"If it ain't got that swing- it's classical!"
An article about ‘crossover’ music by Howard Goodall for The Independent (2000)
In the autumn of 1996 Marianne Faithfull’s album 20th Century Blues, which contained nine songs by the pre-war German composer Kurt Weill, was barred from the Classical Charts. The chart compilers’ selection panel said the album wasn’t 100% Weill and Weill wasn’t 100% classical. This year, William Orbit’s Pieces in a Modern Style became another celebrated refusenik: this time, the ‘Classical Advisory Panel’ (clutching at straws I fear), said the pieces (100% of them from 100% classical composers, by the way) were unsuitable ‘for live performance in a concert setting’ and that Madonna’s producer had ‘totally altered’ the ‘tonal colours’ of the original works.
Meanwhile, the classical music world has worked itself up into a frightful lather over the first ‘Brit’ awards for Classical music, held in the Albert Hall on May 21st. The main complaint seems to have been that these awards are merely a marketing ploy by the record industry to beef up sales of already-popular classical names like Vanessa-Mae or Charlotte Church. The fact is, though, no-one is pretending otherwise: the pop ‘Brit’ awards are held by pop purists to be just as commercially-driven, just as tacky, just as unrepresentative of interesting contemporary music. How can you describe Boyzone, they scoff, as ‘best band’? All that has happened is that classical music has developed its own stable of tabloid celebrities and is busy exploiting them.
But there is another issue lurking beneath all these controversies, one that won’t go away with a scornful shrug, one that is redefining contemporary music by stealth, and one that few music lovers have really come to terms with. It is the issue of ‘crossover’. What most people mean by ‘crossover’ in music is the marketing phenomenon whereby an artist associated with one type of music and its audience is able to poach, through clever advertising and display, the much larger constituency belonging to another. So Nigel Kennedy’s Four Seasons reaches out beyond the traditional market for baroque music to people who normally buy pop records. Lesley Garrett, an opera singer, makes records designed to appeal to a ‘lighter’ audience who wouldn’t be seen dead in an opera house of a Saturday night. This isn’t a new trend. James Galway and the instrumental group SKY trod this path twenty-odd years ago, and Leonard Bernstein spent his entire career leaping chamois-like from genre to genre.
In the last decade, as CD collections have been exhausted by yet more versions of all the old classical chestnuts (I mean, how many recordings of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony does a person need?), the record industry has come to rely more and more heavily on these so-called crossover projects to support itself. They will get more desperate yet, I warn you. David Beckham reading Peter and the Wolf, Evgeny Kissin playing From Russia with Love, or The Chemical Brothers playing The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book can only be a heartbeat away. But the key here is that the material itself isn’t crossing anything or going over anywhere. Whilst the Mediæval Bæbes might borrow techniques from the pop industry (of the 1960s, mind) to sell their discs- namely wearing see-through negligées reminiscent of Castle Andrex in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, their music is still 14th century plainsong. Even Vanessa-Mae plays Bach, Bruch and Beethoven. To describe William Orbit’s synthesised ‘easy classics’ as a crossover project only refers to his fans, more familiar with techno dance music, making the trip from shelf to check-out in a record store. His approach to the music is less daring even than Glenn Gould deciding to play Bach’s harpsichord music on a modern grand piano. The idea that Orbit should be excluded from the classical charts is therefore laughable. His disc reminds me of Tomita’s delicious Snowflakes are Dancing (a synthesised Debussy compilation) and Wendy Carlos’ innovative Switched on Bach of the 1970s. Old music on new instruments.
Genuine crossover, where the material itself is involved in a creative exchange, is a much rarer commodity. Take Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble’s strangely popular CD Officium (1997). In it the Hilliards do their usual high-quality thing of singing Renaissance and medieval sacred polyphony, while Mr Garbarek plays his soprano sax moodily all over it, twisting and weaving through the ancient melismas as if the recording was being made in a ruined church adjacent to a jazz café. It is a curious and fresh idea. The two elements on their own would scarcely merit 5,000 sales, but stick them together and Eureka! – a platinum disc is born. But popularity has very little to do with the way music has shaped its history. What carves out the direction of a musical path is the work of composers and performers wreaking havoc with established styles and conventions. Worrying about who should or should not be in the Classical Charts, who is an appropriate Best Female Artist at the Classical Brits is, in the long run, totally irrelevant.
