There’s an article on Radiohead, including an interview with Christopher O’Riley in the Philadelphia Enquirer: “This is some of the most challenging music being written anywhere,” says Christopher O’Riley, the 48-year-old classical pianist who released an album of Radiohead songs, True Love Waits, that became a left-field hit. To prepare, he transcribed the originals note-for-note to assimilate facets of their architecture. Then, he says, he had to figure out how to replicate their orchestral layers and interconnected melodies alone at the piano.
After months of Radiohead immersion, he came away impressed.
“What’s going on in this music is more than the verse and the chorus,” O’Riley said from his home in Los Angeles. Radiohead “is thinking about form in ways that are similar to classical composers. Things don’t always repeat the way you expect pop songs to repeat. They create this very specific Byzantine mosaic that is infinitely rich, all by itself, in the middle register of the music.”
Brad Mehldau, who has recorded several Radiohead tracks on his albums, explained several years ago that his Radiohead treatments aren’t typical covers. “What I’m attracted to is the tension” in the songs, “the long periods where the harmony is just one chord. The jazz thing is usually to play lots of notes when you get to a section like that, but if you resist and go in a more melodic direction, you find you can get beyond what they wrote. It becomes an improvisational idea off of a motif, but it’s not really jazz, either. [Radiohead] creates atmospheres, and those can be reworked any number of ways.” [thanks Kenton]
Radiohead found all over musical dial
By Tom Moon
Inquirer Music Critic
What does a rock band like Radiohead mean to the world?
The critically revered five-piece from Oxford, England – known for its intense accounts of dislocation and techno-alienation – sells CDs in respectable, though not earth-shattering, numbers. It generates higher-than-average traffic on Internet bulletin boards, with fans endlessly parsing lyrics for hidden meanings. And it does solid business when it performs live, selling its share of T-shirts.
Yet those marketplace indicators don’t tell half the story.
For, while Radiohead is still too intense for modern-rock radio and too abstruse to enchant the masses, musicians working across far-flung genres are studying the band’s every existential wail. They’re taking apart the elaborate productions, examining the unusual chords and twisted-logic structures, excavating the ambient sizzle that surrounds vocalist Thom Yorke’s tortured-heart melodies – and finding inspiration in music that might actually deserve to be called timeless.
“This is some of the most challenging music being written anywhere,” says Christopher O’Riley, the 48-year-old classical pianist who will perform a Radiohead program tomorrow night at the Kimmel Center.
Last year, O’Riley released an album of Radiohead songs, True Love Waits, that became a left-field hit. To prepare, he transcribed the originals note-for-note to assimilate facets of their architecture. Then, he says, he had to figure out how to replicate their orchestral layers and interconnected melodies alone at the piano.
After months of Radiohead immersion, he came away impressed.
“What’s going on in this music is more than the verse and the chorus,” O’Riley said from his home in Los Angeles. Radiohead “is thinking about form in ways that are similar to classical composers. Things don’t always repeat the way you expect pop songs to repeat. They create this very specific Byzantine mosaic that is infinitely rich, all by itself, in the middle register of the music.”
Radiohead’s anthemic, high-density electronics-meet-acoustics approach is an obvious influence on many young rock bands – this year’s model, the Cooper Temple Clause, is a variant on OK Computer-era Radiohead. But O’Riley and a number of other non-rock artists also have investigated the band. Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau did several of its songs, including “Everything in Its Right Place” on his latest trio outing, Anything Goes. The Bad Plus has been known to play Radiohead, as have singer-songwriters John Mayer, Sarah McLachlan and Howie Day. The list goes on, and includes marching bands, crooners and Brazilian singers.
The activity resembles what happened with the Beatles: Artists were so enthralled by songs such as “Eleanor Rigby” and “The Long and Winding Road” that they were compelled to revisit them, some not changing a note, others undertaking a radical reworking.
Mehldau, who has interpreted the Beatles and Björk, explained several years ago that his Radiohead treatments aren’t typical covers.
“What I’m attracted to is the tension” in the songs, “the long periods where the harmony is just one chord. The jazz thing is usually to play lots of notes when you get to a section like that, but if you resist and go in a more melodic direction, you find you can get beyond what they wrote. It becomes an improvisational idea off of a motif, but it’s not really jazz, either. [Radiohead] creates atmospheres, and those can be reworked any number of ways.”
O’Riley, who has a reputation as a solid concert pianist, says the classical-music impulse was to do theme and variations on Radiohead melodies. After some experimentation, he rejected that idea.
“I didn’t want it to sound like a Juilliard student playing a Chopin-ballad version of a pop tune. It was more about finding a way to bring out the core information at the heart of the song, and at the same time translate this dense band texture to the piano’s texture.”
O’Riley hears the band’s version in his head when he performs, and as he goes along, he constantly reevaluates his choices. “Just as the band did writing the song, you make choices moment to moment,” he says. “Every one of these pieces has gone through some revision as I’ve played them.”
The pianist adds that the discipline of doing formal, written transcriptions of pop – he’s also worked up R.E.M.’s “World Leader Pretend,” Tori Amos’ “Mother,” and a bunch of songs by the late Elliott Smith – has sharpened his skills as a classical pianist. He’s now preparing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, a piece he considers the hardest in his repertoire.
“The last time I played it, I slowed it way down and I couldn’t believe it. I realized it’s the same level of difficulty you have in every bar of ‘World Leader Pretend.’ ” His conclusion: “The day-job stuff is a lot easier to play now.”
More gratifying, though, is how audiences have responded to his Radiohead treatments.
“A lot of the performances have been classical pieces on the first half and Radiohead after the intermission. I played this concert in Frankfurt [Germany] and it was a mixed crowd, but you could hear that people were listening, really attentive listening, the same way on both halves of the program… .
“There was the same quality of silence in the room on the Schubert and on ‘Exit Music (for a Film).’ That, to me, said something.”
Radiohead news on this day..
- Thom Yorke posts new Office Chart ‘against antimatter’ – 2011
- Semifinalists for Aniboom Radiohead video contest – 2008
- Radiohead’s second night in Copenhagen – 2006
- Exclusive: ‘Bangers n Mash’ video online – 2006
- Radiohead Chat Room returns – 2005
- Jonny Greenwood interview in Undercover – 2004
- Radiohead featured in two Japanese magazines – 2004
- Thom working on a solo album? – 2004
- Radiohead special on Danish TV – 2004
- Radiohead.tv to be internet tv station – 2003
