Anon - Casablanca 1942 - Elton John - Eric Morecambe & Andre Previn - Robert Schumann - Thelonious Monk - Artur Schnabel - Jacques Barzun - Frederic Chopin - Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook TV - Weird or What? TV - Whitney Balliett -
Scientists have just exhumed Beethoven from his grave. When they opened the coffin they were shocked to see him playing the piano backwards. When asked what this meant, a spokesman said he was decomposing. Anon
You played it for her, you can play it for me. Casablanca 1942 ***** starring Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman & Paul Henreid & Claude Rains & Conrad Veidt & Sydney Greenstreet & Peter Lorre & Curt Bois et al, director Michael Curtiz
I’ve always wanted to smash a guitar over someone’s head. You just can’t do that with a piano. Elton John
Andre Previn: You’re playing all the wrong notes.
Eric Morecambe: … I’m playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order. The Morecambe & Wise show, guest Andre Previn, BBC 1971
When you play, never mind who listens to you. Robert Schumann
The piano ain’t got no wrong notes. Thelonious Monk
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides. Artur Schnabel
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. Jacques Barzun, Critical Questions, 1984
Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano! Frédéric Chopin, cited Jorgensen’s Chopin and the Swedish Nightingale, 2003
A man who awoke one morning with an astonishing talent … ‘I woke up and I could suddenly play the piano … I struck the bottom of the pool’ … treated for severe concussion. Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook III, BBC 2017
In New York a man is struck by lightning and turns into a musical genius. Can our brains be rewired? Weird or What? More Medical Mysteries s3e9, Discovery 2012
Tony Cicoria: Not only can he play music, he discovers he can write it. ibid.
His [Thelonious Monk] improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only from his love of melody but from the love of the older pianists he grew out of – Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his solos, but he let them escape only as parody. Whitney Balliett, New Yorker jazz critic, re Thelonious Monk