My kid is learning the Moonlight Sonata. It’s lovely and all, but for a truly fresh take on this piece, you need to hear Isaac Schankler’s version. You can think of the first movement as having three parts: the bassline, the arpeggios, and the melody. Isaac shifted the bassline a bar later and the melody a bar earlier. The result has the same somber vibe as the original, but it’s… off.
I don’t think Isaac meant this as a joke, and I don’t take it as one. I genuinely love how it sounds. It’s still recognizably tonal, but with less predictable and stable harmony. Beyond the outcome of this specific experiment, I also admire the larger cultural significance of Isaac’s willingness to tamper with a canonical masterpiece. YouTube is full of remixes of the Moonlight Sonata, but none of them are as musical or as inventive as Isaac’s.
The cult of genius surrounding this above-average composer is a serious obstacle to my willingness to engage with his music. I like the idea of approaching him as a source of ideas for making new music with, rather than as a marble statue behind a velvet rope. This might mean reworking the notes on the page, the way Isaac did, or it might mean sampling and remixing recordings. I have been doing a lot of the latter, and I feel a lot more warmly toward Beethoven than I did when I started.
One of the points I make in my doctoral dissertation is that hip-hop is important for music education, not only as a content area unto itself, but also as a set of tools for engaging other forms of music as well. Sampling and remixing give insight into the methods of canonical composers, who routinely “sampled” from vernacular songs and hymns, from one another, and from themselves. The canonical masterpieces are a vast untapped sample library, and it is a fresh and exciting experience to approach them that way. Toni Blackman describes the liberatory experience of hearing her mentor Ezra Greer laying a sample of Louis Armstrong over a beat: “I was in a space of, like, ’Oh, I didn’t know we could do that.’ He was like, ’You can do whatever you want.’”
By the way, if you would like to hear some of Isaac’s less meme-y music, I recommend Alien Warp Etude for microtonal piano.