"C Sharp? What's C Sharp?"

[MarcO]

for your amusement and edification:

C Sharp? What's C Sharp?

Whether it's Streisand tackling lieder, Sting playing a lute or McCartney's oratorio, pop-classical crossovers are always grim. Philip Hensher on five decades of disasters

Philip Hensher

Thursday October 26, 2006

Guardian

Speaking before the September premiere of his new commission, Gaddafi: A Living Myth, English National Opera artistic director John Berry averred that it could "redefine opera".

The piece, written by members of Asian Dub Foundation, was billed in advance as a venture of extraordinary audacity, addressing contemporary politics in music that would set our old friend the Classical Music Establishment by its ears.

Some of us had doubts long before the premiere. In December 2005, writing in this paper about the state of affairs at English National Opera, I said: "A commissioned opera from Asian Dub Foundation has had to be put off - and it's not hard to guess why."

When it was finally unveiled, there was not much pleasure to be had from seeing this gloomy prognostication confirmed.

The critics did their worst: "Cliche and bombast ... "repetitive and incoherent ... laughably wooden" ... "as cynical as Simon Cowell" ... "embarrassingly redolent of sixth-form earnestness" ... "long stretches of jaw-dropping banality" ... "risible moments that look and sound like a Middle Eastern version of Springtime For Hitler". Worst of all, almost every review used the word "brave".

Everyone involved, you might have thought, ought to know better. The history of rock musicians' attempts to place themselves in front of orchestras - and to write what can sometimes, risibly, be referred to as "classical music" - is a truly grisly one.

Rock operas, fusions between rock groups and orchestras, collaborations with string quartets: from Deep Purple's Concerto For Rock Group and Orchestra to Elvis Costello's laborious exercises in elementary counterpoint with the Brodsky Quartet, very little can be counted as a success.

Latest in the catalogue of embarrassment is Sting's album of Dowland songs - an effusion matched only by Barbra Streisand's ill-advised performances of Wolf and Schumann lieder in the 1970s. "For me," Sting says, "these are pop songs, beautiful melodies, fantastic lyrics, great accompaniments."

Usually, exercises billed as crossing cultural boundaries turn out to be no such thing. Most "rock operas" - such as Tommy, The Wall, Roger Waters' Ca Ira and Jesus Christ Superstar - are one of two things. They are either musicals with naive little three-minute solo numbers or they are, bizarrely, just albums. They can hardly be considered heirs to the tradition of Wagner, Verdi and Puccini. Perfectly good on their own terms, they remain stolidly within their own conventions, yet have the nerve to bill themselves as radical.

There are, however, more conscious attempts to use the means and gestures of art music. The Kronos Quartet has made elegant string-quartet arrangements of Jimi Hendrix numbers, while composer Joby Talbot has orchestrated three White Stripes songs for a 35-piece orchestra. An album of these arrangements is due shortly, followed by a ballet at the Royal Opera House to Talbot's arrangements.

One of the reasons such enterprises often fail so dramatically - and it's very difficult to think of any that have lasted more than a couple of performances - is that their composers rarely have the technical ability to record and convey their intentions with any accuracy.

Many rock musicians can't read music and have what strikes most classical musicians as rather a loose conception of authorship, relying on amanuenses to transform vague ideas into detailed life. In the world of popular music, such transcribers, arrangers or "producers" have always done a great deal more than the public suspects.

Most of these pseudo-classical works are actually written by teams of professional composers, working on what may be very approximate ideas. There is not much incentive in that situation to come up with anything original. Three uncredited composers, it is said, worked on Asian Dub Foundation's Gaddafi opera. Carl Davis "collaborated" on Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio - a process eye-openingly described at the time: "Unable to read music, McCartney hums, sings or plays the piano while his collaborator jots down the notes ('Ah, that's better - C sharp!')."

A composer friend of mine, who had the opportunity to observe the production of one of these projects, described it more ruthlessly, in a way that has to remain anonymous. The official composer - a 1960s legend and author of much-loved, cheery three-minute songs - was commissioned to write an oratorio by a prosperous provincial festival. "When I say 'write'," my friend said, "I use the word very loosely. A whole army of people were flown out to his place, and found themselves staying up for 48 hours at a stretch while he wandered around, humming. It was their job to turn this total arse-dribble into a score for chorus and orchestra. He seemed quite pleased with it in the end. Of course, it's never been played since. He's a great man in his own field - what does he want to muck about with oratorios for?"

On the other hand, art music has sometimes found the vocabulary and sound of rock music worth incorporating into its wider world. Stockhausen's Gruppen, as early as 1955 (and thus an almost exact contemporary of Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock), found space in its three orchestras for an electric guitar. The music doesn't imitate the gestures of rock music, and the electric guitar here sounds as astonishingly innocent as the saxophone in Bizet's music for L'Arlesienne.

