Michael Pinnella

Michael Pinnella is Symphony X's founding keyboardist, present since the band formed in 1994 and on its entire discography. Born in 1969, he trained as a classical pianist, and it is that preparation that makes the group's most recognisable trait possible. In Symphony X the keyboard is not a harmonic bed. Pinnella plays contrapuntal lines in parallel with Michael Romeo's guitar, trades solos with him in passages of extreme speed and carries the orchestrations that give the records their symphonic scale. It is a function that demands the reading of written music rather than improvising over chords — Romeo's compositions have the structure of a score, and someone has to perform it. That relationship of equality between keyboard and guitar is what distinguishes the band within American progressive metal, and explains why its longest tracks — "The Divine Wings of Tragedy", "The Odyssey" — work as amplified chamber pieces rather than strings of solos. Outside the group, Pinnella has released instrumental works of his own, among them Enter by the Twelfth Gate (2004), in which the classical training appears without the mediation of metal, and he works as a piano teacher.