Frank Victor - Part I
- Chris Billiau
- Jan 1, 2016
- 5 min read
Frets & Strings and Pick It and Play It
I’ve always had a special fondness for Frank Victor (b.1897 - d.1970) ever since I first read about him from paging through Mel Bay’s Masters of the Plectrum Guitar. Frank Victor never seemed to have the name recognition that some of his peers earned during the thirties such as Karl Cress, Dick McDonough, and Harry Volpe (with whom he wrote and performed several duets). Like many of his predecessors Victor first started playing banjo but as he was born in Germantown, PA it seems now inevitable that he would learn to play guitar as a student of Eddie Lang (1). Frank Victor has performed and recorded with many famous musicians as sideman and bandleader including Eddie Costa, Harry Volpe, Adrian Rollini, and Joe Venuti. Today, his most accessible recordings can be found with the Adrian Rollini Trio and on Guitar Rarities Volume I, performing duets with Harry Volpe, which itself is a rare CD to find anymore. During the 30s he ran the Radio City Guitar Studio in New York with Harry Volpe and headed up the Modern Guitar Department of Metronome Magazine where he was in charge of the “Guitar Queries” section and contributed numerous articles and interviews of his guitar peers.
Frets & Strings Notes
Written and arranged by Frank Victor and published in 1933 by the Al. Rocky Music company, Frets & Strings is a block-chord solo composition for guitar. I found this piece available for download on the RMMGJ blog here. The form is A-B-C-A with a two bar intro. Sections A and B both are in the key of G major and are each eight bars long with repeats with the B section second ending modulating to C major. The C section is 24 bars with no repeat nor modulation back to G major. The final A section, in G major, is 10 bars long with bars eight, nine, and ten making up the ending.
Having played and studied this piece I can’t help but feel this is actually a ragtime composition, or at the very least heavily “rag” influenced. The form, multiple themes, 16 bar segments, syncopation, and machine like movement of block-chords are all characteristics of ragtime. A final “nail in the coffin” to my determination is the use of the words “Jig Tempo” to indicate the song’s tempo. In today’s parlance most people associate the word “jig” with the celtic dance and music but in early American popular music “jig” was the name given to the style of music that preceded ragtime (2) thus jigtime became ragtime. We can deduce that Victor wanted this song performed at a ragtime tempo, but we are still left with determining what “is” a ragtime tempo? A common benchmark in determining ragtime tempo is the use of March Tempo, 110-120 bpm (3). Using March Tempo as a benchmark I was able to determine a tempo that I felt both suited the composer’s intent and my abilities.
Frets & Strings is made of up three distinct themes with the C section being the most robust. Melodic themes and the underlying harmony are mostly diatonic but the piece does make use of chromatic chord shifts frequently. Being a block-chord ragtime piece the melody moves mostly in major and minor seconds diatonically. Larger jumps mainly come from single note runs between chord movement with the exception being the most technically difficult part of the composition, a double octave jump in 25th and 41st measure (Fig.1). The jump, from G on the third fret of the first string to the third fret of the sixth string, takes place in the span of a tied dotted-eighth and sixteenth note. What makes this part difficult is not the double-octave jump but the fingering of the F#9 chord on the first four strings immediately after the sixteenth note. I was able to adequately play these measures at a moderate tempo of 120-ish but in the end I decided to drop the second G in order to keep the song at a tempo I thought appropriate without making those measures sound muddled.
Figure 1.
Some final notes on Frets & Strings. You will notice that the chord diagrams are set into the music notation itself. Frank Victor is said to have invented this mechanic (1). I have never seen it before and I rather like it so I plan to use it in future music notation for this site.
Pick It and Play It Notes
Written and arranged by Frank Victor and published in 1936 by the Radio City Guitar Studio, Pick It and Play It is another block-chord solo composition for guitar and can be found in Mel Bay’s Masters of the Plectrum Guitar. Though this piece is mostly played in a block-chord style it makes use of more single note movement creating periods of a walking bassline throughout.
The form, or at least the way in which the piece is played here, is awkward to me. The first time through is a full 40 bars while the second time through is 36 bars. That is not necessarily strange but the arrangement of the thematic ideas in the different sections just feels off-balance to me. Adding to this sense of being off-balance, the notation provides little to no help on the separation of thematic ideas and there is no repeat; only a D.S. and coda. After a four bar intro the first theme, Theme 1, is eight bars long and played twice for a total of sixteen bars in the key of G major. Theme 2 follows for eight bars with four being in the key of B major and four in A major. Theme 1 then returns for eight bars and we finally come to our first double bar marking the end of the first section, whew. The second section is eight bars long and though it stays in the key of G major the first chord, B major really gives the overall section a IV chord feel until it finally resolves to G major. The end of the second section is our D.S. returning us to the top and through the entire 32 bars of section 1 and to the coda. The coda finishes the piece with a short four bar outline of Gmaj, C#dim, Cmin, B/Gmaj.
Melodically, Pick It and Play It is not very interesting as most of the melody comes from the chromatic movement of chords. What is interesting are chord voicings used in several sections and the voice leading they create. As mentioned above the use of single notes in this piece are mainly used to create a moving bassline rather than accentuate the melody from the top voices of the chords. But, again the bassline movement is often chromatic in nature and provides movement but not much in terms of interesting lines.
The tempo marking states, “Swing tempo” which for this time period would most likely refer to a danceable swing tempo. This piece has a nice bouncy feel the propels itself through the first section. I play this piece usually around 125-130. As with Frets & Strings a nice medium tempo works best. Victor's use of large chords and coveraged of the entire fretboard (for a non-cutaway) make this piece a nice intro into early jazz guitar playing. Enjoy!
2. Rattenbury, Ken. Duke Ellington, Jazz Composer, Yale University Press 1993, print.
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