Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
O’Riley: 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of film composer Bernard Herrmann, known for his iconic musical (and pure musique concrète in the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) landscapes/backdrops for films like Citizen Kane, Cape Fear, Taxi Driver (his last) and memorable and numerous Hitchcock works. Psycho has long been a favorite film of mine, and Herrmann’s score is perhaps more indelibly inscribed on my memory than even the violently etched black-and-white images Hitchcock created. In scoring Psycho for strings only, Herrmann mentioned the intent on keeping a “black-and-white” texture in the spareness of his chosen ensemble. In transcribing a 20-minute suite of pieces for piano, I chose the ebony-and-ivory continuation of that thought. In music so rich, it is astonishing, when putting the notes down on the keyboard, to find the musical materials of Herrmann’s work so bare-motivic, archetypal and ultimately economic. Though I haven’t yet recorded the sequence commercially, it’s become a staple of my concert repertory. This live performance was captured at a live taping of my NPR radio program, From The Top, hosted by the EG Conference last spring in Monterey, and shot and edited expertly by Reid Mangan.
Video after the jump.
