By Mick Gowar
この新年号から毎週、週替わりで4人のライターがエッセーをつづります。まず最初に登場するのは、イギリスの小説家Mick Gowarで、今回は音楽についてのエッセーです。ピアノとともに発展した英国のポピュラー音楽が60年代前後のロックブームの到来で、楽器の王座の地位をギターに譲り渡します。しかし、ギターより音階に幅があり、変化に富んだ音を出せるピアノを演奏するスターの素晴らしさはまだまだ忘れられてはいません。
Recently I went to a concert that has left me with a feeling of nostalgia for the piano - or rather, for the piano in pop music.
I'll tell you more about the concert later. But it made me think about the golden age of popular music - the 1920s and 1930s when songs were played and sung by the fans, not just listened to. The decades when the piano was king; the instrument through which music was handed directly from the composer to the ordinary music lover.
Until the 1930s many more families in Britain owned a piano than a car. The piano was the jukebox, stereo and CD player of the day. Until the 1950s almost every pub, club and bar in the U.K. had a piano to provide music for dancing and singing. Even after the record player had been invented and records started to be made, many more homes had a piano in the sitting room to provide the music for family parties and weekly sing-songs. (The earliest form of karaoke!)
If you've ever listened to a record from the 1920s or 1930s, you'll know why. The only records were 78 rpm discs, made from fragile shellac. They were easy to break and even easier to scratch.
The sound was marred by hisses, pops and crackles, and they barely held three minutes of music.
Early record players were expensive and had to be wound like an old fashioned clock every few minutes (in the early 1930s only one-third of homes in the U.K. had electricity). And, of course, the records had to be changed every three minutes.
Not surprisingly, most people would rather buy the sheet music of the latest hit songs and play and sing them for themselves along with the family or on the pub piano than buy a record. And until 1957 the British Hit Parade - the weekly list of the top 20 most popular songs - was measured not by record sales, but by the numbers of copies of the piano sheet music sold.
But then along came rock 'n' roll and everything changed. The guitar was the instrument young rockers chose. It was cheap, it was portable and it was easy to play. A piano has 88 keys and the player has only 10 fingers. It can take months of searching to find a few basic chords. The guitar has six strings, and most people can learn enough chords to play "Heartbreak Hotel," "Jailhouse Rock" and "Summertime Blues" in a week.
It's true that many of the early rock 'n' roll stars - Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry - Lee Lewis were pianists, but they couldn't compete with the guitarists for sex appeal.
Even in the shockable 1950s, the desperate attempts of Little Richard and Jerry Lee to be as wild and sexy on stage as Elvis or Eddie Cochran looked ridiculous. They couldn't clutch their instrument in a lover's embrace and shake with passion like Elvis. They couldn't play it upside down, behind their head or with
their teeth like Johnny "Guitar"Watson.
The enormous weight and size of the piano anchors the performer to one spot on the stage. You can either play a piano standing up or sitting down - and if you play it standing up you always get a terrible pain in your back and shoulders after two songs.
And yet ... there have always been a few rock rebels, such as Billy Joel and Elton John, who have stuck with the piano. The reason is simple: a song written and performed on an instrument with six strings can never be as rich or expressive as a song written and performed on an instrument that has 230 strings.
Which brings me back to the man whose performance I saw recently: Rufus Wainwright. Despite being the son of old-style guitarist/songwriter Loudon Wainwright, and a talented guitarist himself, Rufus is first and foremost a pianist. His songs blend classical complexities with rock emotion. The most magical moments in his show are when he sits alone at the piano and performs songs like his own "Dinner At Eight" and "The Art Teacher" and "Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah."
And the reason I'm telling you is that Rufus Wainwright is touring Japan in January. If you can, go and
see him. If you can't, listen to his recordings. His music is a reminder of what rock music could have been and can be.
Of course, I am biased. When I was a teenager I lived in a suburb of London called Pinner. In 1968 I twice played tennis with a young piano player called Reg, who later changed his name to Elton Hercules John. But that's another story. I may tell you about it another time.
Mick Gowar
英国の作家、詩人、作詞家。大学で文章の書き方を教え、全国の学校を回って読み聞かせをするなど活動の幅も広い。AWにも連載小説を執筆した。
- has…piano ピアノを懐かしいと感じさせる
- not…to 聞いてもらうだけではなく
- made…shellac 傷つきやすいセラック樹脂を原料にした
- was…crackles シーッ、ポン、パチパチという（レコード盤）ノイズで台なしだった
- by…sold ピアノ用の楽譜の売れ行きによって
- couldn't…embrace 恋人を抱くように、楽器（ギター）を抱えることができない
- Which...recently そのことは、最近、私が演奏を見たあの男を思い起こさせる
- is…be ロックという音楽がどうあればよかったのか、（これから）どうあるべきかを思い出させるものだ
