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Jun 02, 2005 Web Exclusive By Matt Fink Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

Christopher O’Riley isn’t your typical indie rock fan. He might have a weakness for all things obscure and intricate, but where the average listener might sit down and marvel at the complexity of a Radiohead arrangement, O’Riley can pull up the piano bench and tap out his own arrangement. For the last three years, the world renowned arranger and performer has been doing just that, stepping away from the conventions of the classical music he champions on his PRI radio show From the Top and performs in the world’s greatest concert halls and fearlessly pouring himself into transforming the bodies of work of artists not widely recognized by academia: Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Elliott Smith.

With Hold Me to This: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead, O’Riley translates the Oxford quintet into solo piano compositions, rebuilding the songs into entirely different sonic edifices. His first collection of Radiohead arrangements has been transcribed and combined with the art of Stephen Byram for the beautifully rendered True Love Waits (200 pages, available at http://www.christopheroriley.com), giving every aspiring Radiohead transcriber their chance to sit down and try their hand at “Knives Out” and “Karma Police.” Oh yeah, and when not working on the “Shostacovich Etudes and Fugues,” he’s currently plowing through the catalogue of Elliott Smith in his free time. Frankly, we’re lucky he had the time to allow us to pick his brain.

Under the Radar: So, how did the recording of Hold Me to This differ from the first set of Radiohead compositions that you did?

Christopher O’Riley: It differs…I think it’s a progression. Basically, the idea behind it was nothing more than the fact that I had done the arrangements for the first one (2002’s True Love Waits), and in the mean time I’ve been doing all kind of arrangements of different artists, Radiohead among them. And it was just that there was an album’s worth of material of Radiohead, so I decided to do that. There had been stuff, things like “Paranoid Android,” that I had already been touring with when True Love Waits came out, and it seemed that people were very anxious to have those on disc. It does seem rather obsessive, to say the least, but there has been other stuff that I’ve been doing.

UTR: How’d you go about choosing which tracks would appear on this collection?

Christopher: I never go about choosing them; they choose me. The nice thing about the new one is that I’m a little bit more confident in the types of ways that I arrange things and try to find a specific texture unique to the song. I think there were a couple of songs on True Love Waits that suffered from a sameness of treatment texturally, and I think there’s a lot more variety on the new record.

UTR: So what are the things that draw you to certain Radiohead tracks?

Christopher: The same things that draws me to any material that I work on: texture, for one, and harmony, for another. So one of the nice things about Radiohead is that you have five members of the band not just chucking away on chords, but with each contributing a very specific part of the puzzle to every song. So it’s not just melody and harmony; it’s really counterpoint—the interweaving, the voices intermingling.

UTR: Do you think that most pop listeners pick up on that distinction?

Christopher: It’s hard to say. I don’t like thinking of pop listeners or classical listeners as being separate people. I like to think that, particularly now, with the much more porous availability of all kinds of music through the internet, that people listen to whatever turns them on. People listen to whatever they like to listen to. That said, the people that listen to my record, quite a few of them are Radiohead fans first and foremost, but quite a few of them are also those who argue whether Hail to the Thief was a successful record or whether it’s just a collection of really good songs that they much prefer to hear in their live versions. In that case, if you honor the memory of the songs, then you’ll be curious to hear how someone else might play them. So there’s a certain amount of interest in that way.

In one way, it’s sort of universal. I mean, I played a classical recital in Germany some years ago, and I realized that it wasn’t the audience’s reaction or the applause that I was concerned with; it was a quality of silence that I was getting while I was playing. And I thought, well, gee, these people certainly know this Schubert sonata – they know how it goes. They didn’t come here to hear that. They came here to hear what I would do with it. I mean, I’m not a composer, really. I don’t write my own music; I interpret. Whether it’s classical music or Radiohead or Elliott Smith – that’s what I do. But in the same vein, when I played an all Radiohead concert at UC Berkeley, I felt the same thing. I felt like, well, these people are listening because they know the vocabulary of the songs; they know how these songs go. They’ve heard them done 50 different ways by the band themselves. They’re not listening to hear how the songs go, but to hear how it goes under my hand. So, yeah, I think people listen discerningly.

I think it’s actually an advantage playing something that is familiar to the listener to begin with. The other advantage is playing it for people in a classical context who don’t know Radiohead from a hole in the head. They just hear something that’s beautiful and they want to know more about it.

