Twenty-six-year-old author Nick Romeo is a nationally published journalist and music writer. He regularly contributes profiles and program notes to Carnegie Hall and has also written for The Texas Observer, Denver Magazine, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Baltimore Magazine, Classical Singer, FiLife.com (a companion website for The Wall Street Journal) and many other publications.
We need batteries, duct tape, and a flashlight,” said Greg Anderson, a doctoral candidate in the piano department at Yale University. Greg and I were walking to a thrift store in downtown New Haven with Elizabeth Joy Roe, Greg’s friend and partner in the Anderson & Roe Piano Duo. “Are we going to be destroying anything in slow motion?” Liz asked, in a serious voice. “We can bring that lamp I don’t want,” Greg said. Arriving at the New Haven Salvation Army, they fanned out and searched the aisles for flared jeans, bell bottoms, tapered shirts with pointed collars, anything reminiscent of the 1970s. Greg found a marigold shirt with a brown floral pattern and a pointed collar that fit him perfectly. He made for the register. “I haven’t seen one of these in a long time,” the cashier said as he counted out change.
In a few hours, Greg and Liz were shooting footage for a music video of their two-piano paraphrase of the Bee Gees song Stayin’ Alive. Anderson & Roe’s musical paraphrases exhibit many of the traits Franz Liszt developed in his famous paraphrases of Italian opera in the nineteenth century: they’re virtuosic and often playful transformations of familiar material into novel forms and styles.While the Bee Gees might seem an unlikely source of material for classically trained pianists, Greg saw historical continuity in the choice: “Saint-Saëns took the can-can, a popular contemporary dance song, and slowed it down for his Carnival of the Animals.We wanted to pick something that people would recognize as a dance song, and Stayin’ Alive is certainly that.” As a nod to Saint- Saëns’s example, they titled their rendition “Turtle Stayin’ Alive.” They had recorded the audio for the video months ago. That night they were hosting and filming what amounted to a dance party to match the music.
After they left the Salvation Army, Greg and Liz returned to Greg’s apartment and watched a YouTube clip from Saturday Night Fever, in which a younger and leaner John Travolta struts down the street eating pizza, then ducks into a dance club and displays astounding pelvic mobility while dancing to Stayin’ Alive. They took notes and brainstormed as they watched. “I like rows of people on the sides. The problem is I can’t dance like that. Also, we don’t have a glowing floor,” said Greg. Next, they watched a music video by the indie band Broken Social Scene. It showed a bunch of young people partying in a house; the dancing was decidedly easier to imitate than John Travolta’s, the visual aesthetic was low-tech and black-and-white.
After a quick dinner of tofu stir-fry and cold sesame noodles, they were ready to go. Greg changed into a pair of shiny red shoes, flared bell-bottoms, and the marigold shirt from the Salvation Army. Liz wore a black and brown check shirt, platform shoes, and high-waisted black pants. They drove to an apartment a friend had offered for the shoot and cleared out the furniture. Crammed into a cardboard box were their supplies for the evening: batteries, a flashlight, two five-dollar disco balls from Target, a Canon HV 30 camcorder, and a variety of drinks. Soon, friends recruited for dancing skills or enthusiasm (mostly the latter) started to trickle in as a stream of disco hits blasted from the speakers. Greg set up the camera, coached the people in the room on the general idea of the video (“Basically it’s just people dancing in a room”), and maneuvered the disco balls and flashlight to create the desired swirl of lights on the apartment’s green walls. As the night wore on, the dancing became wilder. By midnight they had filmed over three hours of footage for a video that would be just under three minutes long.
Since early 2007, Greg and Liz have created over a dozen music videos that give visual and dramatic dimensions to a variety of music for piano duo, mostly their own paraphrases of familiar works. Collectively, their videos have been viewed millions of times on YouTube, which in a certain sense makes them the most popular piano duo in the world.
One of their most popular videos re-imagines Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango. The video opens in a college classroom as a professorial voice drones about Newton’s laws governing force and attraction between bodies. Dressed as college students, Greg and Liz sit yawning and making flirtatious eyes at each other. Soon the video cuts to a shot of Liz draped suggestively over a grand piano on an empty stage. Then Greg appears, dressed in tight black leather, and begins to play. Liz stays standing, her bare arms inside the lid of the piano and her hands on the strings. The effect is twofold; the manual dampening of the strings creates a percussive timbre that suggests the sound of a tango band, while Liz’s position evokes the intimacy of the dance. Their paraphrase of Piazzolla was meant to musically render the drama and physicality of the tango. The use of multiple hand crossings, the alternation of sitting and standing, and the difficult passagework all suggest the spirit of the dance.
“We tried to imitate the danger and friction of the tango. Are they going to trip over each other? Elements of the dance are literally transcribed into the music,” Greg said of the video. Their performance also emphasizes the sensuality of the dance; they exchange sultry gazes at the piano bench, fling their heads back in ecstasy after hitting certain chords, and tangle and intertwine their arms. The video ends back in the classroom with Greg startling awake, just as the dry voice of the physics professor finishes a sentence; the bulk of the video seems like a Dionysian daydream during a dull lecture. Every aspect of their rendition—the arrangement, performance, attire, and the miniature narrative frame— functions to enhance the essential character of Piazzolla’s music.
