Author: achen

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Authentic Re-Purposing and Bridging the Pop-Classical Divide in Black Violin’s “Brandenburg” (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDn2r_Qgg70
Black Violin’s first music video, unlisted, found only on Black Violin’s official channel

Though Florida-based classically-trained hip-hop duo Black Violin may not have a huge following, middle school me circa-2010 was a big fan. I have distinctive memories of listening to Black Violin’s “Brandenburg” on my first-generation Zune 30 while trudging through the snow to after school swim practice. Years have passed since then, but I can probably credit Black Violin for giving me some of my earliest tastes of classical instruments in a non-classical setting, and something like that can be huge for a young sixth grader just starting out on the violin.

Breaking down Bach

The music video opens up with a pretty tame performance of the theme from Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg Concerto.

This is interspersed with depictions of typical upper class symphony-goers–old men and women dressed to the nines, one woman asking “Bonnie, are you ready for the symphony?”–juxtaposed with shots of more casually dressed concert goers who appear more in line with the hip hop video that takes over around (00:40).

It’s this juxtaposition that serves as the thematic thrust for the video, shot in a style mimicking hip-hop videos from the 90’s and early 2000’s, like this video for Snoop Dogg’s 1994 “Gin and Juice”:


Notably, Kev Marcus and Wil B (the two members of Black Violin) are dressed in tuxedos on stage until about (01:00), where suddenly (through camera magic) they are wearing deconstructed, “hood-appropriate” outfits to denote the dramatic change of style in the music. At this point, the music includes record scratches and synthetic beats to accompany the more syncopated and swung rhythms in a hip-hop version of the Brandenburg theme. The two different kinds of audience members are dancing at this point, with the more “hood” attendees pulling the stuffy old folks up out of their seats (and their comfort zones).

Also in line with the hip-hop style Black Violin is going for is their use of the Brandenburg theme. For about a minute and a half, they loop their stylized rendition of the theme, using it as just another track over which other tracks–beats, vocal patterns, etc.–are layered. The New Penguin Dictionary defines multitracking as the “[technique] by which recordings are made separately and then combined.”

Authentic re-purposing

Interspersed in between sections of the looped Brandenburg theme are two “interludes” at (01:44) and (02:25), containing secondary themes, or variations on the same theme, more virtuosic and improvisatory in sound (a.k.a. with more leaps, repeated intervals, running eighth-notes). At (03:10), there’s a cadenza of sorts (more of bridge leading to the end of the song), with a much slower tempo and a more lamenting tone, as the concert and ensuing dance party come to an end. Again, middle school me thought this was lit.

So the question is: does this sort of re-purposing of the Brandenburg concerto and the 90’s hip-hop aesthetic in 2010 count as authentic music-making?

One might draw parallels to the pop-Baroque era of the 60’s, with records by Sonny and Cher, the Doors, and Procol Harum utilizing harpsichords, recorders and other stereotypically Baroque sounds in pop music. As Dr. Elizabeth Upton writes in the Ethnomusicology Review,

“The Baroque sounds imported from Early Music wave #1 recordings are cool, hip new sounds, included in compositions as a means of conveying a playful freshness, rather than a sense of history or temporal exoticism. ”

The emphasis here is on creating a new sound out of old materials.

And so I would argue that yes, Kev Marcus and Wil B are acting very authentically. They are not pretending to be giving a faithful variation on Bach, nor are they truly copying hip-hop techniques for the sake of copying them. Rather, they fall back on Bach’s theme as a piece of the Western canon and heritage, adapting it to the hip-hop style. If the music video says anything, it’s that the juxtaposition of these two source materials is intentional. They aren’t just trying to make another hip-hop record in the steps of Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg–they’re using their classical and hip-hop backgrounds to making something new and unique.

Musical Advocacy

As I’ve hinted at before, listening to Black Violin adapt Bach and make the violin sound “cool” had a tremendous effect on my as a young musician. Though I’m now more firmly a “classical” musician, I never would have found my passion for pushing my violin or piano skills early on if I hadn’t had some sneaking desire to be able to play anything I wanted from Bach to Snoop … Lion, I guess?

