Marcus Roberts discusses his early musical influences

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Marcus Roberts discusses the sound of piano

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Marcus Roberts on solo piano

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Q: “We were chatting about how much you admire the piano as an instrument and just what you can do with it and the sounds that can be drawn from it…”

A: “Yeah, the possibilities are endless because, first of all, you've got the full range of the overtone series because you got 88 pitches. So basically, you've got seven registers at the very least of tonalities and you've got two hands and you've got ten fingers, so obviously, you can have any range of things going on, especially if you took, for example, in classical music where Bach wrote five voice fugue for the piano. Two which appear in the first book of the 'Well-Tempered Clavier'. So obviously, you've got five melodies going on at the same time potentially. So therefore I think the range is for, the rhythmic power is for, is a contrast between registers. The whole possibilities for different type touches and different pedaling techniques and, of course, with the sostenuto pedal, you have the possibility, if you're playing a grand piano of having certain pitches resonate while the ten fingers are then free to do even more. So you really have just a huge, gigantic range of possibilities.”