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Born Arthur Ferrante, 7 Sept 1921, New York City
Born Louis Teicher, 24 Aug 1924, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American piano players, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes.
Arthur Ferrante (born September 7, 1921, New York City) and Louis Teicher (born August 24, 1924, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) met while studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Musical prodigies, they began performing as a piano duo while still in school. After graduating, they both joined the Juilliard faculty.
In 1947, they launched a full-time concert career, at first playing nightclubs, then quickly moving up to playing classical music with orchestral backing. Between 1950 and 1980, they were a major American easy listening act. They performed and recorded regularly with pops orchestras popular standards by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and others.
The duo also had a more avant-guard side. They experimented with prepared pianos, influenced - oddly enough - by avant-guarde composer John Cage. By adding paper, sticks, rubber, wood blocks, metal bars, chains, glass, mallets, and other found objects to piano string beds, they were able to produce a variety of bizarre sounds that sometimes resembled percussion instruments, and at other times resulted in special effects that sounded as if they were electronically synthesized.
Ferrante and Teicher ceased performing in 1989 and retired in Florida. CDs of their music, some of it not previously released, have continued to appear.
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Ferrante & Teicher's work falls into two categories: prepared piano works and easy listening. After meeting as students, and then working as teachers, at Juilliard, they began to perform as a duo, primarily with classical groups, in 1946. They became a popular act on the "pops" symphony circuit. At the same time, they began experimenting with modifications to pianos, inserting objects into the stringbed, playing on the stringbed, striking keys or strings with blocks, and generally striving to figure out how to get the strangest possible sounds. Working before the first synthesizer, they succeeded in producing outworldly, almost electronic sounds.
People who associate F&T with their easy listening music are often startled to hear their prepared piano works. There is nothing quite like them in the annals of recorded sounds. In fact, throughout this period, the duo was accused of using more than just pianos to produce these sounds.
Aside from a few very early albums of classical pieces, most of their albums up to about 1961, however, are entirely comprised of prepared piano pieces.
After joining United Artists in 1960, they added an orchestral accompaniment (usually arranged by Don Costa and conducted by Nick Perito) and quickly abandoned fiddling with their pianos. As High Fidelity magazine noted of their first album with Costa and Perito, Golden Piano Hits, their new sound was, devoid of gimmickry ... a fact that may appeal to the musical-minded more than those who listen, with both ears, for spectacular sonic surprises.
It didn't take longer to figure out which was the larger audience. F&T became one of the best-selling instrumental easy listening groups of the 1960s. They had immediate hits with their renditions of "Exodus" and the theme from "The Apartment," and over 10 Top 100 hits in the next 13 years. They continued to record a steady stream of 4 albums a year for United Artists until 1979, when they formed their own label, Avante Garde. They often played to packed concert houses, appearing up to 100 times a year at their peak. Although they retired from performing in 1989, they remain close friends and have settled near each other in the Sarasota, Florida area. According to their manager, Scott Smith, they began practicing again in late 1998 in anticipation of a new series of recordings that will include new prepared piano sounds.
You can safely skip virtually everything recorded from the early United Artists LP, "Pianos in Paradise" on, though, unless you need a Muzak fix. The one prominent exception to this advice, however, is their best-selling album, Midnight Cowboy, which gained a lot of attention for its prominent use of Vinnie Bell's "watery" guitar effects. For most space age pop fans, the prepared piano albums are the ones to seek out.
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