As such, I think we can look at what Black Violin did with Brandenburg as a form of music advocacy. The divide between classical and popular music styles is a hard, wide line in the public paradigm. Artists like Black Violin demonstrate just how easily that line can be bridged, and they’re well aware of the power in that. In an article in the Pennsylvania-based The Morning Call, music critic John Moser writes:

[Wil B] says he and [Kev Marcus] are strong advocates of music in schools and do workshops with children and children’s performances at nearly every tour stop. He says the duo will work with and perform for 100,000 children this year.

“Hip-hop loving classical musicians combine their passions into Black Violin “

I’ve lost count of the Uber drivers, upon learning that I was a musician, who asked me “what” I played. I try to play any and everything put in front of me, because I’ve been shown that the classical-pop line doesn’t have to be impenetrable, and I can credit Kev Marcus and Wil B for showing me the light way back when I was 12.

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The Post-War Idealism and Legacies of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem

1964 broadcast of the War Requiem at Royal Albert Hall for the 50th anniversary of WWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwBEtfXXsvU

On Memorial Day, 1982, Pope John Paul II proclaimed, as Britain and Argentina came to blows over the Falkland Islands:

War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.

Pope John Paul II, Homily at Coventry, England
https://www-jstor-org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/stable/23546289

These words were spoken in Coventry, England–the same sight for the premiere, 20 years earlier on Memorial Day, 1962, of Britten’s War Requiem at the consecration of the reconstructed St. Michael’s Cathedral, which had been bombed out along with the rest of Coventry in 1940.

The Conception: Britten the Pacifist

For many, the destruction of Coventry, a non-military target, was symbolic of German brutality during the war. As such, it’s reconstruction from ruin was, despite limited post-war resources, a much-needed healing of old wounds and a statement of Britain’s recovery and resilience (Wiebe 194).

Ruins of the former Cathedral Church of St. Michael, Coventry
Date: January 2011 Photographer: Coventry Cathedral/World Monuments Fund
https://www.wmf.org/project/ruins-former-cathedral-church-st-michael-coventry

When the new Cathedral was finally rebuilt … it was both a monument to the losses of the Second World War and a powerful statement of renewal, a statement given new urgency by rising Cold War tensions.

Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, p. 194

Britten was tapped to write a piece to commemorate the newly rebuilt St. Michael’s Cathedral at the 1962 Coventry Festival ostensibly because of his major international presence and success as a distinctly British composer. This was despite Britten being a well-known pacifist who went abroad just prior to the second world war breaking out and later registered as a conscientious objector, an important point of contention at the time.

Acting on his beliefs, Britten chose to interweave the traditional Latin requiem texts with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, an anti-war poet who died in military service during the First World War. Erin MacLean, of the University of Regina, postulates that Britten’s choice to use the words of a young soldier-poet provided crucial sentiments informed by real war experience that Britten himself lacked (MacLean 44).

The Execution: Vishnevskaya’s Absence

And yet, its premiere was not to go without a hitch. Britten, in order to bolster the anti-war symbolism of the event, intended for the three soloists to be British tenor Peter Pears, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. It was to signal a union of Europe from the ashes–a new spring.

Britten himself kept close ties with the Soviet Union following the war, visiting often and befriending and working with many Soviet composers and soloists, including Shostakovich, Rostropovich and Vischnevskaya. He drew on these connections to bring Vishnevskaya out of the country to Coventry for his premiere, but mere weeks before the piece was to be performed, the Soviet Union blocked Galina Vischnevskaya from leaving the Soviet Union, likely because of the involvement of Fischer-Dieskau with the project. After all, she was allowed to record the piece and perform it only a year later at the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk.

The British Ambassador rightly concluded that the Soviet decision not to allow Galina Vishnevskaya to sing at the premiere of the War Requiem in 1962 … was due to “the character of the occasion at Coventry and possibly to the joint participation of Fischer-Dieskau rather than the work itself/

Cameron Pyke, Benjamin Britten and Russia, p. 171

Music could not be freed from political interests, even to pray for peace. Ultimately, Irish soprano Heather Harper stepped in and performed at the premiere with only ten days notice.

