Classical music is both familiar and strange to me. My parents played classical radio constantly when I was growing up, and I have primal memories of Robert J Lurtsema intoning “This… is Morning… Pro Musica… on National… Public… Radio.” My dad in particular was a huge opera buff, with a floor-to-ceiling collection of tapes and CDs. When I got to grad school, I was able to place out of the music history requirement just by having picked up so much of it by osmosis.
On the other hand, I don’t ever remember feeling like the music was “mine.” It sounded remote and arcane, a maze of formalities in languages I didn’t understand. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes (often) I didn’t, but mostly it just washed over me.
This is not the way I heard other kinds of music. As a kid, I loved Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Run-DMC, Paul Simon, the Big Chill Soundtrack, and the delights of 80s pop radio. As a teenager, I obsessed over the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers. I also got to know Duke Ellington from TV commercials for the New York City Transit Museum, and from my stepfather’s copy of Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. I listened to Ibrahim’s version of an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back” about fifty thousand times.
Ellington felt especially natural to me. I can tell you the exact time and place I first heard “Mood Indigo,” in the Campus Center at Amherst College, performed by a student grouped called the Hot Sextet (heh heh, college) because it felt like they had just filled in a missing piece of my soul. The only classical work that grabbed me that intensely and immediately as a young person was the prelude from Bach’s G major cello suite as performed by Mstislav Rostropovich.
In college I got some “greatest hits of classical music” compilation, and I enjoyed the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. I heard some Steve Reich around then and enjoyed that too. When Morimur came out, I got curious about it, and it got me listening to and thinking about the Bach Chaconne. But my heart belonged to Duke Ellington and Jerry Garcia, and then Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, James Brown, and, finally, lots of producers of electronic dance music and hip-hop.
In the past few years, I have dug into classical pieces once in a while, but mostly as remix material.
And then, last year, something unexpected happened. I got offered a job teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. They didn’t expect me to focus entirely on the Western canon (quite the opposite), but I obviously couldn’t ignore it either. So I had to start thinking about canonical works to talk about in class, music that both I and a bunch of New School undergrads would find engaging.
The G major cello suite was a no-brainer. I did a fun session on its melodic and harmonic aspects. I used Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg aria to explain rubato – I quantized him to a steady tempo grid and compared that to his actual interpretive timing. I presented “Ride of the Valkyries” as my example of 9/8 time, but mostly just so I could talk smack about Wagner. It was fun!
This semester I’m using the Bach Chaconne to talk rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and form. I’ll do the Mozart andante, too, and some Vicente Lusitano, some Caroline Shaw, some of my composer friends from Twitter too. On the second day of class, I had the kids sing a Pauline Oliveros prose score, and I plan to repeat that activity a few times. Preparing these class sessions sends me off to listen to and read about related works, and the scholarship surrounding them too.
So now I’m listening to and thinking about classical music voluntarily, analytically and frequently for the first time… ever?
I’m enjoying my immersion, but it remains a partial and biased one. I love Bach and don’t particularly like Beethoven, so I’m weighting my syllabus accordingly. I’m listening more to my remixes of the canonical repertoire than the originals. The reason I made those remixes in the first place was to put the music in a setting that fits my emotional needs better. Part of me wishes I had infinite free time so I could learn to play groove-driven versions of these pieces, work them up with a band, do them onstage. But there’s something specific to engaging them as audio recordings rather than as scores.
I have been playing the Bach Chaconne and other pieces on the guitar to the extent that I’m able, and it feels great. But even if I could play all the notes correctly, I can’t recreate the tone and timbre of a legitimate classical performance. And I don’t just want to hear notes of the Bach Chaconne paired with Afrodiasporic rhythms. I want the specific tone and timbre of a classical recording paired with the tone and timbre of breakbeats and percussion loops. Only Ableton Live can give me that.
