Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How do you feel when you play pop music on piano?

And rock and dance and radio chart hits in general. Do you feel that this music is so unartistic, so uncouth, so unchallenging, so beneath you? All the repeats, D.S and codas, and such are just so annoying right? Or if you never even played it, how about when you hear it? But the majority in the general public do like it, so....

I think of it differently than I do classical music.

I did a lot of playing by ear before I ever started classical piano lessons, so I'm pretty good at it actually.

It's fun to indulge in sometimes.

I play it for choirs pretty frequently. I usually go on autopilot, because as much as I've tried to find it, it offers absolutely no challenge or interest to me.

I have fun with it. It's a different kind of fun than what classical music offers. Mostly, it's for enjoyment and relaxation.

I have fun playing pop music sometimes with my friends. It's all easy stuff (you can figure out themes and accompaniments by ear) but it's nice to use to relax.

Wow, loaded question! "Beneath me?" I can be not interested in something without feeling I'm above it, can't I?Well I play quite a bit for young singers at competitions, and yes, the repeats etc are annoying, because of all the page-turning back and forth, and the possibility of losing your place. But that's an entirely different thing to whether I enjoy the music or not. I'd be just as annoyed if Beethoven had filled his sonatas with similar markings.

I play jazz and study it as much as classical. I mostly play bebop and later style so I am used to improvising. What I like to do (for fun) is taking a cheesy pop song and make it into an "exploration." Example: I play the 80's ballad "Take My Breath Away" in a Liszt-ian style, with many flourishes and arpeggios. It's a lot of fun and my friends love it.

Other songs I'll jazz up more and use more complex chords than the triads they are written with. I took "American Boy" by Estelle and made it into a Bossa Nova style tune with plenty of room for soloing.

So, usually with pop tunes I play them with a jazz sensibility and make it a little more complex harmonically and improvise on the changes.

I play in a rock band and have done tribute shows of various rock artists. But yeah, dance music is beneath me.

There are some rondo last movements of Mozart sonatas that have WAY less thematic material than the average top-40 song. They consist of an 8-bar theme, repeated endlessly, with minor variations that any high-school age student could write out.


Why should I care whether the like it? The vast majority of the general public doesn't like Rachmaninov, and would positively hate Scriabin if they ever heard it. Yet I love those. A huge number of people listen to Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Do I look like I care?

A lot of "serious" music of today was the pop tunes of a few hundred years ago. I forgot how many composers wrote variations on the melodies that everyone was whistling back then. If Liszt lived today, he'd probably write rhapsodies and fantasies over Beatles and Queen melodies.

Now, personally I can't swing worth a damn, so jazz is right out for me (and I have tried). But whatever I play will be treated with respect. Whether it is Beethoven, or accompanying singers or my tuba-playing son on broadway tunes. Right now, he's working on Ol' Man River, and Kreisler's Liebesleid (neither of which is high-brow music).

Also, I enjoy other types of music. To say something is "beneath me" isn't the right word. To me, art music such as classical and jazz is just that: Art. Yes, it's music, but it's also more than that.

That being said, I love many different types of music from folk music from around the world (Flamenco, Indian classical) to Motown and R&B (Stevie Wonder, James Brown) to some classic rock and some rap from the 90's that I grew up with which has meaningful lyrics.

Much of that music takes talent and effort to produce. And things such as Indian classical are up there as art music. However, just because a song uses a simple structure and simpler harmony than you would find in a Beethoven sonata does not mean you can't enjoy it.

I have divisions in the music I like where I know when I hear a late Beethoven sonata, or a Ravel piece, or John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, I am hearing something very emotionally and technically complex and enjoy it differently than I would a Stevie Wonder song. However many pop songs such as that contain many great and original melodies and chord progressions that can be enjoyed. Not only that, I may even enjoy the lyrics to a song once and a while! Most of the time with singing though, I listen more the the tone and inflection of the voice than the lyrics.

Every type of music is different. We are all aware of how amazing technically and emotionally classical music is. But that doesn't mean that every other type of music should be compared to this. Remember, there was "pop" music in those days too! Simple melodies with simple harmonies that almost anyone could learn.

However, I agree most dance music is pretty god awful. But there are always exceptions to this rule. I guess the hard thing is to look past what the radio is playing. Usually if you look hard enough, there is an artist that takes whatever genre you dislike and does it in a way that you might like. It just takes effort to look beyond what the masses are hooked on.

If people don't dance to my music I'm doing something wrong

Cathy

Damon, you elitist!

I love it. I understand it's different but don't care at all! I love listening to different styles of music... And I don't consider any music to be 'inferior' (or superior for that matter)...

My view exactly!

Then I'd tentatively suggest that you're not doing it right

Making a convincing and stylistically appropriate piano line from a lead sheet does present a technical challenge to me, as does improvising -- again, in a way that is appropriate and engaging.

I suppose, however, that to some extent the satisfaction depends on where you think the boundaries of popular music lie. I'm sure there is plenty of popular music that is dull to play. But I find a lot of baroque music pretty dull to play as well.

Really? Could you please (whether you're high school aged or not) provide examples of your own Mozartian compositional prowesss.

Some pop music is so rhythmically difficult, with syncopations all over the place, I had to analyze the beats before I could play for my choir class. My students would always amaze me by how well they got the rhythms down by simply imitating the recordings and memorizing the songs.

On the other hand, I just taught my best piano student swing rhythm this week. I can't believe he hasn't played any pop pieces in 10 years of piano lessons (I guess I'm partly to blame)!! It was quite entertaining to watch a super-advanced "classical music" student reduced to a complete beginner by a little swing piece that's at most level 4 in difficulty.

I have to play some relatively modern stuff for the school Choir. It's not challenging at all, just a few chords repeated over and over. Amongst others, we are doing some silly "Adelle" song, which is the most recent piece. I honestly don't understand why the choir like it. It's musically boring (especially when all the piano does is literally block chords and octaves in the left hand), the singing isn't that good (I'd prefer the Magic Flute or any Schubert lied...), and the words make no attempt to convey any kind of hidden meanings or similes or anything like that. There's not even a cadence at the end, it just kind of drops away? (Only Chopin can get away with that :))

Just feeding the troll. If there is a paycheck involved, I'll still play it!

My daughter loves Adelle. She feels the lyrics speak to her life. That's the way teens have always been. The words don't have yo have hidden meanings when the literal meaning is meaningful to the listener. When I saw the title of this thread my first response was I have fun when I play pop music on the piano. It's been almost 4 decades since I was a teenager and maybe the pop music I play isn't on the radio anymore, but playing Van Halen's Jump is fun on piano. I don't do it to make a serious artistic statement, I do it to make a lot of noise and have a blast (and maybe feel young again).