Ferrante and Teicher

Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American piano players, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes, as well as their signature style of florid, intricate and rapid fire piano playing performances.

Arthur Ferrante (September 7, 1921, New York City – September 19, 2009), and Louis Teicher (pronounced as TIE-cher) (August 24, 1924, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – August 3, 2008) met while studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1930. Musical prodigies, they began performing as a piano duo while still in school. After graduating, they both joined the Juilliard faculty.

In 1947, they launched a full-time concert career, at first playing nightclubs, then quickly moving up to playing classical music with orchestral backing. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith relates the story that in the 1950s the two students practiced in the home of his grandmother Constance Neidhart Tallarico. Between 1950 and 1980, they were a major American "easy listening" act, and scored four big U.S. hits: "Theme From The Apartment" (Pop #10), "Theme From Exodus" (Pop #2), "Tonight" (Pop #8), and "Midnight Cowboy" (Pop #10). They performed and recorded regularly with pops orchestras popular standards by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and others. In 1973, they did the Hollywood Radio Theater theme for the Rod Serling radio drama series, The Zero Hour.

The duo also experimented with prepared pianos, adding paper, sticks, rubber, wood blocks, metal bars, chains, glass, mallets, and other found objects to piano string beds. In this way they were able to produce a variety of bizarre sounds that sometimes resembled percussion instruments, and at other times resulted in special effects that sounded as if they were electronically synthesized.

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