Ferrante & Teicher

Ferrante & Teicher were one of the most successful US easy listening acts of the 1960s and 1970s, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes. The duo of Arthur Ferrante (born September 7, 1921, New York City; died September 19, 2009, Florida) and Louis Teicher (born August 24, 1924, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; died August 3, 2008, North Carolina) met while studying at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York. Both were musical prodigies and they began performing together as a piano duo while they were still in school. After graduating, they both joined the Juilliard faculty. In 1947, they launched a full-time concert act, at first playing nightclubs, then quickly moving up to playing classical music with orchestral backing.

A switch to popular standards by the likes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers made them mainstays in the pops-orchestra field. The duo experimented with prepared pianos, influenced - oddly enough - by the ideas of avant-garde composer John Cage. By adding paper, sticks, rubber, wood blocks, metal bars, chains, glass, mallets, and other found objects to piano string beds, they were able to produce a variety of bizarre sounds that sometimes resembled percussion instruments, and at other times produced a spacy, almost electronic sound. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.