After the Cakewalk

Despite his having moved to the United States with his family when he was 11 years old, Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was born in Canada where glimpses of his talent had already begun to manifest themselves at an early age. Although Dett was to achieve notoriety for his compositions in more extended forms during his adulthood, followed by the admiration of John Philip Sousa, Percy Grainger, and Sir Eugene Goossens, among countless others, his earliest known compositions were redolent of the popular music he would have been exposed to during his youth, namely marches, polkas, waltzes, cakewalks, and the current rage of that period, ragtime.Among Dett's earliest titles was his "Characteristic March Two-Step" After the Cake Walk. Perhaps written as early as 1899, when Dett was just a teenager, this current edition is wholly based upon its original 1901 band publication that was arranged by Lee Orean Smith. Smith was also responsible for preparing Dett's piano solo version for publication, as well as its forms for "theatre" orchestra and "mandolin club". Owing to the fact that Smith's highly idiomatic scoring was prepared for a band of that period, rather than that of a concert band of today, I adapted, edited and extended Smith's instrumentation in order to make it possible for Dett's music to become available to a new generation of musicians and listeners alike.