"Even while I was studying at [Manhattan School of Music], I was learning about melody and rhythm, and theory, and harmony, and all the great composers like Scriabin, Khatchaturian, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev...Bach and Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schoenberg, Alan Berg...Boulez, Stockhausen...We would listen, for example, to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, or a Bach Cantata or the Prelude and Fugue, and so on. And then the teacher, Ludmila Ulehla, picked the essential 20 composers in music history, from...Mozart...and so on, up through...Debussy, Scriabin...and Stockhousen...Eventually, my goal became to put all that I had absorbed from these studies into jazz, into, say, "Stella By Starlight," to integrate the harmony, the melodic ideas, and so on. I continued doing that for about twenty years afterwards. I spent hours and hours at the piano, sleeping as little [as] three hours a night. But I loved it, so it wasn't arduous work."
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Composers from the United StatesPeople from New York CityJazz musiciansPianists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Beirach in 2019 on his classical education in an interview with All About Jazz
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richie_Beirach
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Richie Beirach
Richard Alan Beirach (May 23, 1947 – January 26, 2026) was an American jazz pianist and composer.
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