What does it mean to remix the classical canon

Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently.

https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697

I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.

In the face of the pandemic and the protests and everything else, I have been finding it difficult to focus on my various jobs. However, I have had plenty of energy for putting beats under canonical classical works.

I started doing this because there were some canonical works whose rhythms didn’t make sense to me, namely, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and the Bach Chaconne. By aligning recordings of the pieces to the metronomic grid and putting funk beats under them, I was able to understand their rhythms much more clearly than I could hearing them performed with heavy rubato. I also discovered that I consistently misheard an ambiguous rhythm in a bariolage passage from the E major Bach violin partita until I put beats under it. Even when the rhythms of these pieces are straightforward, though, I’m finding that I would rather listen to them over Afrocentric grooves. Once there’s some funk involved, listening repeatedly and deeply to this music becomes a pleasure rather than an obligation. The process of making the remixes demands especially close and intense focus. I find it effortlessly pleasurable to give that focus to an Ableton Live session, which is not the way I have ever felt analyzing this music on the page.

Participating in music is always more fun than listening or “appreciating” passively. However, Western classical music is not exactly participation-friendly. I have managed to learn some Bach solo violin music on the guitar, and that has been richly rewarding. But I don’t play piano or any orchestral instruments, and I haven’t been part of a classical ensemble since middle school, so my participation options are limited. The beauty of  a remix tool like Ableton Live is that it turns recorded music into a participatory medium. Maybe I’ll never be able to play the Chopin Études or Bartók’s Mikrokosmos on an instrument, but I can certainly remix them.

The music of the African diaspora tends to be more participatory than the European classical canon,  but that doesn’t make remixes intrinsically challenging to hegemonic cultural whiteness. The anti-racist potential of this project isn’t the fact of the remixes; it’s the idea of using iconic Afrodiasporic grooves: the Funky Drummer break, the Amen break, the Apache break. It feels subversive to combine these particular beats with these particular canonical works, since they come from musical idioms that are supposed to be diametric opposites. My lazy mental shorthand is “white” vs “black” music, but that’s too broad and inaccurate. George Lewis suggests “Eurological” and “Afrological,” and that’s better. But for now, I’m going to use the canon and the groove.

The canon is both mine and not mine. I grew up with classical radio as a constant presence. My ancestors are all Europeans (Western/Protestant on my dad’s side, Eastern/Jewish on my mom’s.) The canon is supposedly the shared heritage of everyone, but it has never been the music that speaks to me emotionally. I experience it more as an ancient alien power source, something to be respected and feared, and maybe harnessed, but not part of regular life.

The groove is also both mine and not mine. I grew up in the United States, where “pop music” and “black music” are practically coextensive. Specifically, I grew up in New York City during the hip-hop era, and my sonic environment was saturated with rock and funk and soul and jazz and blues. My ancestors don’t groove much, but I have tried to break with them. My attempts to groove have involved some clumsiness and ignorance, especially when I was younger, and I have done more than my share of cultural appropriation. (What right do I have to the Funky Drummer or Apache?) I’ve been working on becoming a good guest rather than a colonizer of the groove, but it remains a growth area.

My real purpose with the classical remixes is to reconcile the canon and the groove. I want to tame the excesses of rubato and put the canon’s rhythmic feet back on the ground. Make the oppressor symbolically bow to the oppressed. Decenter the center and welcome in the margins. Put everyone on the same level, in a rhizome rather than a tree. Democratize. Dumb it down? No, make it wiser.

The canon demands focus. The groove creates focus. The canon is only interested in engaging you from the neck up. The groove wants to involve your body from the neck down too. The canon is long time scales, the distant past, both in specific large-scale works, and historically. The groove is about the present. Except it’s also about vastly larger timescales, our common ancestry in Africa. I can’t prove that the groove predates other aspects of music, but can we really doubt it? The canon is easier to institutionalize. It was built by institutions! Can the groove live in institutions? Not as they exist now. But if we can make institutions congenial to groove, we may find them more congenial to humans generally.

I’m certainly not the only person trying to reconcile the canon and the groove. Via Nate Holder, here’s an incredible gospel arrangement of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah:

There are many disco versions of canonical works, most of which are silly, but I love this one:

Going back a little further, there’s the magnificent Ellington Nutcracker:

And before that, there’s Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grapelli and Eddie South slaying the Bach concerto for two violins:

Here are some quotes from my dissertation research that have been informing my thinking about this. I’m putting them here for my own reference, but maybe they’re interesting to you too.

