Regarding Billy Joel, I’m just going by what he said himself in his interview with James Lipton. He took no interest in his piano lessons. They bored him. He couldn’t bear tapping out someone else’s interpretation of hundred-year-old folk tunes and being told in preachy tones to sit up straight, curl your fingers just so, don’t rest your foot on the sustain pedal, and other such things that, in his mind, interfered with the music. He wanted to lean forward and backward, to sway, to shape his fingers according to how the music made him feel. He felt that his lessons were restrictive and pointless. What music lessons were trying to teach him was how to move his fingers to match dots on a sheet of paper, but what he wanted to learn was how to create. He demonstrated with a piano on Lipton’s stage how, as a youngster, he would play major seventh chords and fancy himself sitting in a piano bar. On his own, he learned that “dinner music” is nothing more than major sevenths in some variation of I, IV, VI, and VI. Blues are just I, IV, and V in a dominant seventh. And so on. He has retained almost nothing from those excruciating years.
Regarding Elton John as a mere pop idol, the notion is simply wrong. Paul Buckmaster, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and a celebrated and accomplished composer in his own right, who has arranged music for everyone from the Rolling Stones to Patti LaBelle, worked with Elton early in his career, and said of his music that it was “an inspiration, a real turn on”. His first two successful albums, Elton John and 11-17-70, contain pieces with incredibly rich and complex scores in unusual keys for rock music, like F# minor. They are deeply classical. Even the hard-rocking Take Me to the Pilot breaks suddenly into a key-change from C to E-flat. These are not things that pop music idols were doing in the late 60s. Over the years, he did indeed seize on and profit from a certain pop idol status, even composing the self-parody, I’m Gonna Be a Teenage Idol, in which he and Bernie made fun of themselves. But his amazing discography covers every conceivable style of music, from the tin-pan alley madness of Social Disease to the wailing, steel guitar strains of Country Comfort. From the delicate and pensive harpsichord fugues in I Need You to Turn To to the gutter rock loudness of Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.
As a young man, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Del Newman’s score of Funeral for a Friend. I could read very simple arrangements, but nothing like this, and so I took it to a local college where a grand piano was available, with the intention of figuring it out. As I struggled with it, a man walked in, and thinking that I would be asked to leave, I gathered the sheets with a sigh and stood up.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Elton John,” I said, “Funeral for a Friend”.
He took it from my hands and began to examine it. “It looks quite lovely,” he said, “Would you mind?”
I was thinking, ‘Mind? Hell, no. You mean you’ll play it? I’d love to hear how it’s supposed to sound.’
“Please,” I said, motioning to the bench.
He sat down, spread out the music, and began to play. Instantly, I recognized the familiar and haunting melody. The gentleman, an excellent pianist, constantly interspersed his play with eclamations of, “Oh, my!”, and “Wonderful!” When he got to the segue from C-minor to A via an F-minor-eleven with diminished 5, he gasped audibly. “Oh, gorgeous!” he cried out. When he finished, he and I competed over who could thank the other more profusely. As he walked away, I wondered whether I was dreaming.
“Who are you?” I blurted out.
“I’m the dean of the department.” His deep voice echoed in the large hall.
“I’m not a student here,” I said, “Is it okay if I stay and work on this?”
“Oh, yes, you simply must,” he declared with a polite smile, and disappeared out the door.
I sat down more determined than ever, and worked with the song ever so slowly and carefully, returning almost every day for several weeks until I had it all worked out. I never saw the dean again, but I can still play it to this day from Newman’s own score of Elton’s recording. I suppose, in looking this story over, that it is apropros of pretty much nothing except to provide just a bit of context of what I admit is a very longstanding bias and love for Elton John.
I didn’t say that it was, and in fact went to great pains (repeatedly) to distinguish the two, your nit-picking over the choice of terms notwithstanding. But since you’ve brought us there, Websters gives one definition of “talent” as “Intellectual ability, natural or acquired; mental endowment or capacity; skill in accomplishing” — emphasis mine.
I cannot imagine what you are disagreeing with. You have even just finished quoting me as saying, “The talent to read notes and the talent to create music are completely separate things.” Perhaps by riveting on the semantics of “talent”, you somehow lost the essence of the statement.
What the…? I’m beginning to think you have conflated me and someone else. I have made that very point. Regarding Joel, I’ve covered that above.
I don’t know that I would call them “complex”. I heard one of them performed by his pianist on Lipton’s show, and it is quite much like Joel’s Salieri to Elton’s Mozart. And yes, I know that the movie’s portrayal of Salieri is a caricature; I’m just making a point with a familiar image.
Be that as it may, I hardly see the need to descend into the thread like Superman and beat me about the head and shoulders. Quite many of my views on quite many topics are “interesting”, but I respect the views of others, so long as they are honestly held, even when I disagree. This is neither General Questions nor Great Debats, and so I believe that my own opinions might merit more than your summary dismissal of them, particularly since some of the ones you’ve mocked exactly match your own.
Nearly every point of yours that I disagreed with was based on your ‘knowledge’ of the fact that Billy Joel cannot read music. Yes, I saw the very same Inside the Actor’s Studio episode that you (and thousands of others) did; I am as big a fan of Joel as you are of Elton John. However, just because Joel despised his lessons does not mean that he did not learn how to read music! And while his skill at sight-reading may have deteriorated over the years, I think he still knows that the little dot with a flag on it means an F. Also, he may not have liked his lessons (who did??), but he developed a love and appreciation for playing classical music – a fact that came out in the very same interview with James Lipton. You simply cannot be a pianist with an appreciation of playing classical music without being able to read music to some degree.