Zooming Out

Fifty-five years after the Coventry Festival of 1962, conservative radio personality Dennis Prager sparked remarkable controversy when he was invited to conduct Haydn’s Symphony No. 51 with the Santa Monica Symphony in Los Angeles, as was highlighted in a September 2017 article in Musicology Now by University of Chicago PhD candidate Ted Gordon.

For Prager, “classical music” is a core component of Western culture, which he claims is under attack by secularism, multiculturalism, the Muslim faith, same-sex marriage, academia in general, and the “war on Christmas.”

Ted Gordon, “Does ‘Music Trump Politics’? Dennis Prager and the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra
http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2017/09/does-music-trump-politics-dennis-prager.html

Guido Lamell, music director of the Santa Monica Symphony, defended his invitation to Prager, which triggered protests from those who disagreed with Prager’s cultural and political views, by stating “music trumps politics.” Similarly, Prager responded to the backlash by stating that this particular performance–of an innocuous Haydn symphony–was in essence apolitical. But as Gordon wrote:

Yet Prager’s performance with the SMSO is of course political: it uses the “genius” of classical music as evidence towards his political ideology of “Western” supremacism. In addition, more practically speaking, his presence at this concert worked towards the creation of a new political group: people united by their supposedly “apolitical” support of “Western Art Music”.


Ted Gordon, “Does ‘Music Trump Politics’? Dennis Prager and the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra”

Britten’s War Requiem shines as an example of just how intertwined politics and music often, inevitably, are. One can look back at 1962 and see the politics at play, the powers and views embedded in the very essence of the project’s conception and execution. Music does not trump politics so much as it reacts to politics–either by willful ignorance, support or subversion. Britten’s was more the latter two, and while Haydn’s symphonies may ostensibly exist independent of today’s politics, the context in which they are presented today can invite politics’ influence in profound ways.

Sounds of a Better World: Music in Protest of War

Despite Pope John Paul II’s plea in 1982, war has not left humanity’s agenda. It is in the news, on our Twitter feeds and on our breath: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. The list of violent conflicts, new and old, is extensive, and ever-growing. And yet, so is the body of music produced in response to and in protest of war.

Britten was not the first composer to ever sing in the face of violence, and he is certainly not the last. In 2015, children’s choral composer Jim Papoulis set a poem written by Virginia 7th grader Claire Latimer entitled I Ask For One Day for the Fairfax Choral Society Poetry of Music collaboration with Fairfax County Public Schools.

I ask for one day

Where I don’t have to hear about pain or life that’s lost.

Claire Lattimer, “I Ask For One Day”
https://www.jwpepper.com/I-Ask-For-One-Day/10881214.item#/submit

Papoulis, in his composer’s notes, wrote:

The sentiment of a 12-year-old child making a plea for peace and non-judgement, for just one day, is about as pure and as real of a feeling as I can imagine.

Jim Papoulis, “I Ask For One Day” Notes from the Composer
https://www.jwpepper.com/I-Ask-For-One-Day/10881214.item#/submit

The piece was published under Boosey & Hawkes’ Sounds of a Better World. Of course, a 7th grade student from Virginia doesn’t have quite the same experience as a poet who died in the trenches of World War I, and it may be a while before we align Jim Papoulis with the likes of Britten. In fact, Benjamin Britten and Wilfred Owen seem as far removed from Jim Papoulis and Claire Lattimer as just about anything, but I believe one can draw a powerful comparison in good faith under that fitting phrase: sounds of a better world. Those who would separate music from politics would invalidate the possibility of such sounds.

Works Cited

Gordon, Ted. “Does ‘Music Trump Politics’? Dennis Prager and the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra.” Musicology Now, 19 September 2017,
http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2017/09/does-music-trump-politics-dennis-prager.html. Accessed 1 April 2019.

MacLean, Erin. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”: Sacrifice, Pacifism and Reconciliation in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. MA Thesis. University of Regina, 2011. Web. 1 April 2019.
https://search-proquest-com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/docview/1045938046?accountid=13567.

