Life According to Piano
What I Do
After I quit piano lessons in my teens, because I had already accomplished my life goal of playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, I started writing lovely angsty adolescent songs — with good music, of course!
Then I realized that I didn’t intend to sing in front of people. I just wanted to play piano.
BUT I still wanted to “sing” songs!
Which is how my first piano recording was subtitled: Piano Songs.
Only, the world read that subtitle and thought I was going to be singing on the album. Oops.
I had in mind Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Alas! no one else had that in mind!
Still, when I improvise & compose my piano pieces, I still believe that I am creating a song to sing at the piano. Which means that many of my pieces end up in song form. Verses and choruses and even the occasional bridge.
Only, I have no words for these songs, so to differentiate the verses, I create different music. Which in classical structure ends up being a backward rondo: A-B-C-B-D-B — the chorus returns, but the A section does not.
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