Tell Tchaikovsky The News

Mr. Bailie asked me to join him for a full two-hour show the other evening, which I was, as ever, more than happy to do (What qualifies as happiness in excess, I’m not sure: ecstatic, perhaps? Jubilant?). The theme that I suggested was that of the pop music/classical music cross-over, something that has concerned me in various ways for many years. Recent television shows, like Maestro and Pop Star To Opera Star, and the move by different opera festivals to commission pop stars to write new operas (Mr. Albarn, Mr. Wainwright, Mr. Costello, Mr. Waters, Mr. Merritt, The Knife, The Dirty Projectors) plays up to the idea that the very distinct arenas of classical and pop must somehow be resolved with one another. This is a view that may well be held by some consumers of either structural format (this being the main distinction between the two), but is not the case, in praxis, for musicians. The Other may offer ideas of ‘freedom,’ ‘credibility,’ ‘appeal,’ or ‘ambition,’ but, whatever it offers, it must be understood. A popstar who knows nothing of classical music is not a popstar, as pop must eat and reconstitute all other music. A classical musician who doesn’t listen to pop music is simply unfeeling.

The mix of both started early in the history of rock’n’roll: Mr. James Tenney created a tape loop piece, based on Blue Suede Shoes, in 1961; the Beatles sampled a Bb from Mr. Sibelius in 1966. Supposed-classical music and pop music were working along not dissimilar lines during the sixties and beyond: Mr. Reich was originally a jazz drummer, so his interest in rhythm comes from the same source as rock’n’roll; Mr. Riley was a hippy with hit records; & Mr. Glass started investigating sub-continental music at the same time as the Beatles (them again!) and Mr. Leitch were visiting the Maharishi. From there, as classical music attempted to stave off irrelevance and pop sped into non-meaning, the two copulated again and again; frequently ashamed by it, as often preening and smug.

There wasn’t enough time to go into all that during the show. It would have brought down the mood considerably anyway. There wasn’t even enough time to play some of the records we had brought along with us. Thus, for those who care and those who can, I have thrown the remainders and the leftovers onto a Spotify playlist that you can listen to at your pleasure. Well, mostly pleasure.

And Another Thing, Peter Ilyich!

Classical Interpretations

A general acknowledgment that pop composers are composers second and lattermost. And some of them are quite good too.

Balanescu Quartet – Pocket Calculator (composed by Herren Hutter & Schnieder, of Kraftwerk)
Ensemble Modern – Peaches En Regalia (composed by Mr. Zappa)
Nigel Kennedy – Third Stone From The Sun (composed by Mr. Hendrix)

Pop Appropriations

Where one presumes the distinction between the consumption of pop and classical is so great that listeners will either not notice the theft or feel supremely self-satisfied for picking up on it.

Dr. John – Dance a la Negres (lifted from Mr. Bizet’s Carmen)
Serge Gainsbourg – Lemon Incest (borrowed from Mr. Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No.3)
Barry Manilow – Could It Be Magic (tea-leafed from Mr. Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor)
Della Reese – Don’t you Know? (reminiscent of Musetta’s Waltz, from Mr. Puccini’s La Bohème)
Elvis Presley – It’s Now Or Never (based on O Sole Mio)

Structural Ambition

Attempts at appropriating classical music structures into pop, which, in some ways, simply makes it classical music. Not in an important way though.

Deep Purple – Concerto For Group & Orchestra
The Electric Prunes – Kyrie Eleison (from Mr. Axelrod’s psychedelic setting of the Latin mass in F Minor)
Damon Albarn – Heavenly Peach Banquet (from the opera Monkey: Journey To The West)
Elvis Costello & the Brodsky Quartet – Swine
Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe – La Japonaise
Sparks – The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman (The radio opera/musical)

Resetting

In which a composer sets the lyrics of a pop song to new music, as if the words and original music were somehow separable.

David Lang – Heroin (using lyrics originally from The Velvet Underground)
John Corigliano – Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (set without ever having heard the original music)

Counterpoint/Subtext

On some occasions, employing a theme from a known classical piece adds something to your pop song or, at least, makes a clever point. What these might be, I can’t imagine.

P.I.L. – Death Disco (using a theme from Swan Lake)
Alice Cooper – Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets (descending into an extract from Mr. Bernstein’s West Side Story)
Mansun – Fallout (for some reason The Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairy)
Rufus Wainwright – Oh! What A World (cleverly utilizing Mr. Ravel’s Bolero)
Radiohead – Idioteque (where a sample of Mr. Lanskey’s Mild Und Leise is used, although Mr. Lanskey later revealed that the sample itself is based on a leitmotif from Mr. Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde)

Cover Versions

Showing, at once, the wide range and limitation of everything.

Emerson, Lake, & Palmer – The Nutrocker (originally by B. Bumble & the Stingers, originally by Tchaikovsky)
Manowar – Nessun Dorma (originally by Mr. Pavarotti)
Birdsongs of the Mesozoic – (Excerpts from) The Rite Of Spring (originally, in its entirety, by Mr. Stravinsky)
Robert Wyatt – Del Mondo (originally by Mr. Canali, whoever he may be)
Big Brother & The Holding Company – All Is Loneliness (originally by Mr. Moondog)

Namechecks

In response to Roll Over Beethoven, it became the done to sing nice things about composers from the mid-seventies onward.

Eurythmics – Beethoven (I Love To Listen To)
Kate Bush – Delius
Falco – Rock Me Amadeus
John Cale – Brahms
Art of Noise – Il Pleure (At the Turn of the Century) Claude Debussy
Gonzales – Salieri Serenade
Kraftwerk – Franz Schubert

Anomalous

And many more…

Arthur Russell – This is How We Walk on the Moon (Classical cellist/disco moonlighter)
David Bowie – African Night Flights (rock’s most successful use of Mr. Cage’s prepared piano)
Ryuichi Sakamota – Forbidden Colours (falling between two stools)
John Cale & Legs Larry Smith – Legs Larry At Television Centre (self-explanatory)
Penguin Café Orchestra – Pythagoras’s Trousers (orchestra)
Wendy Carlos – Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, 4th Movement (from the highly influential A Clockwork Orange soundtrack and opening music for Mr. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust concerts)