As part of the piece, I want to incorporate Michael playing piano on stage as well, to bring a sense of realism to the story, the fact that the man in the play can still remember to play piano, even though he suffers from severe Amnesia. The reason this particular piece of music was chosen is because of its simplistic, yet haunting and captivating melody. One of the outstanding things about Encephalitis is although the memory is severely impaired, and yet their memory of music and how to play the piano are intact, ‘the brain’s music system appears to operate with functional independence from the language system’ (Levitin, 2006, 127). It is indeed a daunting prospect at the thought of learning a song on piano, for someone who had never played piano before. The piece of music I have chosen is John Tavener’s The Lamb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2V9lE_FxK8
The reason for this was because Tavener is a well-known classical composer, so I want to bring some variety of musical genre into the show. Although it was a relatively simplistic melody, by the end of the hour, we managed to add in chords on the left hand as well as playing the melody on the right. Michael has never played piano before and he picked it all up in the hour which was incredible!
We started off first with the basics, learning the melody on the right hand. We did it note by note, slowly adding on a new note every time with Michael copying me 2 octaves below, continuing this method until he had picked it up. The main challenge was holding on the different notes for different counts, so introduced the pedal which sustains the note for longer. We then went on to learn just the left hand melody and split it into three sections. For an aid for Michael I placed small blank stickers on the piano with either the first or second chord he was meant to play. The two chords were G major and D major so the G major chord had #1 written on, and the D major chord had #2 on it. This made it much easier for Michael to differentiate between the notes. I have made a decision that it is best to leave out the slightly discordant harmonies from the beginning of the original song, as it is going to be played over some happy emotive text spoken by one of the cast members playing the wife.
-Naomi
Works Cited
Levitin, J. D (2006) This is your brain on music. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Tavener, J. (1996) The Lamb. [online] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2V9lE_FxK8 [Accessed 28th April 2015]