Johnson, J. (2002). Who needs classical music? Cultural choice and musical value (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Classical music comes from the body but is about being more than the body: it enacts the quitting of the body through the bodily— hence its fundamentally ritualistic, mythical power, representing in the physicality of the body our spiritual aspiration to be more than bodies (p. 69).

Stanton, B. (2018). Musicking in the borders: Toward decolonizing methodologies. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 26(1), 4.

Western classical music is an ethnic music, just like any other type of music. The implicit challenge embedded in this idea is the question: Why does one ethnic music enjoy the privilege of so-called universality? Western classical music fancies itself to be universal because a wider context of colonial violence facilitated its ascendency and epistemic violence facilitates the naturalization of its primacy (p. 10).

Jorgensen, E. R. (2003). Transforming music education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[Elite music is] associated with the great traditions, the so-called classical musics of the world. These musics have had widespread and continuing intellectual appeal across cultural and political boundaries. They express a sense of the extraordinary in their formal design and intellectual, emotional, and sensual impact and appeal. They exemplify such values as formality, refinement, restraint, spirituality, dignity, balance, contrast, expressiveness, and intricacy—values that contribute to culture, construed as the refined elements of human society (p. 33).

Those within [the canonical tradition] are systematically and increasingly repressed, even oppressed, by the expectations of them by significant others, and it becomes more and more difficult to break free and change the tradition. When this occurs in cultures and civilizations, if the system is unable to respond to the demands of a changing society, it declines or is truncated prematurely. The only way of continuing a culture or a civilization is to actively resist this process of fossilization and atrophy, and rejuvenate or transform it. In music, this means consciously changing a musical practice to reflect the society of which it is a part or foreshadow an imagined society of the future (pp. 40-41).

Hess, J. (2015). Decolonizing music education: Moving beyond tokenism. International Journal of Music Education, 33(3), 336–347.

The canon is an act of power in itself – it is the arboreal reinscription of Western classical music. It creates a center and forces outsiders to the margin. Employing a rhizomatic approach allows us to think relationally instead of in a binary manner and also allows the potential movement away from the automatic reinscription of Western classical music as normative… If we uproot arboreal hierarchies, we can replace them with rhizomatic networks where knowledge exists in plateaus and actively relates to all surrounding knowledges (p. 342).

Madrid, A. L. (2017). Diversity, tokenism, non-canonical musics, and the crisis of the humanities in U.S. academia. Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 7(2), 124–129.

[T]he canon is an epistemology; it is a way of understanding the world that privileges certain aesthetic criteria and that organizes a narrative about the history and development of music around such criteria and based on that understanding of the world. In other worlds, the canon is an ideology more than a specific repertory (p. 125).

Scruton, R. (1999). Aesthetics of music. Wotton-under-Edge: Clarendon Press.

Democratic culture presses us to accept every taste that does no obvious damage. A teacher who criticizes the music of his pupils, or who tries to cultivate, in the place of it, a love for the classics, will be attacked as ‘judgemental’. In matters of aesthetic taste, no adverse judgement is permitted, save judgement of the adverse judge. This attitude has helped America to survive and flourish in a world of change. An aristocratic culture has an instinctive aversion to what is vulgar, sentimental, or commonplace; not so a democratic culture, which sacrifices good taste to popularity, and places no obstacles whatsoever before the ordinary citizen in his quest for a taste of his own (p. 497).

Lang, P. H. (1997/1952). Music and history. In A. Mann & G. Buelow (Eds.), Musicology and performance (pp. 24–39). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

By the end of the eighteenth century we no longer speak of German music, for this music became the musical language of the world… For in the symphonies of Haydn, as in the works of Mozart and of the other masters of the era, there speaks a musicianship that is universal, timeless, and valid under all circumstances. This music is not one solution or one aspect, nor is it a personal matter; it speaks to all peoples (p. 38).

Gagné, D. (1994). The place of Schenkerian analysis in undergraduate and graduate curricula. Indiana Theory Review, 15(1), 21–33.

[T]training in functional harmony and voice leading establishes a basis for understanding music that can serve as a foundation for the study of virtually any musical style, western or non-western (p. 23).

Bradley, D. (2012). Good for what, good for whom?: Decolonizing music education philosophies. In W. Bowman & A. L. Frega (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy in music education (pp. 409–433). New York: Oxford University Press.

Western philosophy as a system of reasoning was one of the factors justifying European colonialism; the discursive traces of these supporting Enlightenment philosophies remain in today’s educational thinking (p. 409).