DRAKES Cake Walk:"Composed for Drake Co." Brooklyn1909 Start Price USD 19.99 Current Price USD 42.99 Time Left - Bid Count 3 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Tuesday, August 19, 2008 End Time Tuesday, August 26, 2008 Location Duluth, Minnesota See more about 'DRAKES Cake Walk:"Composed for Drake Co." Brooklyn1909' Description DRAKE'S CAKE WALK: "Composed by Edwin F. Kendall Expressly for Drake Brothers Company, Brooklyn N.Y. & Boston, Mass." Published by Drake Brothers, Brooklyn, 1909 I'm listing this better-than-average cake walk under my usual category of "rag," but also as a collectible, under "cakes and doughnuts." It will be interesting to discover which category of buyers will be most interested. As usual, I will parse the composition musically (below), but first, a reminder of the history of Drake's Cakes. The following paragraph is copied from their current Website: ""Drake's has been providing the Northeastern United States with delicious snack cakes for over a century. Newman E. Drake baked his first pound cakes in Brooklyn in 1888 and sold them by the slice. Drake's popularity grew and the Drake's brand with it, supplying such favoites as Drake's Coffee Cake, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles and Ring Dings." The full story, available on Wikipedia and elsewhere, offers fascinating details. Drake's were the first kosher bakery, because they did not use lard or other animal fats. The company went through many changes of ownership in the last century -- Bordens, Ralston Purina, Culinar (Canadian), and is now owned by the company that constituted its main rival for many years, Hostess cakes. (Seinfeld fans may remember a 1992 episode called "The Suicide" in which Drake's Cakes provided the plot.) Now -- musically -- I can tell you nothing about composer Kendall, except to say that he knew the territory. This is a good, form-fitting cake walk, and like most of the post-1900 cakewalks, it's really quite a good rag -- displaying more in-measure syncopations than the cakewalks of the 1890's. In E-flat and A-flat major, the pattern is: Intro(4)    AA    B    A    C (fine)    Coda(8)    D.S. (to C). It's a surprisingly good piece of work for a commercial project. Mr. Kendall isn't afaid to inject some unusual harmonies, e.g. in the first bar of "A" a fast switch between the tonic (Eb) and an E-flat diminished. The piece is of intermediate difficulty, the L.H. employing mostly a standard 1-x-2-x rhythm, but not octave-chord. The Trio ("C" theme) is especially attractive, with consideable syncopation and unusual accents. Rather than score a standard repeat, the composer uses a light treble Coda, before indicating the Trio repeat  with a D.S. to the fine. Drake's published this cake walk on good quality stock, with three pages of music, including the back page. Thus, it's just one-fold, with no inner page, and it's in very good condition. The spine is intact and there are only a couple of tiny clear-tape repairs on the edges. Max Morath     © Copyright 2005 Interstate Bakeries Corporation - All rights reserved.   Place a Bid!