Our blog-brother Joe (Butts In The Seats) has posted a most interesting question in his last blog and it just screams out for a response. Fortunately I can compress my response down to two words: Michael Jordan.
Look, if the Good Lord came down right now and said: “Bill, I’ve chosen you to be the champion of the Human race. I’m going to pit you against the rest of the universe in a contest – if you win then your species gets to continue. If you lose you’re all going to hell. You get to pick the game that you’re going to play and one person from anytime in human history as your teammate.” Without any hesitation my response would be: “2 on 2 hoops is the game, Michael Jordan is the man.”
Now, for the record, I’m not really into basketball. We all know that “White Men Can’t Jump” but there’s at least one black man out here who isn’t so hot either. Sure you would want me as your defensive partner but honestly, there are blindfolded 6 year olds who can easily outshoot me. Me, I’m a tennis buff. So why this pick? Very simple – with all due respect to Kobe, LeBron, Kareem, etc., Michael Jordan was and is the greatest roundball player that there is likely to ever be. The fate of the human race would be assured with a team of Michael Jordon and ANYBODY.
But if the aforementioned Diety said “OK, you can have MJ, but I’ve decided the game is going to be baseball” I’d be awfully worried. The greatest basketball player in history, one of the best athletes of all time, couldn’t hit a hard curve to save his life. Here is the point – MJ was built to be a basketball player but if you take him out of his element he is flailing, despite being such a great athlete. Conversely, orchestras are built to play Beethoven. Disco? Motown? Funk? House? Rock? Not so much, and no matter how many rehearsals you have it’s not going to be very good.
There are myriad reasons and I will give just a few of them. First of all, it’s hard enough to become fluent in the dialects closely related to your language. Take the specialties of Early Music and Contemporary music. In many conservatories these are not taught as a part of the core curriculum. Anyone interested has to actively search them out and there is still a strong element in the business who looks at anyone who spends much time in either of those worlds as something of a freak. It is difficult enough to master those dialects which are so closely related to the main language that orchestras use day in and day out, but imagine trying to get an orchestra to master the intricacies of the Purdie Shuffle? Not only are most of your musicians unfamiliar with the very concept of it, they’ve probably not been trained in this genre at all, and having experience in a genre makes all the difference. Anyone who has seen the sheet music to Fool in the Rain or Babylon Sisters, both of which feature the Purdie Shuffle, will tell you that what you see on paper and what you hear on the recordings are two vastly different things. And vice versa. The Dissonance Quartet of Mozart looks a lot more benign on paper than it actually sounds. Give Bernard Purdie one of the timpani parts to Nielsen 4 (“Inextinguishable”) and throw him into the middle of the New York Philharmonic just for fun and see what he makes of it.
Another reason why these kinds of cross-dialect musical experiences rarely work is the orchestra itself. The orchestra is generally not built for the genres in question, most of which came into being over the last 60 years. First there are the instruments themselves. I can’t think of a lot of bands that feature viola, bassoon, or tuba, and they certainly didn’t show up much in the recorded oeuvre of Led Zeppelin. That was guitar, bass, and drums, with the occasional B3 thrown it. That’s what the music was built for and that’s what works the best. To adapt that music to an orchestra requires an extremely inventive orchestrational mind, someone who understands both the essence of breaking the Led out and the Mozartian groove. I’d wager this is a fairly rare combination. Incidentally, I did hear one very terrific rendition along these lines done by the fabulous trio Time for Three. Their take on Blackbird is utterly gorgeous and an exception to the rule. (Personal pet peeve – it drives me nuts when people ask me “why don’t orchestras play more Gospel music?” The very idea makes me cringe.)
Then there’s the acoustic problem. Throughout the history of classical music if you want more sound you add instruments. Want more string sound? Add a couple of desks. And don’t forget – 4 trumpets are better, and louder, than 3. What the orchestration books neglect to tell you is that you have just made co-ordination more difficult – something about the more cooks there are and the broth being spoiled. Every musician has their own opinion about how things should go and now you have to adjust within the section and THEN with the rest of the orchestra. In these newer genres if you want more sound then you just turn it up to 11. Not only are you plugged in to your Marshall stack but you’re still one on a part! This is critical because you still have some control over how you fit into the whole. As an orchestral keyboardist I can tell you it is a hell of a lot easier to be a section of ONE than it is to worry about another keyboardist AND the rest of the orchestra. Listen to the artistic freedom found in Dazed and Confused or Stairway to Heaven. Great with that thunderous quartet but I’m not so sure it would have the same élan with an orchestra.
I would hope, friend Joe, that from my musings you don’t get the idea that I have anything against these genres. Quite the opposite – I have comparatively little “classical” music on my iPod but quite a large amount of Art Rock, Classic Rock, World Music, Jazz, Funk…. I love this music, and I still wake up every day hoping that Peter Gabriel finds himself in desperate need of a keyboardist to go on a world tour featuring The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Selling England By The Pound and, somehow, the only phone number he can come up with is mine. Ditto Jon Anderson and The Gates of Delirium, Ian Anderson and Songs From the Wood, or any of another 6 dozen or so artist/album combinations. I mean, I like the folk @ the ESO and all, but I gotta admit that if my phone rings with that call then they’ve seen the last of me in Edmonton. It’s just that the orchestra, any orchestra, is just not built for most of this music. There are exceptions but they are few, and very far, between.
And here’s the rub – that’s ok. We’ve got our music, we play it well, and we should be happy with that. I wouldn’t want to hear most rock bands play Stravinsky though I can think of two exceptions to that immediately- ELP and King Crimson – and both bands feature musicians who were trained in conservatories! Incidentally, yesterday I received an email from a friend of mine who happens to have played in KC for many years – he’s worked out six movements from Firebird for his own band’s next album. Personally I think he’s out of his mind, but I’ll be very curious to hear it.
Great article!
I’d rather hear the specialists do their thing too. The biggest tragedy in much symphonic pops programming is that the boards, committees, executive directors, and marketers that mandate this sort of programming are making a sick concession that “of course, most people don’t really want to hear classical music.” If they can’t sell one of the highest forms of human expression that is the classical music tradition, they should find a different job (or be thrown out on their tin ears).
It’s also generally a disservice to decent pop/rock/jazz other non-classical musics to elevatorize it with vapid symphonic arrangements. It’s nuts using a Ferarri of an institution like a symphony orchestra to mimic a Heavy-metal monster truck or country pickup. There’s plenty of great literature to please any audience in the repertoire custom designed for a symphony orchestra, and most other genres sound best in their native garb, instrumentation, and habitat.
There are a few notable crossovers that can work well. I played in the Ft. Wayne Phil where a Blood Sweat and Tears concert was universally appreciated by the orchestra and the audience — The deal there was the original BS&T musicians carefully put together well-crafted symphonic arrangements of their rep. Some classical composers and performers effectively incorporate rock or styles into their musical language, much the same way that Grieg, Dvorak, Bartok, and others made folk music the core of their compositional language. Anyone who heard Leila Josefowicz perform the Ades concerto with the SPCO has heard the best of classical training incorporating rock rhythms and idioms. These are still the exceptions that prove your “Leave it to Michael Jordan” rule.