UTR: Do you think there’s a stigma against rock music in the classical community?

Christopher: Oh, I’m sure there is. There’s a stigma against me for playing any kind of rock music. But there’s a stigma against anything outside of the narrow framework of the classical industry. Look at classical radio. Classic radio is dying of its own accord, not because there is a lack of interest in classical music, but because stations have market-researched themselves into a situation where they’re playing nothing but classical sound bites. If I turn on a classical radio station just about anywhere in the country, I’ll damn sure shut it off, and I know the stuff. So, they’re shooting themselves in the foot, really. There used to be stations—and this is true of really good pop stations, too – where you were listening, but you didn’t know what you were listening to, because it’s not Top 40. And you pull the car over and listen for the set list because you want to know what they were playing because you liked it so much. There’s no sense of discovery on classical radio anymore, and there’s very little of it in popular music radio, aside from some college stations. It’s a big waste.

UTR: So do you sometimes feel like an artist without a home, like an artist caught between two different scenes?

Christopher: I’m kind of caught between, but I’m also straddling a lot. I mean, there still are people who will hire me to play classical concertos with orchestras and classical recitals, and I have my classical radio show, From the Top, which does very well, and I think it’s doing a fair amount to encourage the listening of classical music and enjoyment of classical music, first and foremost. So, I’m getting by. It’s not like I’m left out in the cold. It’s just because I’m doing so many different things, I see the hesitation and the mixed feelings about constituencies being mixed. And it bores me, really.

UTR: So what was the reaction of your peers when you started playing these Radiohead songs?

Christopher: My peers by and large really like it. They’re always going to be wary of the crossover stigma, but crossover is something that has been happening for over 600 years. It’s just with commercialism that it has become a dirty word. But a lot of composers – Beethoven and Mozart used to sit down and jam on the popular opera tunes of the day. And Franz Lizst, a Hungarian composer, used to do whole big virtuoso vehicles based on Hungarian folk songs. So music that’s in the air is fair game, and people have been doing it for a long time. It’s only recently that, God forbid, somebody makes a record—like Bernstein or something that’s not particularly a crossover at all—and it sells a bunch of copies, that people resent that. Crossover, for me, has never been a dirty word, because the person that has made the most hay out of it is the flute player James Galway. And it looks like every record of his is some head-scratching boardroom decision. Like “What genre can we milk, what niche market can we gyp this time?” And I know from knowing him as a person and having worked with him, I know he just plays what he loves. He just happens to love a lot of different kinds of music, and that’s what he does. And he’s the most generous and genuine musician to perform with and be friends with, so I was disabused of that cynical opinion.

And friends of mine that know me know the same thing. I just play what I like and I wouldn’t do it otherwise. The best of all really was this Austrian pianist, now living in the United States for many years, named Claude Frank. And this was the first guy to record the Beethoven sonatas on LP, somebody that’s a dyed in the wood traditionalist, and his daughter is a friend of mine, Pamela Frank. She’s a violinist. They were both at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago where I did one of my first Radiohead recitals, and Claude Frank comes backstage, and he’s the one who said, “I don’t know Radiohead from a hole in the head, but I love the music. I love the arrangements, and I love the playing.” Now he had no business having a new idea in his head, but he was cool with it. That really meant the most to me.

UTR: Have you found that most responses have been that way?

Christopher: Yeah. There are some who respond by saying, “Why should I listen to you play a Radiohead track when I can download it in two minutes and listen to them play it?” That’s fine. It’s fine.

UTR: So where do you think Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke rank among the great 20th century composers?

Christopher: I’m ranking them right up there. I have my choice. I can take “The Ligeti Etudes” off of my piano shelf, and say, “Yeah, that’s what I want to learn.” Or I can say, “I really want to play [Radiohead B-side] ‘Cuttooth’.” Right now, that’s really what I’m doing. Well, right now, I’m doing a lot of Elliott Smith. But basically I’m just doing the music that I love, and the music that I love right now happens to be along the arrangements of these songs that I listen to constantly, more than the standard repertoire. And it’s not that I don’t hear new music in the classical vein that I don’t like, but it just doesn’t get me going as much as the other stuff. The big classical project that I’m in the midst of right now is playing all of the Shostakovich “Preludes and Fugues.” And it’s basically a two-evening event, because Shostakovich’s 100th birthday is in 2006. To me, that’s the most important body of piano music of the 20th century – that one work. So I’m not out of the loop, it’s just that I’m not going to be playing music that doesn’t really turn me on. I just spend too much time at the piano to be playing and working on music that I feel half-assed about. I’m spoiled.