I’ve also been using MIDI files to bridge the gap between the scores and recordings. MIDI gives me a visual and aural way to get the recordings onto the grid. I can also color-code and annotate my clips, which is invaluable for harmonic and formal analysis. MIDI is a weird hybrid of notation and performance – it’s abstracted and simplified, like the score, but still aural and tactile.
Hip-hop (and sample-based EDM) helped me understand that recorded music is more than a frozen performance. Recordings have a distinct materiality of their own. A sample of a breakbeat is not interchangeable with a drummer playing that breakbeat in a room. It’s easy to hear pop music as recorded sound first and foremost, because it’s so conspicuously “about” recorded sound anyway, and because it’s usually so aesthetically remote from humans playing instruments in a room in real time. But sampling helped me hear “live” recorded genres like jazz as also being a distinct art medium from performance. Jazz pedagogy is more concerned right now with Miles Davis’ note choices than his mic technique, but his mic technique is critical to those recordings’ impact.
Glenn Gould is the only classical music figure I’m aware of who was outspoken about using the recording studio differently from the concert hall. He believed that people should be using playback technology to customize their listening experiences. Outside of electroacoustic composers, I don’t know who else in the classical world takes recorded media so seriously.
Meanwhile, hip-hop and techno artists recognized the potential of classical music samples right away. Robert Fink writes about how the Fairlight orchestra stab functions in the producerly imagination as an “ancient alien power source” in his must-read paper, The story of ORCH5, or, the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine.
I would love to read more about how electronic music producers think about the classical canon as a sample library. I have seen plenty of lists of classical samples in rap, but other than Fink, I haven’t seen anybody writing about What It All Means. Searches on the library computer and Google Scholar for “classical sampling” only turn up literature on Cage and musique concréte. WhoSampled has this helpful list, but it mixes audio samples and interpolations, and they are really not the same thing. This Spotify playlist is interesting, but it offers no context. I’ll happily take recommendations for things I can read.
Like I said, my own interest in sampling and remixing classical music is as much about the sound as it is about the “music”. Deutsche Grammophon style classical recording is not any more neutral or objective than the most processed pop single. Those engineers are making a statement by setting the mics so far away from the performers. The resulting “natural” reverb is anything but, unless the album was recorded in a cave. Concert halls and churches are audio technologies too. Their strong presence in classical recordings adds to the sense of ancientness and alienness that is distinct from the notes being played.
When I talk about mic technique in music tech class, I like to compare classical recordings to the close-miked strings in “Eleanor Rigby” or the close-miked piano in Elton John songs. That close miking sounded weird and intense originally, but now we’re all used to that bone-dry up-close sound. To me, it’s Deutsche Grammophon style concert hall reverb that sounds weird and unnatural.
I took a grad school class on classical recording with some German Tonmeisters, and they’re all about realism in recording, realism realism realism. But their recordings sound faker than close-miking if you grew up on the Beatles. “Realism” in recording is more like a stylistic choice than an objective fact once you know what causes it (namely, decorrelated phase information caused by sound reflecting off the surfaces of the concert hall.) Tonmeister recording is more like a genre of recording than a Platonic ideal of it, much like how “prestige” is a genre of movies and TV shows.
As I’ve been doing my classical remixes, I’ve been especially enjoying the effect of running them through compression and tempo-synced delay. Normally you place those effects before the reverb in the effects chain. Putting them “after” the natural concert hall reverb sounds wild!
If I ever learned to play, say, the Bach Chaconne well enough to perform it live, I’d still sound like Jerry Garcia playing it, not like a classical musician. It would sound interesting if you heard me playing the Bach Chaconne over a funky rhythm section, but it wouldn’t have nearly the freshness of hearing Viktoria Mullova play it over looped breakbeats. And there is zero chance of such a thing happening except in remix form. Or, I don’t know. Maybe someone wants to give me a grant to hire some world-class classical performers and, like, the Roots, and put them on a stage together? That would be fun. In the meantime, I’ll stick to remixing as my way of making the strange familiar, and making the familiar strange.
The images in this post are all from the top results of searching “classical music” on Google Images. Seems to be kind of a trope.