At this point, I won’t even pretend I have any longtime readers, but about four years ago I would post occasionally about my love of the piano as used on pop music.
There’s just something about that sound that really grabs my ear. The instrument has an incredible range of harmonics. It has strings, but it’s a percussion instrument. Essentially, it was invented as a combination of the clavichord and harpsichord. Part of the sound comes from the force with which the keys are struck and part comes from how the strings are allowed to vibrate.
It can be lowbrow, like a barrel-houser in a brothel, or high-class, leading a concerto in an orchestra.
Here are two tracks from 2008 that show a couple different approaches.
The Richard Swift song from the Ground Trouble Jaw EP evokes the classical soul of the Sixties. The Eric Hutchinson song is from his third record Sounds Like This. On the first example, the bass and drums set up a menacing groove and then the piano crashes in with those big chords. On the second example, the piano is taking lead and we would categorize the resulting sound as “pop.”
If I knew more about music theory, I could explain in detail how this works. But instead, just listen for yourself.
Richard Swift – Lady Luck — BUY
Eric Hutchinson – OK, It’s Alright With Me — BUY
FOOTNOTE: In the foreword to Arthur Loesser’s Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, Edward Rothstein wrote:
[The piano] became… the social anchor of the middle-class home. Lessons were required of every eligible maiden and bachelor… The piano’s singing voice was well suited to domestic expressions of passions and of social aspiration, as well as to the more public aesthetic achievements of the classical repertoire. The discipline of playing the instrument also meant that these passions were controlled and shaped. The piano was not just a seducer, it was also a moral guide; it played the Mephisto Waltz but also The Maiden’s Prayer. The study of the piano was necessary – one journal asserted – for the proper “formation of character”… The instrument was inseparable from developments in nineteenth-century commerce and technology. The manufacturers were all middle-class family firms making instruments for middle-class families.
In his preface to the same book, Jacques Barzun wrote:
“…the piano is the social instrument par excellence. It is drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.”
One Response
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Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Says:
At this point, I won’t even pretend I have any longtime readers…
There, there. I may not have been here very long, but I have been reading for a few years.
It’s just not Christmas unless you are dredging up performances of Xmas from bands I’ve never heard of.