Matonti, Charles J. “A Prayer for Peace Now: Britten’s War Requiem Revisited.” The Choral Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 1983, pp. 21–30. JSTOR,https://www-jstor-org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/stable/23546289.

Papoulis, Jim. I Ask For One Day. 2015. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 2015. Print.

Pyke, Cameron. Benjamin Britten and Russia. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016. Print.

Wiebe, Heather. Britten’s Unquiet Pasts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print.

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Concert Attire for Tonight is [insert here]


Photo by Francisco Bricio on Unsplash

In grade school, concert dress, attire, etc. usually meant white top and a black bottom. I distinctly remember looking up Youtube tutorials on how to tie a tie (Double Windsor knot for the win) because my Dad didn’t know how, and my brother’s instructions were too confusing for an 8-year old. I also remember standing in dumbstruck awe when I saw that nearly every other boy in the Queensbury Elementary School 3rd Grade Chorus was wearing a clip-on. I had struggled in vain.

We were never really given a good answer as to why concert dress was white and black. “It’s more affordable than a tux” seemed to be the prevailing explanation, but that wasn’t really an answer. Why is concert attire important? Why do most professional orchestras today dress in tuxedos, black suits and dresses, when smaller chamber groups might go for head-to-toe black (my own preferred uniform) or even forego “concert attire” entirely? Why did my High School a cappella group look like a penguin colony?

Where did uniform concert attire originate?

According to the New Penguin Dictionary of Music (a fitting source), concert dress as we know it solidified in the mid-19th century as:

white tie and tails for men

full gowns for women

The New Penguin Dictionary of Music

Orchestral players would wear black, while soloists could be as more “flamboyant.” Notably, this was the evening wear for the upper and middle classes. Musicians, many of whom were just then breaking out of the court servant mold and becoming freelance artists for hire, adopted the dress of the upper class for concertizing. More notably, we in the world of Western “classical music” haven’t made significant changes to concert dress since the mid-19th century. In engaging with this antiquated practice, we are indeed confirming our position at the foot of a tradition 150 years-strong. *

*
Of course, other performance wear practices, such as church choirs wearing robes, have endured even longer than the “white and black” paradigm. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

But is this a good thing?


Photo by Hadi Yazdi on Unsplash

Plenty of practicing musicians today make efforts to “modernize” their performance wear. Choices include foregoing tails and ties, substituting slacks and skirts for floor-length gowns, and even incorporating non-Western elements into one’s outfit.

Of particular importance in today’s cultural landscape is the question of women’s concert dress. “Evening gowns,” while still required by some major institutions, have almost entirely been phased out of professional concert dress in an effort to promote gender equality in the music world.

Upsetting the patriarchy

Historically, the image of women in music has been a hot topic of sorts. Noola Griffiths, a music performance researcher, writes of notions of “appropriate display” that may inhibit women from pursuing (or being allowed to pursue) and succeeding on certain instruments. “[Throughout] 18th century Europe women were excluded from playing instruments that were considered incompatible with notions of bodily decorum and that failed to exhibit ‘a quiet body,’ that is a body not engaged in physical effort … the choice of musical instruments available to women was severely limited” (Griffiths). The fact is, in a field long dominated by the male patriarchy, women still have to contend with what established, white men view as appropriate in order to be taken seriously. This extends to concert dress especially, as the emphasis in institutional choices on the matter generally focus on “modesty” or, worse, “distraction.” We can do better.

Diversity, multi-culturalism and schools

Classical music is fast becoming a different playing field. Though there’s still immense and crucial progress to be made, gender equality in music is a goal within reach. The emergence of gender identity concepts has also blurred the lines between women and men’s obviously gendered concert dress. An increasingly diverse and multicultured industry also creates a need for more inclusive representation in concert dress. All of this is to say that perhaps mid-19th century evening wear etiquette shouldn’t be the rules we play by today.

And then there are considerations of socioeconomic and cultural diversity. The explanation for black and white concert dress received in schools wasn’t totally off topic: it’s cheaper than a tux. Even later on in high school, when I did wear a tuxedo or a suit for gigging and concerts, cost was always an issue. Classical music already has a huge barrier to entry when it comes to cost. This unfortunately goes hand in hand with barriers to entry for certain ethnic or cultural minorities, and it’s a complex issue. Concert dress codes in schools should not be part of the problem.

