Wayne Alpern - Scarab,Beatles Piano (Henri Elkan Music)

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Scarab is a collection of ten Beatles arrangements for solo piano. These tunes sit atop the summit of modern vernacular music. Each one is a gem worthy of creative compositional development rooted in the loved and familiar. The goal of their arrangement, rearrangement or recomposition even, is to let the tune evolve of its own right, spinning itself into wider and more referential musical horizons where the recognizable pops out like the sun behind the clouds, ranging from the transparent to opaque, but always embedded within. They drift along the way between popular and classical music, with touches of blues, gospel, folk, country, baroque, barrelhouse, atonality, rock and romanticism, crossing fences and deliberately blurring conventional stylistic boundaries to compel an aural integration at a higher level of musical synthesis.

The title Scarab of course is a play on Beatle, but it represents the elevation of a common insect to a higher spiritual plane. That's the alchemistic goal of this project: to transform the ubiquitous into the unique, the commonplace into the extraordinary, the Beatle into the Scarab, by tapping and unleashing the full force of its intrinsic potential to transform us and even itself. The extraordinary Billy Test is the pianist-alchemist here, conjuring this musical magic, casting its spell and bringing notation from compositional prescription to performative incantation.

My deep relationship with the Beatles goes back to my early roots in Detroit, the cradle of Motown, when I heard them for the first time in the mid-60s listening to my tiny transistor radio very late at night in bed. I had no idea I'd become a composer, but I knew instantly I was transformed, and the world had changed.

WAYNE ALPERN is a New York City composer, arranger, and scholar who integrates popular and jazz idioms with classical techniques and repertoire to create a sophisticated contemporary style of cross-genre, or even post-genre music. After years of composing complex new music, he embraced his personal history and indigenous musical culture and fused them with his classical background and training. His work includes numerous jazz arrangements, string quartets, woodwind and brass quintets, mixed ensembles, pieces for string orchestra, and several piano works.

Alpern's innovative compositions, recompositions, and rearrangements have been performed and recorded by distinguished artists from diverse musical traditions. A native of Detroit immersed in the Motown sound, he studied at Oberlin College, University of Michigan, Yale University, and City University of New York, with additional work at Harvard, Juilliard, Wesleyan, and University of Pennsylvania. His musical scholarship and theoretical expertise focuses on Schenkerian analysis and 20th-century music. He holds a law degree from Yale Law School and practiced civil litigation for nearly twenty years. He taught at Mannes College of Music, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Cardozo Law School, worked at General Music Publishing, United Artists Music Publishing, and was Steve Reich's editor. He is President and owner of Henri Elkan Music Publishing, Inc. and a lifetime member of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society. He has lectured extensively in North America, Europe, and Russia. In his capacity as Founder and Director of the internationally acclaimed Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory, Alpern received the highly coveted Society for Music Theory Honorary Lifetime Membership Award recognizing his "substantial and longstanding accomplishments distinguishing the recipient and our discipline through his many good works on behalf of his fellow scholars and students of music theory for our collective benefit."
PLAYERS & INSTRUMENTS:
Wayne Alpern: Arranger
Billy Test: Piano

TRACKS, TIMES:
1. Let it Be 3:40
2. Eleanor Rigby 4:46
3. Penny Lane 2:13
4. Hide Your Love Away 2:57
5. Yesterday 2:20
6. Norwegian Wood 5:06
7. Lady Madonna 2:02
8. Blackbird 3:40
9. When I'm Sixty Four 3:40
10. Nowhere Man 3:25

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