Reeves Piano and Synthesizer Music Album 11 - Good Musicians Die Young

Album 11 - Good Musicians Die Young - I'm What's Left Cover Art in Color as shown on the Reeves Motal Piano and Synthesizer Music Website

Good Musicians Die Young. I'm still here. I'll let you figure it out!

OK, OK, I'm an old piano player - and OLD musicians play OLD songs - so get over it!

Actually, most of my songs are really pretty new from an historic perspective. The oldest I think I've done is the Christmas song Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella from 1553. By that point much of the essence of "modern music" had been invented. Certainly with Johann Pachebel's Canon in D in 1680, we can see that Melody, Harmony, and Polyphony in general had displaced the Gregorian Chants of the Medieval Period.

I've been reading a book published in Germany in 1937 by Alfred Einstein (no relation to Albert) that takes a broad look at music since the most primitive period - music is older than speech! It's particularly interesting because he includes excerpts from some of the "old" music. There's a score of a High Mass from the 13th century that uses a whopping total of three different notes!! (They were really pushing the envelope with that - most of the time it was a single note.) There's a reason monody and monotony have the same word root. By the way, women were kicked out of the church choirs in the 6th century - a whole new layer of monotonous monody.

So - even though some of the young whippersnappers, (that I frequently beat with my cane,) may sneer at my "old" music, I feel quite justified in playing it and consider it quite modern. Particularly when one of our "modern music" genres is a ridiculous regression to the one note monody chants of the Middle Ages - it's called rap.

So - to borrow a phrase, "Just take them old records off the shelf!"

Reeves

PS This is a photo from a Colorado winter trip and shows a stretch of near frozen rapids on the Animas River. The train had stopped midway along the Durango to Silverton rail trip.