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Tell Tchaikovsky the news: Rock stars invading classical domain
Sunday, December 12, 1999 By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Writer
Aging rockers and pop stars have only a few options open to them, compositionally speaking. They can retire, allowing their music to live on in elevators and oldies stations. They can continue writing pop songs in their own style and hope it remains fashionable, which it usually doesn't. Or they can reinvent themselves, recasting their vision in updated trappings or a different medium.
The latter is the most difficult by far. The artistic chameleon David Bowie has success with his transformations because his career has been built on change. Nearly everyone else might as well climb Mount Everest in a swim suit as write music of a different style. It doesn't matter how big the artist gets -- in fact, the more popular an artist becomes, the harder it is for his fans to accept change.
Why? Because the music industry wages vast turf wars. What you write is what you are. Artists are identified with formats -- from hip hop to country to alternative to techno -- and every sub-genre within them. Those who step outside what they are known for feel the heat from critics, fans and record executives.
It's tough enough for an artist to mix things up within pop music -- witness U2 and its "Pop" fiasco in 1997. But what if the artist moves out of rock into classical music? It's as devilishly difficult to do as a four-part Bach fugue is to play.
However, that's exactly what several superstars of the pop world have tried this decade. Paul McCartney and Joe Jackson recently released classical discs. Billy Joel announced an all-but-permanent move to classical composition, and David Byrne and Stewart Copeland have written classical works. The musical quality of these efforts varies immensely, but nearly universally these artists have had a hard time getting a fair hearing.
Established songsmiths like Jackson and Joel face great challenges writing classical music. Although classical is not inherently "better" than pop, it is often more complex. But the greater hurdle for most of these rockers-turned-maestros is the perception by their fans on the one hand that they can only ever be pop stars and by the classical music world on the other that a symphony by them is just plain 'phony.
"It's totally inevitable," says Joe Jackson, 45, whose 1982 single "Stepping Out" was a Top 10 hit and whose Symphony No. 1 was just released on Sony Classical. "I am reluctant to have the word classical attached to me. I am a composer in the dictionary definition."
With a career spanning new wave, reggae, pop, swing and jazz, the versatile Jackson has struggled with those who would box him up musically. But he sees it as endemic of the industry. "Much more ridged barriers have been put up in the last few decades," he says. "But in the other ways they are starting to come down. Everything is starting to come down."
If that's true, it's about time, because the whole situation is getting downright ludicrous. All this huffing and puffing over labeling someone musically is missing the point. Music is what composers write; it doesn't define their person.
Ludwig van Beethoven worked in both worlds, composing popular works and arranging folk songs. Just because a rocker didn't spend years in a university training to be a composer doesn't automatically make the music irrelevant.
Take the case of McCartney, 57. No one has to like his "Liverpool Oratorio" or his recently released "Working Classical," but to waste energy fretting about whether he should be allowed to do it makes little sense. Labels are helpful for description, but not as binding contracts. And that goes equally for both devotees of the Beatles and of Brahms.
The term "classical music" has never really made much sense. It was an attempt to separate art music from that stemming from folk or popular traditions. However, it's a constricting nuisance even to contemporary composers.
Besides, the diverse creations of the 20th century would seem to negate any attempt at a monolithic "classical music" From Mahler's introduction of folk songs and similar material to his grand symphonies to the absolute fragmentation through experimentation of today's classical music, it's no longer even possible to say exactly what art music is. One of the best symphonies of this decade is Libby Larsen's Symphony No. 3, "Lyric," in which the composer celebrates the popular music of the pre-rock days: blues, jazz and funk.
Even more pertinent is why would we want to exclude those with a different approach to the discipline?
Frank Zappa's classical output has staying power. It will outlive many academically trained composers. And by working with the London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez and Ensemble Modern, Zappa showed that musical genius knows no boundaries of genre.
Jackson is the perfect example of how bias adversely affects the ear. The British musician grew up adoring Beethoven as much as the Beatles, played in a jazz orchestra and even attended London's Royal Academy of Music.
His professional career is just as diverse, touching on many pop genres and also film composition. His 1997 work on "Heaven & Hell" called on the talents of classical stars Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Dawn Upshaw. The larger picture here, then, is of a composer with many interests, and in this context his Symphony No. 1 makes sense.
A four-movement journey through the stages of a person's life, this opus doesn't employ a traditional orchestra. Rather, Jackson writes for electric guitar, trumpet, alto saxophone, trombone, flute, keyboards, violin, viola, bass and drums.
It's not your typical symphonic sound, and to a culture that feeds on musical borders and walls, it makes Jackson seem like an extremely inept classical composer, so clueless that he doesn't even know what forces to write for.
"Because people are going to know the tip of the iceberg, it's hard to change people's perceptions," says Jackson. "My symphony is not a classical piece, but it's based on classical form. It has a structure, a very traditional structure. It's totally symphonic, but it's just not written for a symphony [orchestra]. And why should it be? It's 1999!
"I love orchestras in the traditional sense. I just think as someone who has grown up with pop music and grown up with the pop world I am doing it in a way that's right for me. I do know how to orchestrate, I am just more interested in using a contemporary palate."
Which is precisely why Jackson doesn't like McCartney's work in general. McCartney has made a concerted effort to write classical music that sounds "classical" to our ears. "It's very clumsy and self-conscious," says Jackson.
McCartney, who cannot read or write music, comes up with the musical idea, but needs the intervention of skilled orchestrators and musicians to put it down on paper and flesh it out to an orchestra. Critics, composers and classical music buffs have teed off on McCartney's team approach. But even this usually comes off more as a thinly veiled attempt to show how difficult classical music is and how much training it requires, than an honest critique of the music. What's far more interesting than the process that helps McCartney write -- and for centuries composers have received help and advice when writing larger works -- are his aesthetic decisions as compared to Jackson's.
McCartney can't write for symphony, and he does exactly that in "Standing Stone" and "Working Classical," while Jackson can orchestrate but doesn't in his Symphony No. 1.
The point is you can't lump these rock guys together. You must listen to the music as is.
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