@dwsel
"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it."
@havokmusicinc
what a hell of a piece. I hear echoes both of ragtime and of video game music here
@vapormermaid
It's like when a MIDI breaks and all of the channels become grand piano.
@futsk01
I'm even more fascinated by the fact that someone can play this by hand
@kaikofoni
one reason this etude sounds like 8-bit music is the alternating voices. early game consoles had very few sound channels, so composers used a kind of "voice stealing" technique – rapidly switching multiple voices on a single channel to simulate more voices. this piece does something similar: it's mostly just 3–4 notes at a time, but the rapid alternation makes it sound much bigger.
@chemistryguy
"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are going to love it." I, for one, am absolutely obsessed with this song. Utterly brilliant and easily a century ahead of its time.
@AldoGaspari.
Fun fact: Liszt really admired Alkan’s skill at the piano, it was even said that Liszt was “frightened” at Alkan’s own technique, and his ability to play Liszt’s pieces.
@dirkcampbell5847
Quite extraordinary. Had no idea anyone in the 19th century could even imagine writing like this. Thank you for introducing me to Alkan.
@pkuvincentsu
Thank you for including the full piece at the end! You don't know how many music related videos I've watched where the person talked for 20 minutes about a piece and never played it in full. So I appreciate this.
@britcom1
This music sounds like it should be a musical accompaniment played during an old silent film actors playing firefighters fighting a 4 story building fire with a damsel in distress hanging out of a 4th story window with smoke pouring out from behind her.
@bahlalthewatcher4790
Reading the score gave me carpal tunnel.
@agnisumant
I love that you included the performance of the piece so that we can hear the nuances you described for ourselves. This is how id like music creators to explain musical concepts. Really well done!
@haniyasu8236
A part of why it sounds "8-bit"-like could be because it's reminiscent of some of the limitations of 8-bit music: - This piece literally never has more than 3 notes voiced at a single time, and as it turns out, the NES only had 3 melodic tracks that could play at any given point in time (pulse 1, pulse 2, and triangle wave). If you wanted more than that, you had to get creative, like.. say for example doing a tremolo where you would swap back and forth between two notes to give the appearance of more instruments and notes in your harmonies than there actually were - Programming this music wasn't exactly easy... I'm not an expert in the tools of the time, but I imagine that making every single note be an eighth note would make things be much easier to program, meaning that all of the creativity it put into the accenting and harmony of the notes, like it is here. - While the hardware definitely limited instrumentation, you still had access to a computer that could play things perfectly every time, so why not make your music feature insanely fast and exhausting rhythms and arpeggios? - Idk anything about chord progression, but that harmony in the melody sounds very gamey. There's probably some reason for that.
@danielevans7439
Thank you for including the full etude at the end. After your hyping it up, I knew I had to hear it immediately.
@drajanacz.1376
Alkan was an absolute freak. He's so strangely mysterious since at one point of his life he basically disappeared from civilisation and isolated himself. But before that, as was already said here, he had some REALLY CRAZY technique. Liszt said that Valentin's was better than his. Which is pretty funny. They were mutually terrified of each other (but were a good homies) because when Alkan first heard Liszt play, he rushed home and spent the whole night crying from how defeated he felt. Interesting and genius fella❤️
@vegardno
6:47 this is a staple of Flamenco and Spanish guitar, both the rhythm and melody/chords
@misterakt
With how much he loved putting classical music to the rock forefront, this piece would've been the PERFECT piece for Keith Emerson to play with ELP. It could've been an instant prog classic.
@PepijndeVos
So many of these music videos just waffle while you put the music front and center. I was about to look up the piece when you started a full performance. Subscribed.
@pannegoleyn9734
Wow, what a marathon! The psychoacoustic effect in that interleaved melody is *fascinating*: listening really carefully, I'm still absolutely convinced that I'm hearing the left hand notes of the melody an octave above where they actually are. It's reminiscent of another composer playing similar games: Tchaikovsky, in the string writing in the last movement of the sixth symphony, where the melody that one hears, and the lower harmony, are actually interleaved notes between the first and second violin sections. Of course, Tchaikovsky's playing games with spatial perception (even more so given that in his time the second violins would be at the conductor's right, where cellos usually sit now), rather than with octaves.
@PianoCurio