Concert etiquette and the piano duo have generally stifled and excluded the sort of robust physicality that Anderson and Roe celebrate. Arrangements and compositions for piano duo began to proliferate in the early nineteenth century. By that point, the instrument had expanded in length to the point that a single piano could accommodate two people. The expansion in size was driven in part by the demand for precisely this capacity and in part by the ambitious compositions of Beethoven and other composers who literally exhausted the range of existing pianos and drove the instrument closer to its current size. Before recording technology brought instant access to musical entertainment, the easiest (and often the only) way to enjoy music was by playing it yourself or attending gatherings at which others played. But the domestic origins of the piano duo genre generated a repertoire of predominantly simple and unchallenging music, geared towards providing an evening of entertainment to the largest possible number of households.
“Music for one-piano, four-hands tends to be very domestic and feminine. Think of two pig-tailed sisters and an audience of grandmothers muttering, ‘Oh, so precious, they are playing on the recital!’ All we could think of was little girls—it was so lame. So we said, ‘Lets make it concert worthy.’ A couple of pieces stood out, and we just had to compose the rest,” Greg said. The associations Greg had with the piano duo are a microcosm of the impressions many people have of classical music in general: quaint, gentle, a realm of grandmothers and sleepiness. Greg and Liz take an iconoclastic pleasure in smashing through the stereotype of classical music as a tame and harmless anachronism. They want audiences to have powerful, visceral reactions to their music. After hearing their exuberantly virtuosic take on Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz at a concert in Oregon, one woman in the audience leapt to her feet and shouted “Now that’s a waltz!”
This is just the sort of reaction they want to provoke. They consider many aspects of classical concert etiquette not just arbitrary, but actively destructive. Prohibitions against spontaneous applause, casual attire, and even talking are all relatively recent phenomena that tend to imbue classical music with an almost holy aura of seriousness and high purpose. Funny or frivolous music is received with solemn silence or stern nods of approval. “People treat Mozart like his music was delivered to the hands of God, but it was delivered to the commoners of Vienna. They would laugh aloud during performances of his operas,” Greg said. Listeners would also erupt into spontaneous applause if they particularly liked a moment in the music.
During his second year as an undergraduate at Juilliard, Greg noticed something strange about himself and his classmates. They didn’t enjoy going to classical concerts and recitals. Greg was constantly falling asleep at recitals. It felt strange to admit it, but he found many of the recitals kind of boring. He went to see the drama students’ plays and noticed that other drama students were thrilled to see their peers’ work. So why wasn’t the same true of music students? How can you make people excited about classical music?
These are the questions that Greg has spent the last decade trying to answer. He knew that if even classical musicians were less than excited about going to classical concerts, then the general public would continue to yawn their way through concerts or just avoid them entirely. He also realized that plays had a natural advantage over classical music: people died, fought, fell in love. In other words, the content was blatantly relevant to real life. But he knew that music can also speak directly to fundamental human concerns, even if it does so in an abstract language. Greg often remembered a transformative concert experience: a Mozart piano concerto he heard as a ten-year-old that seemed like the most incredible thing in the world. Most musicians and music lovers have similar memories, yet few concerts provide anything close to that sort of experience for a majority of listeners. This was what Greg wanted to change.
Part of the problem was that by the time he was studying at Juilliard, he could only listen critically. “Going to recitals became very frustrating. I’d hear some gorgeous bit of Mozart and be thinking that slur could have been more graceful, or their tone isn’t transparent enough,” he recalled. Around the same time that Greg was thinking about how to make recitals more exciting, he started playing duets with Liz. They felt an instant chemistry and decided to organize a recital of music for piano duo. They were friends before they were musical partners—they watched Harry Potter movies together, they went out to eat Chinese food—and the playfulness of their friendship naturally carried over to their musical endeavors. In other words, they had fun together. For their first public concert, they took an unusually creative approach: they made a different poster for every piece they were performing. They drew a skeleton for Saint-Saens’s Danse Macabre, found an ornate Germanic script to advertise a piece by Brahms, and hung them all over Juilliard. They also created an original narration to accompany their performance of the Carnival of the Animals, interspersing the spoken words with the music. The result was a great success. The crowd laughed and cheered throughout the recital, and, better yet, no one fell asleep.
They now apply this same approach to programming and presentation at every concert, so that each Anderson & Roe event is a mixture of narration, musical performance, and audience involvement. “I can’t even imagine not talking,” Greg told me. “Even for an educated audience, I want to talk about things that will interest everyone.” Even for a small concert at a New Jersey Steinway dealership full of ersatz columns and gaudy chandeliers, Greg and Liz made every effort to engage with the audience. There were roughly thirty people settled in small rows of metal folding chairs. “Looks like every pianist in New Jersey is here,” Greg joked as they walked in.
Rather than making the typical virtuoso’s stage entrance—sweeping on stage to a burst of applause and studiously avoiding eye contact with the audience—they began the concert by introducing themselves and saying a few words about piano teachers. “We wouldn’t be here without people like you,” Liz said. “I’ve had amazing teachers throughout my life,” Greg added. “I still talk to my old piano teacher once a week.” Soon Greg transitioned into his characteristic mode of address: a mixture of humor and instruction. “Now duo piano is one of the few types of chamber music in which you are touching each other, which, come to think of it, could put the relationship of Brahms and Clara Schumann in a whole new light.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.
Throughout the recital, they prefaced each piece with either a personal comment, “To us this sounds almost like Mozart doing a musical rendering of laughter. So feel free to laugh at or with us,” or a bit of educational information, “This is the point in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion when Peter realizes he has denied Christ, and the texture and dissonances almost evoke his weeping.” Their comments throughout the recital performed the triple tasks of relaxing the audience, educating them, and expanding their sense of what a classical recital can be. Near the end of their performance, during a rousing paraphrase of a Strauss Waltz, a few pig-tailed toddlers began dancing in the aisles. By the end of the waltz, it almost looked as if some of the middle-aged New Jersey piano teachers might join them.
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