#Mehldau radiohead sheet music how to#

And then The Bends, which is their most guitar-based record and, arguably, one of the greatest guitar rock records of all time. Then I worked my way backwards through the first record, Pablo Honey, that’s an album that even sort of the band disavows, almost. These were genuinely beautiful sounds that were coming out of the band. I thought there were original harmonic sequences in this music that were genuine. Also, I’m a big fan of very sensual harmonies that you’d find in Ravel, a harmony, a chord that makes your hair stand on end. That appealed to me on that textural level.

#Mehldau radiohead sheet music how to#

I don’t think there are more than one or two members of Radiohead that know how to read music, but they’re each really creative artists and they each contribute a particular idea or a thread or a motif-much like a Bach fugue or a Shostakovich fugue-to each song. It also had in common with other genres of music that I like the idea of counterpoint, a mixture of voices, of a real sort of weaving of voices rather than a more vertical or chordal or more overtly beat-related types of pop music. There is one song, “Electioneering,” that I didn’t like so much, but it was incredible hearing it. Listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer, it was a completely strong album from beginning to end. That’s what we’re shooting for in this world. We’re used to, in the classical realm, buying a Mahler recording and there’s not any weak tracks on a Mahler symphony. I bought the record and listened to it.įor a snobby classical music listener, I think there are a lot of pop albums that suffer from being the product of one or two good songs and eight songs of filler. It just sounded like something I might be interested in. Jedd Beaudoin: When did you first encounter the music of Radiohead and what was your impression?Ĭhristopher O’Riley: I first heard them in their third album, the one that was probably the most written-about of any rock album since Abbey Road or the White Album, OK Computer in 1997. He spoke to Jedd Beaudoin about his work listen to their conversation above. 16, in an event hosted by the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. O’Riley performs an evening of Radiohead music at Distillery 244 in Old Town on Tuesday, Jan. In addition to the aforementioned recordings he’s tracked compositions by Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Nirvana and others when not performing works by Igor Stravinsky, Bernard Herrmann and others (see the acclaimed 2011 effort with cellist Matt Haimovitz). O’Riley has issued two full-length albums of Radiohead music (2003’s True Love Waits and 2005’s Hold Me To This) in addition to having adapted several other songs by the British band to piano since the late 1990s. “I really like to think that this is an infinitesimally slowed-down improvisation because I really am making note choices, harmony choices from one sixteenth note to the next.” The Los Angeles-based musician has been arranging/interpreting/performing Radiohead’s music since the early 2000s. “They’re all some of the most difficult pieces that I play,” says pianist Christopher O’Riley, discussing his preparation for a recital spotlighting the music of Radiohead.