Combining the Past and Present

As I waited in my seat in Evans Hall for Friday’s Christopher O’Riley concert to begin, I overheard a conversation behind me. A boy pointed out that O’Riley had set up a laptop on the piano in place of paper sheet music. He explained that his school was switching to a completely paperless report card system as well, and noted to his grandfather, “When you were my age, they thought there would be flying cars and robot maids.” Sometimes, things just don’t change as much as we thought they would. Certainly this is the case for music.

Christopher O’Riley is a classical pianist, which to most evokes an image of stuffy concert halls and music written by dead European men. He is, however, a classical pianist who plays Radiohead. Cover songs certainly aren’t a unique concept, but typically they’re within the same genre – if not the same century – as the musician’s regular repertoire.

In addition to his piano playing, he is also the host of the most popular classical music show on the air, NPR’s /From The Top/. The show highlights the future of music in the form of the best young musicians from around the country. These students play all kinds of music from all periods, sometimes skillfully accompanied by O’Riley himself. A recent episode featured a 16-year-old Hawaiian slack key guitarist, as well as a classical floutist from New Jersey. The diversity of the music performed on the show is reflected in O’Riley’s own versatility.

The concert on Friday began with four Radiohead covers back-to-back. He mentioned that one reason why he was drawn to the alternative rock Brits was the complexity of their layered music. The way that his transcriptions highlighted these layers was incredible. Breaking down a full band song to be played on a single instrument is no small feat, even for someone with O’Riley’s skill. Occasionally, three distinct parts would be going on at once and he would have to juggle two, going back and forth with one hand in order to keep them all together.

The next set of songs was by Nick Drake, a singer-songwriter who O’Riley pointed out was one of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke’s biggest musical influences. Revealing himself as a huge music geek, he explained how he would be playing two versions of the same song, “Place To Be,” based on Drake’s studio and home recordings. This obsessive geekiness also led O’Riley to find and transcribe an unreleased Elliott Smith track entitled “True Love” that was deemed too dark to be included on either of Smith’s posthumously released albums. This song, as well as “Cupid’s Trick,” had an eerily beautiful quality that is quite different from the original song, yet both still captured their essence. O’Riley closed the first half of the concert with Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box.” The energy and power of the original was kept intact in the cover, and the dissonances added a fitting feeling of anxiety.

The second half of the concert began with covers of songs by the Cocteau Twins and Pink Floyd. Then O’Riley closed his laptop and began Maurice Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit,” widely considered one of the most difficult solo piano pieces. Three movements told stories of a water sprite luring men into the water, a dead man hanging from the gallows and an evil spirit called Scarbo. O’Riley’s hands crawled back and forth across the keys as well as over and around each other, displaying the sort of technical skill for which there is no technological substitute. He closed the set with “Let Down” and “Paranoid Android,” both by Radiohead, then quickly came out for an encore of Elliott Smith’s instrumental “Bye.” The latter sounded as if it could have easily been an old piano etude, but for the hint of dissonance creeping in at the edges – an appropriate metaphor for Smith’s life and music.

There’s a lot of talk about how music is dead, given the state of the Billboard charts these days as well as the steady progress of technology in making music less economically viable. I disagree. Music has been an integral part of the human experience for thousands of years, it’s going to take a lot more than the Ke$has and Justin Biebers of the world to bring it down. Because, really, things haven’t changed all that much. We’re still moved by this thing that has been around for centuries, and it brings us out to sit together and listen in a way few other things can. The crowd at the concert on Friday was a pretty even split between Conn kids and senior citizens. Somehow, between playing a 1909 Ravel piece and Radiohead songs from 1997, O’Riley made the differences irrelevant. Things haven’t changed much — we have a lot more in common than we think.