My musical journey began with the piano when I was 10 years old. My brother and I started lessons with my father's violin teacher on the same day. He was forced to step in when his wife, (a piano teacher), left him shortly before. We started with the John M. Williams, (not the Star Wars guy), & Shaylor Turner's beginner books. Students from before 1980 may remember learning from their very first piano book, first grade book and second grade book. Who remembers the fairy arpeggios?

I took to the piano like a duck to water and wrote my first piece: "Snow", 2 weeks after my first lesson. I used two hands around middle C and I wrote it in proper notation. (Sadly it was consumed in the great conflagration of 1982 and I don't remember the tune.) Dad's violin teacher was very much "old school" and a stickler for accuracy so if we hit the wrong note he would flick the errant finger, which was rather off-putting...

When I was 11 I entered secondary school and continued my piano tuition there under a couple of very competent male pianists. All was fine for a couple of years until it began to get difficult and I hit the wall. All who have studied an instrument will be familiar with this: At some point it just gets difficult and you have to REALLY practise hard in order to progress. Those who don't, drop out at this point. I was one of these as I didn't like hard work at this point in my life.

I also dropped out because I had found rock music and my musical calling, writing songs and playing bass in my first band at the age of 14. So it was that my piano development halted, although not entirely, as I continued to play and love the instrument, just that I didn't play other people's notation and didn't take lessons anymore.

After leaving home at 17 I no longer had access to a proper piano and could only rarely touch the keys for some decades after that but when I had the chance I always took it. Despite my lack of technique and preparation I remember playing half a cafe piano gig at 22 so I at least knew what I was doing. I also remember playing Rhodes piano at a blues jam in college a few years later.

It wasn't until I got involved in the musical scene in Portland at the age of 35 that I found the need for a keyboard again and I bought a cheap 2nd hand small Yamaha thing around that time which I used to work out tunes and harmonies and write down notation. I guess it improved my technique a little but it certainly wasn't like playing a proper piano. I did play the town's grand piano from time to time during this period and was able to more-or-less play Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, although certainly not to performance standard.

At 41 I wrote and arranged for orchestra the first tranche of my setting of "Songs From The Lord Of The Rings". All of these were worked out on my crappy electronic keyboard and there were even some piano parts written out.

At 45 I took on the challenge of writing and arranging my "Songs Of Travel" to compliment RV Williams' effort. These were all lieder for voice and piano so I had to bring the piano into proper focus and lift my level. I still had no real piano to play with so it was all done in my imagination and using the synthesizer in my notation program. Despite these limitations I believe the piano parts still hold up.

After my father moved into his retirement home his piano was passed around and eventually at 50 I finally had a REAL piano! Eureka! I began playing it regularly but developing proper technique took a long time!

The piano is the most difficult instrument of all and anyone who doesn't understand this clearly has not succeeded in mastering it to a high level. It has two hands, each of which must be able to play different, difficult, multi-note things simultaneously. It has 7 octaves! It has 3 pedals, each of which requires careful and expert use and understanding. It is frequently called upon to play 3 or 4 sections simultaneously, thereby imitating most of an orchestra on one instrument! It is the go to instrument for most performance accompaniment and rehearsal.

Only one other instrument can come anywhere near to competing with this level of complexity and that is the organ. The organ is similar to a piano in that they both embody the traditional keyboard and thus all pianists can play the organ to an extent and vice-versa but there the comparison stops. The organ has multiple manuals and a huge pedal board but those are only 2 or 3 octaves each. The piano has 7 octaves on ONE keyboard! To access notes outside the manual on the organ the organist must select different stops. This involves a different mindset to the piano where you simply hit the note. Also the use of different stops creates vastly different tonal colours. To adjust tonality on the piano you need to change your technique. The organ has no sustain pedal which is a critical part of a pianist's technique. The list goes on but these are the most obvious differences. Then there are electronic keyboards which are something else again. You can argue that the organ is just as difficult as the piano which may theoretically be true but the fact is that most of the great composers preferred the piano and consequently the most difficult and complex works are written for the piano. Bach loved the organ of course but he lived in a time before good pianos were available.

Anyway, I gradually progressed on a real piano, especially from the age of 55, until at the age of 60 I released "The View From Phobos", an album of solo piano pieces that I had accumulated over the preceding few years. I finally had developed a pianist's understanding!

From this point on I simply wrote piano music as required, which included accompaniments for my complete LOTR cycle and my piano adaptation of Schubert's divine String Quintet D. 956. Like most composers it became my go to instrument for sketching out pieces as it enables one to employ multiple sections of multiple voices without having to score for an orchestra while simultaneously allowing the piece to be realized in public performance by a single musician. What's not to love?

If I had developed my understanding and technique far enough to do all this why had I not played my own piano stuff on record? Why had I hired Nick Young for example? Well, sadly, I just don't have the ability of a concert soloist and although I can play all the sections of a given piece I cannot put them all together in a reasonable amount of time to have a reasonable expectation of being able to give an accurate performance at proper tempo in one take. I did force myself to play one of my accompaniments to one of my songs for a YouTube clip and I eventually managed to achieve a decent take with just one error but it took a crazy number of takes and even then I only did a verse at a time. If you watch the clip you can see that I can play but I have to say that I simply don't have the time to do this for every one of my pieces. I much prefer to concentrate on the writing and production and leave the performance to someone with better technique than me.

As for most composers, my solo piano works are a window into my soul. They are the distillation of my musical ideas into a concentrated form that I play for myself. They are meant to be played and enjoyed for their own sake and I hope that you, the reader, will enjoy playing them too!

Excelsior!


Warren Mars: August 2024