Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A musician, composer, conductor and pianist who says he never stops working and aims to touch people with his work.
On the island
Eight records
Everything's Coming Up RosesFavourite
I think this is just one of those songs that if you're on a desert island and you need an alarm clock and a wake up call, this is exactly what you want to wake up to.
Michael McDonald & Kenny Loggins
I think they're just magnificent. And they recorded a song a couple of years ago called What a Fool Believes, which I think is not only very sophisticated, but if you can understand the lyric, I think it makes a lot of sense.
there's a song that is in its complexity it's so simple and the lyric is so beautiful that this is a song that really lets me be at peace if such a thing is possible.
Carly Simon & Michael McDonald
to me, the sexiest singer is Carly Simon. I just think she's just hot stuff. So on a cloudy day on the island, it would be a wonderful way to kind of, you know, get from four o'clock to eight o'clock to hear You Belong to Me, which I just think is a hot record.
For me, it's peaceful, but it also allows me to think about my own thoughts and and get very introspective.
One is called Where is Love? which is wonderful as a title because that's so simplistic. To begin with, you think Oh, come on And then it turns out it isn't simplistic. There's a fabulous fellow singing it, and it and it's what makes the London recording so great is because it is a real English child singing it.
The other, I think, has become universally known as one of the great standards of the of the seventies and eighties and I'm sure will live forever, which is Send in the Clowns, which just Is Sondheim probably at his best lyrically? A wonderful melody that he wrote.
this is just the song that James Galway recorded, which is from Gene Seaberg. This doesn't have lyrics, unfortunately. I mean, it does have lyrics in the show, but not on his because the man plays the flute. But it's called Dreamers, and basically it says that sometimes we need to change the way that we feel.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:34From what part of Europe do your family roots come?
My parents came from Vienna.
Presenter asks
2:48Did you take to music or were you put to it?
I think it was a combination. I mean, I have perfect pitch. I could play at a very early age. My sister was taking all the lessons, and then the teacher would leave, and I could just go to the piano and just do it. ... So it was very clear to me at a very young age that I was never going to become a great performer of classical music, though I studied for 14 years at Juilliard.
Presenter asks
3:37Did [going to Juilliard] take you away from the other kids when they were out playing softball?
It didn't worry me because truthfully my mother was very liberal and felt it was important for me to play with the other kids. The problem was that uh sometimes they would have these nicknames for me, like I was called Fingers at the age of eight. You know, and I couldn't play hardball, I could just play softball. But no, I um I never had that feeling like I was missing something, no.
The keepsakes
The book
I would take a phone book and hope that possibly something would happen like an E. T. ... and I could make contact with the world.
The luxury
Photograph of his mother at age 17
I would probably take that because every time I look at that picture, it's just, you know, it's a warm feeling.
Presenter asks
4:02When was the very first time you played to an audience?
Well, the first important one I was about nine years old, I I won a contest to play for an audience and it was a terrible affair because what happened was that I won. My mother bought me this beautiful, beautiful suit and it was kind of scratching me and itching me. ... So on the day of the concert my mother put pajamas underneath the pants so it wouldn't bother me that much, you know, the wool. And I went out on the stage and I thought I was going to be just brilliant, and I he started to hear people laugh. What I didn't realize was that the pajamas were starting to show from underneath, you know what I mean?
Presenter asks
5:46What happened to you when you left the Juilliard?
Well, I was at Juilliard School of Music. I was at a place called Queens College and I wanted to get into, you know, show business. And there was a fellow by the name of Buster Davis who was working with A girl by the name of Liza Minelli. ... And she and I became good friends and she told this man, this Buster Davis, that I was a very good pianist and whatever. So he auditioned me and he liked me very much. And the first thing he did was he gave me a job As a rehearsal pianist for this television show.
Presenter asks
10:48Did you accept the discipline of film writing, working to the stopwatch a few seconds at a time?
Yeah, well, you know, uh film music is, I think, sixty to seventy percent inspiration and certainly thirty percent mathematics, just to know how long you need, where it has to start, where it has to stop. And the more I've done, I think the more I've been able to have more inspiration and less feeling like I'm working to the clock. But in the beginning it was very much trying to be very correct and very, you know.
“I enjoy working. I think it's uh it's something I love to do, you know, and if it's something that you love to do, you you do it. And I have this feeling that uh it's important for me to put work out that I think will touch people and will hopefully uh give them songs that they can listen to and hum and enjoy and laugh at or cry at and that's what I like doing.”
“But you know it's a funny thing, you'd never write thinking about the money. It's really the work that I find the excitement. To to put something on the earth that wasn't there yesterday. That's what I like.”
“I think so. I think that's I mean, to me, music finally is about touching someone, that the listener hears it and is touched in some way. And that's called communication. And some of us use it verbally, and some of us use it musically.”