Christopher O’Riley’s THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER BOOK I delves into the subtle intricacies of Bach’s famous masterwork, revealing the composer’s nuanced craftsmanship through an exploration of the spaces between notes. Inspired by Bach’s profound lyricism and informed by historical insights, O’Riley’s interpretation transcends conventional keyboard traditions.
Today, Christopher is our featured artist in the “Inside Story,” a blog series exploring the inner workings and personalities of our composers and performers. Read on to learn about his love for literature and film, and the source of his inspiration to explore the space between Bach’s music…
What have been your biggest inspirations on your musical journey?
For my Bach immersion, my inspirations — other than the primary inspiration of the greatness of Bach’s music — have been my reading of John Eliot Gardiner’s book, Music in the Castle of Heaven, which recounts his own immersion, touring all of Bach’s cantatas. I would read Gardiner’s book while listening to the complete Bach300 recordings, primarily the period performances by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a longtime musical hero of mine. My simultaneous reading and listening made a deep impression on me, and served as the inception for my approach to Bach’s music in that I realized that the majority of Bach’s music was vocal music, written for the most expressive instrument ever, the human voice. This made all questions of the propriety of playing Bach on the harpsichord or piano immaterial, in that I decided that, rather than slavishly applying one articulation to all the intermingling counterpoint of voices, or even one articulation to each voice, one should instead take the lyrical impulse as inspiration and realize that there could be as many different articulations in a voice as there were consonants in any sung language; that there could be as many types of connections or distinctions between notes as there were ways of eliding, pausing, breathing or gasping between notes.
What advice would you give to your younger self if given the chance?
I wonder whether any advice to my younger self would have made any difference to my late trajectory of insight and intentionality. I do wish I had known and felt as I do now way back when I was in school or doing competitions. And I would love to revisit all the repertoire I’ve ever played with my new perspective and insight. I hope to get around to as much of my old repertoire as possible.
Take us on a walk through your musical library. What record gets the most plays? Are there any “deep cuts” that you particularly enjoy?
I’ve always listened to a wide swath of styles and repertoire, having very early on embraced alt rock music when I was in grade school, and played modern jazz professionally since high school. Even though I eventually stayed on the narrow path of classical music study at conservatory, I went to New England with the idea that I would pursue both classical and jazz. And my interest in lots of different music led me to do my own arrangements these last years of music by Radiohead, Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, and a host of others. These days I’ve become particularly enamored of the work by Swedish jazz pianist, Bobo Stenson.
What emotions do you hope listeners will experience after hearing your work?
I hope listeners will take away an unprecedented sense of immediacy and intimacy from my Bach performances, and a sense of the lyric impulse being the overriding inspirational consideration.
What are your passions beyond music?
I love literature and film. My favorite book of all time is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I have read many writers comprehensively, like Charles Dickens, Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Russell Banks, Cormac McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Mark Z. Danielewski, Stona Fitch, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, Christophe Marlowe, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Gibson, William Gass, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Pete Dexter, Alan Moore, Marcel Proust, John O’Hara, William T. Vollmann, Bohumil Hrabal, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, Danilo Kiis, Stephen Graham Jones, Joe R. Lansdale, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Kobo Abe, Vladimir Nabokov, David Goodis, and Donald Westlake. I’m presently making my way through the complete works of Georges Simenon.
Film directors I’ve been devoted to over the years include Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Pierre Melville, Lasse Hallstrom, Martin Scorsese, Hiyao Miyazaki, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Federico Fellini, Ridley and Tony Scott, Ethan and Joel Coen, Wes Anderson, and P.T. Anderson.
What musical mentor had the greatest impact on your artistic journey? Is there any wisdom they’ve imparted that still resonates today?
The teacher who has had the most lasting impression is the late Patricia Zander, with whom I studied for only one summer towards the end of my college years. I’m sorry to say I was not as motivated by her insights back then as I am now: we were studying Beethoven’s last Sonata, Op. 111. She had a way of emphasizing the space between the notes as the way to create a sense of impetuousness, in some cases by contracting the space between, creating an ever grander sense of space and climax by broadening infinitesimally the space between running 16th notes. I had a hard time implementing her ideas at the time, being caught up in the momentum of Beethoven’s hyper-kinetic musical motion. But in my work on The Well-Tempered Clavier, I came to implement her ideas as the foundation of my method, incorporating the Japanese aesthetic concept of Ma, The Space Between, often invoked in interior design, flower arrangement, composition in painting and drawing. In Bach’s music, we are in awe of the note choices Bach has made, but our respect can create an unwanted distance between us and the music. One of the only ways keyboard players of his time had available to them was agogic, which is accent not by force but by space: patterns could be broadened slightly to give a sense of climax, condensed to create impulse and tension in motion. Zander’s insight was foundational to my method. In my teaching of my class, Everything We Need To Know About Playing The Piano We Learn From The Well-Tempered Clavier (all episodes streaming on my YouTube channel, @ChristopherORiley360) when I presented the course at the University of Utah a couple years ago, I devoted a lecture excerpt to Zander and my debt to her.
Pianist, arranger, collaborative artist, composer, educator, and media personality Christopher O’Riley follows his passions into a fractal array of innovative directions, ever striving for the truest and deepest human connection, through performance and collaboration. It is with O’Riley’s dedication to the learning abilities, personalities, and imaginations of artists that he comes to his latest endeavor — a traversal of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. O’Riley has produced an online archive of video lectures entitled “Everything We Need to Know About Playing the Piano We Learn From The Well-Tempered Clavier,” a series illuminating a new perspective on each Prelude and Fugue, expanding on the ways the paucity of Bach’s notation encourages us to engage creatively and imaginatively.