Re-evaluating concert attire in today’s social context

It’s important to understand the role attire plays in the concert setting. Musicians and performers communicate with audiences not only audibly, but also visually. To quote Griffiths once more:

Concert dress is a valuable visual cue to an individual’s attitudes and through concert dress soloists can confirm or challenge generally accepted roles and statuses in the performance situation. 

Noola Griffiths, Music Psychologist, Teesside University

Concert dress is a uniform. Court musicians dressed according to the dress code of the court. When musicians began freelancing more and embedding themselves in the 19th century night life, they dressed to fit their audience, to be at once visible and hidden. Concert dress is designed to allow musicians to blend in with their surroundings, including each other. Today, that generally means black or other neutral colors. This serves the secondary (or perhaps the primary) purpose of drawing the audience’s attention mostly to the music and the soloists, who wear more adventurous colors amid a sea of black because they’re meant to be seen.

[Orchestra] players wear black, because the audience wants to pay attention to the music – not them. Many classical music lovers believe that there should be absolutely nothing to distract from the music, not even the performers themselves

Maddy Shaw Roberts, Classic FM

However, because concert dress is a uniform, many dress codes were designed with only women and men in mind, and with only one body type for each. Trans musicians are often forced to conform to a gender they do not identify with on stage, and musicians of different body types are often forced to wear unflattering clothes. This is, again, applicable to both professionals and to students.

By dividing attire by gender, one is also asking students who identify as one gender but present as another to forgo their presentation in favor of gender-expected clothing. If a student identifies as female but presents as male, what is the purpose of expecting that individual to wear a concert gown? Is there a need to keep the traditional divisions of gender in concert attire?

Stacy Dziuk, NAfME

At the same time, we have to consider the formality of our concert dress. Tuxedos with tails and evening gowns, while outdated, are at least of equal formality. Therefore, it makes little sense for women to wear items like black long-sleeve sweaters or sheer blouses and leggings on stage surrounded by tuxedos. Perhaps this is a sign that tuxedos are “too formal” while current dress codes for women aren’t formal enough, or are too vague to set a standard of formality in the first place. In an impromptu interview conducted with a vocalist at the Eastman School of Music, I was presented with a possible solution:

“Concert dress should be standardized to two or three options of equal formality, each designed to be compatible with a number of body types. That way, there’s no ambiguity as to what one should wear, and people have the choice to dress in a way that fits their concept of themselves without worry.”

Gwyneth Paker, Voice Student, Eastman School of Music

A final point: we should also bear in mind, for the sake of inclusiveness, that classical music and opera don’t have the best public image at the moment. Part of this is a consequence of the fact that classical music is still dominated by white men, and minority representation is going to take a while to improve. But concert dress plays a role here, too. When a child goes to see their local symphony or opera company for the first time, only to see an orchestra dressed in penguin suits and dresses, or yet another presentation of an 18th century opera in period dress, what kind of message does that send? Is our performance practice reinforcing the idea that classical music is irreparably elitist? Can we amend it to mitigate that perception?

Queensbury High School Madrigal Singers (home sweet home)

References

“concert dress.” The New Penguin Dictionary of Music, Paul Griffiths, Penguin, 1st edition, 2006. Web.

Dziuk, Stacy. “We Are What We Wear: Inclusion and Diversity in Concert Attire: Does your concert dress code welcome all students?” Teaching Music, Oct. 2018, p. 26+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A562004496/ITOF?u=nysl_ro_rochstru&sid=ITOF&xid=9fbf2a10.

Griffiths, Noola K. “The Fabric of Performance: Values and Social Practices of Classical Music Expressed through Concert Dress Choice.” Music Performance Research, vol. 4, 2011, pp. 30-48. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/docview/2082950229?accountid=13567.

Paker, Gwyneth. Personal Interview. 1 February 2019.

Roberts, Maddy Shaw. “Why the heck do musicians always perform in black?” Classic FM, May 2018. https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/musicians-black-concert-dress/.