By Rusel D’cruze
Here’s the man who’ll never let you think about genres in music. If you think pianists are just old men at a piano and nothing else, or whether artists like Skrillex could never really make their music soulful or soothing, this pianist-electronic artist will make you think differently about being strict with genres, because that’s what the creative artists you love DON’T do.
Remember the background music (OST) from the Black Swan trailer? Or the OST from ‘The Intouchables’? Well even if you haven’t, the man below is what the two have in common.
For those who couldn’t imagine blending the piano with electronic music, it’s what David Guetta would sound like if he played a piano while rocking a crowd.
Ludovico Einaudi’s music has been, apart from the usual classical style he was trained for, a new generation of what many call neo-classical music, combining soft soothing pieces or intensely serious notes with a wonderful touch of modern electronic effects.
OK a short introduction, Ludovico Einaudi has led a lifetime of musical pursuits starting by composing his own music on his folk guitar as a teenager. He began his musical training when he was 27, at Milan’s Conservatorio Verdi under Luciano Berio, whose innovative work with African vocal music (like come on, how many of us think about music and Africa together?) and arrangements of songs by The Beatles inspired him to an “open way of thinking about music”, he says.
After garnering international attention, Einaudi has performed at major venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, Old Vic Tunnels, Tanglewood Festival etc., followed by works like Salgari which included the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Rabindranath Tagore. Well, so much for traditional stuff.
Einaudi’s captivating creativity lies precisely in his ‘open thinking about music’. Why can’t a pianist be like a DJ too? Why not feature the catchy digital, new age genres and create an experience that can’t be complete without it? Music beyond the delicate stroke of keys and into the realm of beats, strings, digital sounds that give listeners a complete experience, give it a deeper insight into the purpose of music, that is the essence of Einaudi’s pieces. Personally, they inspire me to interpret melody in fresh, thoughtful ways. His work is a completely new perspective to the piano you might never have heard before.
Here are a few links to convince you to delve deeper into Neo-Classical pieces.
Einaudi is known mostly for the scores of soundtracks (pun intended) he composed for TV soaps such as Dr. Zhivago and other movies, such as “Due Tramonti” in I’m Still Here(2010), “Nuvole Bianche” in Insidious(2010), “Fly” and “Una Mattina” for The Intouchables(2011). He won awards for Best Soundtrack at the Italian Music Festival and his album Divenire(2006) topped the iTunes classical chart.
Here’s what you should listen to if you really want to discover a whole new world of music altogether:
I Giorni
One of his most loved melodies of all times, I Giorni has been a favourite of numerous lovers of calming tunes with a revamped feel. Well it’s also how I discovered Einaudi, I happened to love the background music of a certain Airtel commercial named Endless Goodbye way back in 2011 and that’s how I’ve felt the presence of this modern pianist, in the silent tunes of sights every day, in melodies hidden in the simplest things in life.
I Giorni was conceived through Einaudi’s travels in Africa, his latest album, Elements was inspired by the smallest influences he felt around him, which he strung together into an introspective collection of music, a beautiful blend of the pristine classical piano and the gentle rhythms and beats of digital, new-age effects.
On Elements, Einaudi says,”I saw new frontiers — on the edge between what I knew and what I didn’t know — that I had long wanted to explore: creation myths, the periodic table, Euclid’s geometry, Kandinsky’s writings, the matter of sound and of colour, the stems of wild grass in a meadow, the shapes of the landscape…”
Well then, here’s the innovative pianist making the world lend an ear to his musical creativity, dissolving the barriers of strictly classical piano and chaotic electronic music. So here’s music that makes you think about the world with excitingly new eyes.
