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Dedicated to Tori Amos

(Picture: DS)

Tori Amos (Sketch for a Portrait of)

(15.8.2023) In the early 1990s, when I was an avid reader of the German Keyboards magazine, I did very much identify with the piano playing style of Tori Amos. Before we come to that, I must say that a very competent journalist, Albrecht Piltz, was writing for the German Keyboards magazine and conducted also wonderful interviews for that very magazine, and also with Tori Amos. And there is something which is making me really angry: this kind of journalism, this kind of motivated, competent journalism has silently disappeared over the years. And those people that I see as the embodiment of good, motivated and competent journalism do not even get an article on Wikipedia. But I have said it now. Which means: this kind of wonderful, inspiring journalism has not silently disappeared. Its disappearence can be decried, and this is what I am doing here. If there is a poet laureate, there must be also a journalist laureate, and his name is Albrecht Piltz. Now it is said, and we can move on to discuss the piano playing style of Tori Amos, respectively my sketch for a potrait of Tori Amos, pianist, in the context of a history of piano playing in the 1990s.

The Piano. A History in 100 pieces is the title of a wonderful book by Susan Tomes. It is dedicated largely to the classical tradition of piano composers and opens its perspective also to Jazz. As far as the 1990s are concerned, Michael Nyman does get a mentioning, Tori Amos does not. And it is perhaps fair to say that the kind of piano playing that I did so much admire in the early 1990s is a piano playing style in the service of the song. And perhaps this kind of piano playing that exists in Pop music and is largely bound to the structure of the song is not the kind of piano playing that is being observed by someone who is writing a history of piano music, in terms of what the classical composers for the piano did, and which only marginally also encompasses the piano writing for, for example, a Schumann lied.
But still one could also turn things around, which would mean: we would observe the classical tradition, in terms of how this tradition affected the piano style of Tori Amos, inspired it, and was being transformed by this piano playing style in the service of the song. And this idea is also the conceptional idea of my sketch for a portrait of Tori Amos. I am not interested in physical likeness here. My sketch shows her on her way of studying the tradition of piano playing, from very early on. Which means, as a curious girl (see the figure on the right), but also in terms of being affected by very archaic musical structures that resonate in her playing. And this is the one memory I have from one of the interviews I have read with Tori Amos. And this is the one memory that actually inspired my sketch. And it is the passage in one of these interviews in which she said that she felt the fifths (or the fourths) coming.

The piano playing style of Tori Amos, it must once be said, is often very guitar-oriented. It is the rapid alternation between left and right hand (often at the end of a bar, as a kind of fill-in), alternations that remind the interplay of bass and rhythm guitar in a band, and I am thinking that Tori Amos, on her journey (in the context of my portrait) is also encountering the guys of Led Zeppelin (they sit at a campfire in my picture), and this is what one, also as a pianist, might learn from them, this kind of interwaving bass patterns with harmonical fill-ins, which appears, for example, in purest shape, in her cover of the Led Zeppelin song Thank You. Which I did transcribe in the early 1990s myself, which made it possible later, to compare it with the very capable transscriptions that now can be found on Youtube. For guitar players it is totally obvious what ›fifths and fourths coming‹ does mean: it does mean the archaic, but powerful sounds of thirdless chord structures, structures that a musicologist will be able to trace back far in time. And today, knowing more about music of the Renaissance, and also about medieval music. I am inclined to have the journey of Tori Amos begin at the time of the Renaissance, with the keyboard player on the left (in my picture), who is just finding out what one can do with one of these early keyboard instruments that are in development, and seem to be somehow derived from the organ.

My sketch is not about the personal or biographical cosmos of Tori Amos. This I would not dare to touch in my portrait. It is only about my perception of her piano playing style in the context of what people have done with the piano, and specifically have done with and on the piano during the 1990s. I did move away from identifying with that style somewhat later, realizing that myself, I was actually more interested in structures that are built on themes, and less in the structure of songs. So what I am doing here, visually, has something to do with my own development, but also with my perception of the piano playing style of Tori Amos today. My perception is more remote than it was in the early 1990s, but the perception of that style is now a perception in the context of a more general history of piano playing.

What are the two boys doing in the foreground of my picture? Actually I don’t know exactly. The figures that appear in my pictures seem to have their own will. The ladylike appearence of Tori Amos, for example, was not something that I did deliberately. I just repaintted the figure of a wanderer; and yes, I think that the one boy on the left is grasping some magical herb, while his brother, less interested in the ingredients of a piano playing style, is indifferently holding his brother by his one leg. So that his brother will not fall into that herb, and get too much a dosis of that particular herb. Yes, that might be it. It is a journey, and even while being on a journey one must move on from time to time. Or otherwise one might miss the 1990s.

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