UTR: So what do you think sets Radiohead apart from their peers?

Christopher: It’s very strange. In addition to the concerts, I occasionally play in schools to junior high school students and high school students. And they don’t know Radiohead either. And I’m realizing that I thought it was an age thing, but it’s not; it’s a marketplace thing. They’re basically an indie band. Or an alternative band with more of an indie feeling than anything else. They’re sui generis – they are themselves. They are the band that other thinking people copy, and they are what the Beatles were in their day, in terms of creativity and in terms of making the benchmark without saying, “Oh, gee, let’s revolutionize pop music today.” They’re a very disparate group of people who I know for a fact happen to really enjoy the different things that each of them has to offer the main group. I don’t know of any other collection of musicians that has that kind of talent pool available to it within itself.

I just watched the Metallica documentary [laughs]. Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s like, “Well just this time we’re going to put a record together by sitting around in a room…” Oh, God, it’s amazing what people listen to… But anyway, I think it’s mostly a marketplace distinction, because most people don’t hear Radiohead because they’re not playing them on the radio. Other people react to Thom’s voice badly, thinking that he’s a whiner, but I think he’s really not a heart-on-sleeve lyricist. He’s a very expressive singer, but I think of his dark lyric sense to be more of generalized, depersonalized – that’s not to say impersonal – observer, or as he has said, being someone how overhears conversations on the bus and putting that kind of thing in the song. He really has an ear for that. So it’s very universalist, but the universalism that people usually react to is that “Gee, the music is really kind of a downer.” So, fine, listen to Britney Spears if that is really what you want. So, all in all, in my life I have always been drawn to the fringe. Even when I was into pop music as a kid, I had a band and was doing classical stuff, but I was always drawn to stuff that was on the outside, like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis, and it just went out from there. So Radiohead appeals to that outsider sensibility in that way. But, there again, they’re selling out arenas. It’s not like they’re some unknown act – they’re the biggest act in the world, arguably.

UTR: So what is it – the melodies, the arrangements, the writing – what is it that you find is so exceptional about them?

Christopher: I think, first and foremost, it’s the way that each of them contributes to the way the song goes. I’ve heard songs along the way, like a Thom Yorke solo demo, and then you hear it the way it comes out on the record. “Like Spinning Plates” is a good example. When they’re playing live, he’s playing it on the piano, and on the record, it’s this completely different animal, something completely unto itself. And that’s what happens when they all brainstorm. That’s probably the most exceptional thing about them. Because the songwriting is really solid, but also the sense of experimentation is exceptional, and the way the have the ability to be editors of each other’s ideas can’t really be taught or quantified. As far as songs that appeal to me and make me want to listen to them over and over again, harmony is something that usually gets me first and foremost. Melody, secondly. And texture. Harmony and texture are the two big ones. The lyrics are very important, but I have to turn a blind eye to them, because there’s nothing I can do with them. So, yeah, those are the things that really affect me about their songs.

That said, people always talk about the turn to techno that they’ve made over the last few years, but I insist that even from early on, they’ve always had this textural thing—that counterpoint has been there. It has always been five people contributing one particularly great idea to every song.

UTR: Right. Do you think they come across that deliberately? Or do you think it’s a very organic process, where that’s the dynamic that arises when they’re all in the same room?

Christopher: I’m sure of it. For instance, Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack came out last year, and he was doing a fair amount of publicity for that. And the band was taking a year off, but they spent a little time in the studio, and Jonny Greenwood said, “I enjoy what I’m doing now, but there’s no question in my mind that the five of us together are always going to be better than each of us on our own.” The one conversation that I had with Thom Yorke, he was consistently self-deprecating, saying things like, “’How to Disappear Completely’ is just a mediocre guitar and vocal song.” I said, “Well, that may or may not be the case. I don’t necessarily agree with you. But what Jonny puts over it with that quartertone cloud of strings makes it a unique song.” And Thom smiled at that. It was just that Jonny has that sophisticated classical music kind of pedigree, and Thom can’t read a note of music. And the two tend to meet rather explosively and in a genial way.

UTR: Do you think they have any recognition of how good they are as a band?

Christopher: Do you mean as themselves?