We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Super Piano Brothers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Super Piano Brothers below.

Alright, Super Piano Brothers thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

We both grew up as classical musicians, and bridging the gap between our traditional conservatory training and popular music from video games and movies was a sometimes difficult hurdle we had to navigate. When we first started, the idea of classical musicians playing non-classical repertoire was uncommon.

Compound that with the fact that playing music from popular media like movies and video games, and you had something so unusual at the time that most audiences struggled to comprehend, much less accept. While it may seem more mainstream and obvious now (the Grammy’s just included a category for video game score), the idea of bringing forth video game music onto center-stage in a traditional classical setting was both innovative and intimidating when we first started out. It was a novel concept that music typically playing a subservient role to a filmgoer or gamer’s experience could be presented as a legitimate art form in a concert space.

From audiences to even our own teachers, people constantly got the wrong impression about who we were and what we did. This gradually went away as we matured and became more confident in what we wanted to accomplish ourselves. The industry itself also came around, as concert series like Distant Worlds, Video Game Orchestra, and an increasing number of others also helped bring this idea into mainstream acceptance.

Although at first it seemed like we were playing to the wrong ears, as we continued to persist and perform we found more and more supporters – both from enthusiastic fans and fellow musicians eager to collaborate. We were not classical musicians “stooping to the level of popular entertainment”, nor were we amateurs on the internet “attempting to glorify a source of recreation”. We were well-trained artists who saw serious potential in something underappreciated, and had the passion to share that with anybody and everybody.

Super Piano Brothers, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We both began our classical piano training at an early age, and grew close while studying under the same teacher. We would spend a lot of time getting to know one another as friends and fellow musicians, discovering a mutual passion for many different forms of entertainment, particularly video games – and similar ones at that! What started out as a casual game of one-up’s-manship of “Look at this game melody I can play!” quickly evolved into a collaborative activity where we could both enhance the music in ways we could not do alone.

It was an electrifying development that earned us a lot of positive reception from our early supporters – mostly peers and schoolmates. We yet lacked the resources to make it a serious commitment until a few years into college. A competitive opportunity presented itself and we decided – despite living separately in Boston and New Year at the time – to record one of our old classics: “Bob-Omb Battlefield”.

Artistic success is not easily measured by the same metrics as most business ventures are. A huge part of it is necessarily subjective – and as many would say, the most essential part. The thing that sets us apart in our eyes from our many excellent peers in the industry is a commitment to merging the classical style at the highest level with the passion and wonder of entertainment. While recording and performing covers and originals is a core part of our work, our calling card remains our “hybrid narrative arrangements” which are story-telling pieces intimately crafted from our own experiences engaging with the source.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For us, the most rewarding part of being an artist is the ability to manifest our emotions (whether that be love, passion, frustration, and everything in between) into a tangible piece of work that we are able to share with the world. Music has been our biggest vessel for expression and connecting with others through shared emotions and building a deep yet nonverbal understanding is deeply rewarding. More specifically to our group, what keeps us going is bringing together communities from very different backgrounds (e.g. Star Wars fans + lovers of Beethoven) to discover a shared love for something new. Our ability to combine fandoms of different genres and demographics to break down barriers via music remains one of our greatest strengths as well as one of the most rewarding aspects of being artists.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Our perspective is that a great deal many more people have the potential for creativity than they realize. Creativity is a skill like any other, and can be learned and improved upon. Many so-called non-creatives have either have blocked themselves through this self-labeling or have not had the opportunity to explore.

We hope that we can show others some core elements of creativity through our work in a fairly direct manner. You can take something that you love or feel strongly about and recreate it in exactly the way that you love about it. You can also take it and reinvent it in a completely new way, inspired by a unique perspective that only you can see by virtue of being yourself. Finally, you can take elements of multiple things you love and combine them all into a creation that embodies the very best of everything that brings you happiness.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/superpianobros/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperPianoBros/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/superpianobrothers