Keith Emerson

Along with many other people, I was shocked and saddened by the terrible death of Keith Emerson at the age of 71. It's officially been ruled a suicide, due to a bout of depression he was suffering due to the loss of the use of two of the fingers on his right hand. I remembered hearing, a few years ago, that he had a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, and I guess it got that much worse, to the point that he virtually couldn't play music. I can't begin to imagine that things got so bad that he felt he couldn't go on, but there are many more people better informed about these things than I am. Suffice it to say, it was tragic news to me.



In this post, I will be taking a personal look at some aspects of the work of Keith Emerson, one of the most influential musicians in my life. What I mean by that is that the sheer force of his playing, his virtuosity and humour, with influences there for all to see, steered me to many styles of music and composers that I may not have discovered otherwise.


Style

First of all, he was a strongly rhythmic player, with a love of  Latin, honky-tonk, stride, barrelhouse and blues music that showed in his composing and improvising. He also introduced me to some unusual time signatures, most notably, 7/8 time, and I learned to recognize the variations on that rhythm in the music of Genesis, Yes, Frank Zappa, Rush, and many others. He would constantly change time signatures, too, in his improvisations, which really kept me guessing. When I don't know where a song or a piece is going next - that's the kind of music I love.

He also used chords and intervals that I hadn't heard before, most notably fourths. This is an interval that is usually used to create tension near the end of a musical line, because it sounds a little "off," but is then resolved to a third, to bring the line to an ear-pleasing conclusion. Emerson (and again, others in the progressive rock field) used the fourth to dramatic effect in melody and chording, not resolving it in order to create a more arresting, perhaps "primitive" sound (it's no surprise that, as a 13-year-old, I used to listen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer's self-titled first album while reading Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian books!)

The one problem I do have with his playing is the extreme speed he seemed to want to play at much of the time. It was like he was in a rush to get to something else, and notes got lost. I often thought, if he could have slowed things down slightly, it would have been much easier to appreciate his genuine virtuosity.


The Moog Synthesizer

I had heard the Moog synthesizer in music prior to ELP's, but had no idea what it was. Believe it or not, the first use of the instrument that I heard was on the Monkees' 1967 LP, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., in the songs "Daily Nightly" and "Star Collector." On Mike Nesmith's "Daily Nightly," it's used as more of a tone generator, to create "spacey" effects, but on Goffin & King's "Star Collector," it's actually a solo instrument, kind of a quirky organ, which is what I thought it was at the time.
The Beatles also used it, fairly extensively, on Abbey Road, mostly in the background, on such tracks as "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun." Once again, for all I knew, it was an organ of some sort.

What Emerson did, on that first LP, was bring the synthesizer up front, using it as a major instrument, rhythmically and as a solo instrument, due to his early mastery of it as a keyboard, not merely a novelty. Listen to the layering of them in the last (7/8) section of "Tank," and how he solos effortlessly over that rhythm.
The standout track, of course, is Greg Lake's "Lucky Man" (which he has admitted to writing when he was 12 years old!), which benefits both from his own reverb-laden production, giving it a mysterious quality, and the astonishing synthesizer solo at the end. Emerson's virtuosity in using notes at the top end of the range of the simple three-chord structure of the song, as well as the justly famous swoops and slides that the instrument was capable of, gave the song an otherworldly quality that's still affecting today. This was the piece that made me really sit up and want to know what this instrument was.
Emerson would go on to use the synth in various ways in later LPs, always getting a new, unique sound out of it.
He also helped develop and use a polyphonic synthesizer (meaning you could play more than one note at a time, i.e., use chords), which can be heard on the albums Brain Salad Surgery and Works. This instrument is the gargantuan (roughly 4 ft. by 4 ft.) panel that he was using when I saw ELP at Exhibition Stadium in 1978. It's an unbelievably complicated-looking thing, with wires, switches and knobs galore, and I can only imagine the work it took to use it.

(Side note: There is a terrific young musician named Rachel Flowers who plays ELP's music on the original instruments, like Hammond organ, and that enormous polyphonic synth, in her home. You can find her many postings on YouTube. I was astonished to discover that she's been blind since birth, which makes her talent that much more amazing. Do check her out.)


