, saying later that "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully", he was associated with it for the rest of his career. It is thought that part of the reason for its success is that hat the mix of melancholy—"just like the ones I used to know"—with comforting images of home—"where the treetops glisten"—resonated especially strongly with listeners during World War II. One music historian wrote that "'White Christmas' changed Christmas music forever, both by revealing the huge potential market for Christmas songs and by establishing the themes of home and nostalgia that would run through Christmas music evermore." I have a record album of Bing Crosby's Christmas songs so I have heard him sing it many times. On most recordings of the song, the opening verse is left out, although some singers have included it: The sun is shining, the grass is green, The orange and palm trees sway. There's never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A. But it's December the twenty-fourth,— And I am longing to be up North—