Later composers also found the style alluring - there is perhaps a little pop flavour in the electric guitar writing in Tippett's The Knot Garden from 1969, and there is a full-scale collision in Bernstein's theatre piece, Mass, written for the opening of the Kennedy Centre in 1971. Not all of these were particularly successful - it's hard to think of anything more comprehensively embarrassing than Bernstein's would-be grooviness, which left Paul Simon utterly unimpressed when he was given an early preview.

But by now the watchword was "breaking down the barriers" between high and popular cultures. Two dissimilar figures had the same idea simultaneously, so that the atrociously grandiose Concerto For Rock Group and Orchestra by Deep Purple was premiered in 1969, shortly followed by Peter Sculthorpe's Love 200, also for rock group and orchestra.

The Sculthorpe, written by a sophisticated musician, has worn much better but this sort of thing was terminally dealt with by Kingsley Amis in his 1971 novel, Girl, 20.

In Amis's book, the appallingly trendy Sir Roy Vandervane writes and performs a piece, titled Elevations 9, with a rock group called Pigs Out in a hall that "over the past couple of years had served as the venue for many an exciting transmedial breakthrough, anti-establishment manifestation and punch-up".

The piece, not radical but in "a jazz style that even I knew had faded out 30 years before", is a total flop, pleasing neither the cognoscenti - "I devoted myself to the horrible task of listening to everything that was being played" - nor the rock fans, some of whom subsequently smash up Vandervane's instrument.

It's an acute observation - who was ever actually pleased by any of these cross-border ventures? Rock musicians sometimes made something rewarding out of a fragment of art music, as in A Whiter Shade of Pale, Procol Harum's performances of a Bach bourrée, or even - on Yes's Fragile - a transcription of a movement of a Brahms symphony. But actually writing or envisaging work for a symphony orchestra has always proved beyond them.

Tempted by the idea of gestures they thought of as "operatic" or "symphonic", their technique has tended to stick there. Monserrat Caballé duetting with Freddie Mercury on Barcelona may sound "operatic", but it is only a three-minute song of banging and crashing - all climax and no crescendo. Some of Wagner's single musical structures last over two hours - and no rock musician has a clue how to start constructing something like that.

The sad truth is that the writing of orchestral music is an exact art, way beyond the capacity of anyone who can't read music. Art music had reached such a pitch of sophistication by the beginnings of rock'n'roll that when the latter takes on an orchestral canvas, it tends to sound like a pea rolling around in a drum.

Rock musicians might like the idea of an orchestra and a chorus, just as they might fancy putting on a dinner jacket, but the fact is that every single one of these ventures tends to sound the same: like a naff imitation of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, written by someone who once heard the piece on an advert for Old Spice.

Hall of shame

Deep Purple

Concerto for Rock Group and Orchestra

Performed in 1969 by Deep Purple, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the late, great Sir Malcolm Arnold - at least some of whom ought to have known better - this is a fantastically pompous eff ort. The lyrics do nothing to improve matters: "How shall I know when to stop singing my song? How shall I know when it all goes wrong?" Is that a request for advice?

Freddie Mercury/Monserrat Caballé

Barcelona

Quite possibly the campest three minutes ever recorded, this proved too over-the-top even for Madame Caballé's demented entourage of opera queens. If you want to give yourself nightmares for life, simply try to envisage the opera this "operatic" duet might have been extracted from.

Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet

The Juliet Letters

Get up, go out, make a phone call, have a cup of tea, come back again: it's still going on - and you've really not missed much. If you thought Hindemith's way with counterpoint was grey and interminable, you've been spared Mr McManus's efforts. And we thought rock musicians were meant to liven things up.

Leonard Bernstein

Mass

Embarrassment a-go-go, the late middle-aged Lenny's attempt to show he was hip, cool and groovy has by now passed through all barriers of good taste into a strange Zen world of pure weirdness. Stephen Sondheim said: "Have you thought of translating it into Latin, so you won't have to listen to the words?"

Paul McCartney

Liverpool Oratorio

Enjoyed brief popularity in Liverpool. An autobiographical attempt to display immense lovability with the quite unnecessary aid of orchestra, chorus and Dame Kiri te Kanawa. Frankly, it could make you punch a hole in a pew.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks, MarcO, good read.

I'll never forget the reaction I got back when I was a teenager from my old guitar teacher, a 70-something classically trained Hungarian, when I played him some Yes, which I was listening to to death at the time and was really impressed by (virtuosity not yet being distinguished for me in terms of taste). "Bunch of amateurs," he said. Made me rethink a lot of things.

[MasterShake]

1: Paul McCartney can't read music!?!?hahaha wow! learn something new everyday!

as in A Whiter Shade of Pale, Procol Harum's performances of a Bach bourrée

I don't recall hearing any of that in that song.

A "bourree" is much like a Gavotte, or double time dance piece. Jethro Tull, on the other hand, DID use "bourree". They just took the straight 8ths and made them swing. Which was pretty damn cool.

[nattyMatty]

D flat?