Ferrante & Teicher

Piano duo Ferrante & Teicher were one of the best-selling easy listening acts of the '60s, offering light arrangements of easily recognizable classical pieces, movie soundtrack themes, show tunes, and similarly compatible fare. Arthur Ferrante (born September 7, 1921, New York City) and Louis Teicher (born August 24, 1924, Wilkes-Barre, PA.) met while attending the prestigious Juilliard School of Music; both were child prodigies, and they struck up a fast friendship, performing together as a duo even while they were still in school. After graduating as piano majors, they both joined the Juilliard faculty, while developing a distinctive style of their own during their free time. In 1947, they became a full-time concert act, at first playing nightclubs, then quickly moving up to classical music with orchestral backing. A switch to popular songs and standards by the likes of Kern, Porter, Gershwin, and Rodgers made them mainstays in the pops-orchestra field. While they were enjoying success on the concert circuit, Ferrante & Teicher had been experimenting with treated pianos, influenced -- oddly enough -- by the ideas of avant-garde composer John Cage. By adding paper, sticks, rubber, wood blocks, metal bars, chains, glass, mallets, and other found objects to the string beds (among other techniques), the duo was able to produce a variety of bizarre sound effects that sometimes resembled percussion instruments, and other times produced a spacy, almost electronic sound (before such a tone even existed). In the latter half of the '50s, they recorded several albums in this vein for Westminster (most notably 1956's Soundproof and Soundblast) and ABC-Paramount (including 1958's Blast Off!). The results were highly unique and quite different from their later work, appealing more...