What matters is the journey the music makes. Genuine crossover, like the pioneering work of Steve Reich, is exhilarating and unpredictable, and it will undoubtedly be the musical mainstream of the future. Some key composers of the first half of the 20th century pointed the way to the current trend. One was the American George Gershwin, whose work draws equally from classical and jazz sources, another was Kurt Weill. Weill’s music combines the acerbic cabaret style of theWeimarrepublic with his conventional classical training. Both composers’ music was considered uncategorisable in its time. Indeed, the positioning of Weill still creates confusion, as Marianne Faithfull discovered. Once both Gershwin and Weill were considered by musicologists as interesting, if slightly lowbrow, outsiders. Now we can see that their experiments were well ahead of their time.
Rhapsody in Blue and The Threepenny Opera seem quite at home in our colourfully fractured musical world. Though everyone knows his meanderingly attractive Gymnopédies of 1888, Erik Satie’s theories on the future use of music turned out to be startlingly prophetic. He talked of music becoming an all-purpose, ubiquitous backdrop to modern urban life- ‘furniture music’; he would have appreciated the soothing balm that is New Age ambient music, and experimented himself with the notion of mixing and matching alien traditions. To some extent we have grown used to the deliberate mixing of styles through film and television scores and musicals. Here, old-fashioned symphony orchestras rub shoulders with pop rhythm sections. Simon Lacey’s theme music for the BBC’s current Fish series is a textbook example- a small classical string ensemble nestled inside a contemporary drum pattern.
In the theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber has been using the twin influences of classical and pop all his creative life, producing a hybrid of the two with which audiences are obviously very comfortable. Mostly, though, film and TV music is slave to a visual or narrative master. Many of the musical decisions have been made by the composer principally to allude to something on screen or stage. All the ingredients of Morricone’s wonderful score for The Mission, for example, are suggested by the film’s plot: baroque strings with decorative oboe solo, inspirational South American choral wash with percussive spine, and so on. Abstract attempts to cross musical frontiers are less common. Probably the most famous of the recent crop of ‘mixed genre’ recordings are Karl Jenkins’ Adiemus trilogy (1995-8).
Jenkins’ work is thoroughly promiscuous, bounding across boundaries musical and geographical, one moment evoking the Serenghetti the next an urban aerobics class. I have had some personal experience of the difficulties this kind of cross-dressing can cause, when I sent my new album We Are the Burning Fire to some record company experts for their opinion. The album is an unashamed melting-pot of the musical influences that most inspire me- English choral singing, folk melodies and traditional instrumental styles from around the world, dark Irish passion, pop rhythms, Latin percussion and muted orchestral strings- and so I expected some mystification. Their reaction was unanimous: ‘it’s very beautiful, Howard, but it’s neither classical, nor World, nor Pop- no-one will know which part of the store to put it in’. It reminded me of an interview I gave in 1993 to Classic FM about my musical Silas Marner.
I offered to play a song from the show (it was being performed that night by the City of Birmingham Touring Opera) but I had to choose a section that sounded classical- it wouldn’t be right for the station if it was at all poppy in character. But I have grown up in the era of pop and it runs as much in my veins as does my classical music training. I am a board member of Folkworks and I write popular musical theatre- how on earth can I restrict myself to a notion of style as limited as ‘classical’? I am not a special case, I am representative of many composers. We’re not really interested in who crosses the floor of what record store to hear another rendering of the same 30 pieces, nor who qualifies to climb up which chart. Real crossover has always been the engine of change and growth in musical culture, whether it’s Stravinsky pillaging Russian folk tunes or McCartney and George Martin borrowing ‘classical’ textures for Eleanor Rigby. For me, its pull is irresistible.
(Howard Goodall May 2000)