Thus while still playing on the (mostly) black keys of F-sharp major, Berlin could hear the music in a variety of other keys. Turning the wheel shifted the keyboard right or left relative to the strings, positioning the hammers over higher or lower notes than they would ordinarily strike. To one side of the keyboard was a small wheel. Around 1910, as his career was starting to take off, he bought an upright “transposing piano” for $100. Having limited skills as a pianist, he couldn’t easily change keys. Getting tunes down on paper wasn’t Berlin’s only challenge. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the song that made Berlin a star, was dictated to one Alfred Doyle, who reportedly was paid 50 cents a page. Berlin would bring in whatever he had - sometimes just a whistled melody, sometimes the piano chords to go with it - and the arranger/collaborator would help fill in any blanks, then write it all out in musical notation.
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Music publishers in those days had professional arrangers on staff for that purpose, since many tunesmiths (a lot of black composers of ragtime, for instance) were similarly self-taught. So how did he write music if he couldn’t write music? Simple - he got someone else to write it down for him. The key of C is for people who study music.” In a 1962 interview, Berlin said, “The black keys are right there, under your fingers. This wasn’t unheard-of for a self-taught musician, since it’s easier for untrained fingers to play the black keys (which are elevated and widely spaced) without hitting wrong notes. He played almost entirely in the key of F-sharp, allowing him to stay on the black keys as much as possible.
at age five, Irving Berlin dropped out of school in his early teens and taught himself to play the piano while working as a singing waiter from 1904 to 1907. All you need to do is come up with the hits.īorn in Russia and brought to the U.S. Fact is, if the music industry thinks you’ve got commercial potential, it’ll figure out a way to compensate for your technical deficiencies. As you rightly suppose, neither can lots of modern songwriters, but here’s the thing: musical illiteracy wasn’t all that rare in Berlin’s day either. The composer of countless beloved standards and show tunes including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America” couldn’t read or write music.
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