piano

Moving from pi to pi-ano: Piano music was evident everywhere as I was growing up (TV, movie themes, radio, ‘elevator music’, churches). The first piece that truly caught my attention was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. On drizzly afternoons, students at school practiced this popular assignment on the ancient auditorium piano. The slow delivery, the simple yet complex structure of melodic tenderness stopped everything else in my head – I had to listen.

A little later in the 1960s, a recording of Mason William’s piano composition, Classical Gas, oddly caught fire on the popular charts. There were no lyrics, no rock and roll or Motown sound like most of the hits of the 60s. Every time Classical Gas came up on my bedside alarm clock/radio, I stopped what I was doing to listen up close. The soaring sound had a way of lifting my spirit – and the intricacies of the rhythm and a kind of call response melody wordlessly fascinated my mind.

There were balladeers of the same era whose music was a tightly woven combination of voice and piano. Elton John, Roberta Flack, Jackson Browne, and Carole King come to mind. Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder thumped the keys as they sang. The Derek and the Dominos 1971 song ‘Layla’, especially the instrumental ending, sailed on a passionate intertwining of piano and guitar.

Some of the recordings I remember seem to have been sped up a bit in their current format of delivery. I miss the deliberation of the original tempo. My mind is clear on this – it says ‘slow down’ when the newer reproductions are faster than the musicians played or sang them. (This might affect the key as well.) Would a tempo change be caused by flawed compact discs, or some fluke in the equipment that plays them, or something else altogether?