His Influences

As I hinted above. Emerson never hid his musical influences, doing entire pieces based on works by well-known composers, or I suppose, at least those that caught his ear.
Hence, we have the album-length performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition, an abbreviated version of which I saw them do at the Toronto concert I mentioned above. He also did rock versions of two of Aaron Copland's pieces, "Hoedown" and "Fanfare for the Common Man," not to mention the amazing version of Ginastera's "Toccata" (from his First Piano Concerto), which also featured Carl Palmer using a type of proto-drum synthesizer in his solo section.
Perhaps the most well-known tune he did with The Nice, prior to ELP, was a version of "America," from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. He apparently even throws some Dvorak into this piece for good luck!
And, let's not forget one of ELP's best-known songs, Lake's "I Believe In Father Christmas." As a bridge between verses, Emerson plays a bit of the Lt. Kije suite by Prokofiev (popularly known as "sleigh ride" or "troika"). It adds a nice upbeat touch to an otherwise rather cynical tune.

Hearing all these pieces made me curious to go and check out the originals, and, for example, I was fortunate enough to see Aaron Copland conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra back in the early 80's at the then-Ontario Place Forum. They opened with "Fanfare," (an exhilarating piece in its original form), as well as "Rodeo" in its entirety, among other popular pieces.

ELP also adapted many classical composers' pieces for their own songs. On the first album, for instance, "The Barbarian" is based on Bartok, and "Knife-Edge" on Janacek - both of whom have become composers whose work I have come to admire.

Emerson seemed to have soaked up music like a sponge, and would quote many other composers  (like Bach, in "The Only Way,"and "Knife-Edge") or insert snippets of popular music as he improvised. This leads me to my final point...


Humour

Some people have found ELP's music ponderous, or pretentious, but it was never without humour.
From Tarkus on, there was always a lighter-hearted piece of music on each album: "Are You Ready Eddy?" on Tarkus is a tribute to their recording engineer; "Benny the Bouncer" on Surgery is a darkly humourous ditty about a pub fight between two hooligans; and they do a raucous version of Kim Fowley's "Nut Rocker" (itself based on Tchaikovsky) to lighten things up at the end of Pictures At An Exhibition.

As mentioned above, Emerson would also throw in bits of other songs as he went along. Other (British) musicians did this, too - David Bowie and Genesis both quoted The Drifters' "On Broadway" in songs of theirs, for instance, and Rick Wakeman quotes a bit of Bizet's l'Arlesienne on The Six Wives of Henry VIII - but not to such an extent as ELP.
Thus, you can hear a bugle call during "Are You Ready, Eddy?"; fife-and-drum music in "Abaddon's Bolero," from Trilogy; "Short'nin' Bread" is quoted in "Hoedown"; and in "Karn Evil 9: Second Impression," from Brain Salad Surgery, there is a bit of Sonny Rollins' "St. Thomas." This is used in a section that features a synth sound that is very similar to a steel drum, and maybe that's what made Emerson think of that Caribbean-style tune.
Also, as mentioned, the Dvorak he quotes in "America" is from the 9th Symphony, a.k.a., "From the New World" - get it?
There are many more examples, most of which I'm sure I wouldn't know; these are just a few that I recognize.

On YouTube (again!), there's an amazing transcription of Emerson`s "Piano Improvisations" from Welcome Back, My Friends, ELP's 1974 triple LP live album, that names the pieces he quotes, right on the sheet music. Oddly, I heard a snippet of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that isn't mentioned there, but perhaps they considered it too obvious. In any case, it's amazing to see Emerson`s music written out.


Conclusion

I don't guess I'll ever be able to emphasize enough how much of an impression Keith Emerson made on my young, musically curious mind. Perhaps he is the most influential rock musician I've ever known. Judging by some of the comments I've seen in various YouTube postings, I'm not the only one who owes him a debt of gratitude for expanding my musical horizons.
I can only speculate what my musical explorations would have been like without him, but I'm pretty sure they would have been much more difficult, and much less rich and varied.

So, thanks"Emo," and RIP.