[Cake-Walk] Borel-Clerc, Charles. (1879 - 1959)
LA MATTCHICHE. CÉLÈBRE MARCHE. ["Tongo" Sorella]
St. Petersburg, Russia: Northern Lyre. 1904. Upright folio, illustrated front wrapper. 5 pp. [PN] 1421. Scarce Russian sheet music printed in red and black with a Black man and woman on cover evidently performing a Cake-Walk beneath the printed title appearing in both Cyrillic and English. Disbound, with skinning of the paper along the spine edge, inside front hinge reinforced with paper, slightly toned, but overall a very good copy. Rare. No copies of this edition listed in Worldcat.The music is of a Spanish flavor, and is apparently from a series of compositions by Borel-Clerc based on melodies by Ramón Estellés and Carlos Gomes. Here published under the banner of a Cake-Walk dance, it is composed like most music of that genre, in 2/4 time.
The Cakewalk became a popular stage act for expert dancers as well as a craze in fashionable ballrooms at the turn of the twentieth century. Couples formed a square with the men on the inside and, stepping high to a lively tune, strutted around the square. The couples were eliminated one by one by several judges, who considered the elegant bearing of the men, the grace of the women, and the creativity of the dancers; the last remaining pair was presented with a highly decorated cake. The cakewalk originated among enslaved Black Americans who, often in the company of their captors, used the dance as a subtle satire on the elegance of white ballroom dances. It contributed to the evolution of later American and European dances based on jazz culture, rhythms, and that musical influence on the growth of ragtime. (Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, Volume 1, p. 175)
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