Classical Crossover

Economist
February 6, 1993

SURVEYING the programme for a recent concert given by a leading British pianist, David Owen Norris, many concert-goers raised an eyebrow. Pieces by Walton, Debussy, Haydn, Brahms, Messiaen -- all quite acceptable. But three songs by Joni Mitchell, the California queen of 1960s folk-rock? Mr Norris is noted for including out-of-the-way works in his concerts, but they used to be unimpeachably classical. Has he been stricken by a fancy to kick over the traces and go pop?

Other concerts are provoking the same reaction as the crossover tendency in classical music grows apace. It is no longer largely limited to the wilder shores of contemporary music, where electronics and improvising musicians feel a natural affinity with the more experimental elements in jazz and rock. Music usually regarded as "popular" is making its way into more mainstream programming, like Mr Norris's recital.

As he told his audience on BBC Radio 3, he felt no special justification was needed for including tunes by Ms Mitchell, since "over the years I've come to the conclusion that she's a very great musician, regardless of which side of the classical-pop fence you happen to be on." Indeed, he put her in a class with Schubert and the English lutenists and declared that "her harmonic sophistication is comparable to late Faure".

This may be stretching a point, though Mr Norris's arrangements of the Mitchell songs were a perfect complement to the set of rather austere etudes by Messiaen which had preceded them. And the Mitchell settings also revealed certain harmonic similarities with Messiaen.

An increasing number of young musicians have noted such similarities, and tend to view jazz and pop as congruent with 20th-century classical music. Another British pianist, Joanna MacGregor, has made a considerable reputation playing works by such jazz pianists as Thelonious Monk and Erroll Garner along with Bartok, Debussy and Ives.

For Miss MacGregor, their lineage is related, and she plans recitals to illuminate the links between one work and another. A recent concert of hers moved from Satie and Debussy to Django Bates, a British jazz musician, and a jazz-inspired protest piece by Frederic Rzewski, culminating in selections by Ives.

Asked by an apprehensive management if she might substitute some Gershwin songs for the Ives, Miss MacGregor refused, declaring the whole effect of the sequence would be destroyed. The officials gave way and the concert was a great success -- both for Miss MacGregor's committed music-making and her energetic, pop-star presentation. As a breathless press release put it, she "looks like Cher!"

Crossover is not simply a license for jollying up the standard repertoire. To players like Miss MacGregor, it really reflects the complex blend of music in the 20the century. Jazz and classical, for instance, have been crossing over since early this century, when ragtime took Paris by storm, inspiring Debussy to include "Golliwog's Cakewalk" in his suite "Children's Corner". In turn, ever since the 1920s, the French impressionist composers have influenced jazz musicians; there is a strong and oft-remarked resemblance between the harmonies of Ravel and those of Duke Ellington.

In fact what may be needed is not merely an acceptance of the crossover principle, but a rethinking of musical categories as a whole. Just as an upheaval has long been advocated by a British violinist who is a notorious crosser-over, Nigel Kennedy. His desire to bridge artificial divisions between musical genres seems to have gone too far, dwindling into a punk campaign against "British snobbery". But in his earlier, less obsessive days, a Kennedy recital might have included both a Bartok sonata and Miles Davis's "All Blues", with "The Girl from Ipanema" as an encore, all played with due regard for the special discipline and properties of jazz and for the links between the genres. Indeed, Mr Kennedy suggested that that link could be helpfully acknowledged if record shops arranged their wares not by musical category, but in strict alphabetical order.

Some listeners might be shocked at the prospect of such promiscuity, but it would merely reflect attitudes already held by leading contemporary composers like John Adams. He has described the past as "a huge, warm, steaming compost heap", which he can quarry to nourish his work in any way he pleases. Initially associated with the minimalist style, his pieces almost blandly melodious tunes underpinned by repetitious rhythmic patterns borrowed from rock and African music. But Mr Adams is also happy to pay homage to many other sources, from Beethoven and Berg, to Messiaen and Skryabin, to Gershwin, Hollywood film scores and Duke Ellington.

Such a stylistic hodge-podge might produce nothing more than a musical compost heap if Mr Adam's own compositional instincts were not so strong. Although some of his works can seem exercises is self-consciously outrageous electricism, most are expressed, compelling and original, whether in his "Eros Piano", a lush, impressionistic quasi-concerto, or in "Nixon in China", a full-blown current -events opera.

Clearly, these crossover or hybrid strains suit the experimental temper of the time. Orthodoxies of all kinds have broken down, releasing new energy (though at the cost of a quiet life). The result in music may be a vigorous new vocabulary that offers a cure for the tongue-tied state in which the more traditional forms of the contemporary scene have found themselves.