FEATURE:
Elizabeth Alker’s Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop
IN THIS PHOTO: Little Simz and the Chineke! Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London, during this year’s Meltdown Festival (which Little Simz curated)/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Woodhead
Elizabeth Alker’s work for a while now.; Years ago, whilst working for BBC Radio 6 Music, she presented the music news. Now, on BBC Radio 3, she hosts Unclassified and Classical Live. I have written some features recently about Classical music. How Pop artists are performing live with orchestras. It is not just a cynical way to appear grander and classier. They know that this incredible addition adds something incredible to their music. I think that Classical music is still seen as niche and orchestras are not just reserved for that world. Like Pop/Rock and Classic have nothing in common. Whether performing alongside Dua Lipa or another artist, uniting these different spheres is extraordinary. It means that Pop fans and those who come to see the artist are introduced to music and a genre they might not know about. It is not cheapening Classical and making it more pop culture. I think that it gives it long overdue attention. It is not only Pop with a capital P that uses Classical musicians. Little Simz recently performed with the Chineke! Orchestra. That took place in June during her Meltdown Festival set. A perfect combination, these songs were given nuance because of the orchestra. I think we will see a lot more of this going forward. However, it is not a new phenomenon for Classical and Pop worlds to meld. This has been something that has been present for decades. Maybe not as fulsome and epic and fifty-two-piece orchestras and massive Pop artists (Dua Lipa) playing at the Royal Albert Hall. Think of groups like The Beatles and how Classical artists can be heard in their songs – most noticeably Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s A Day in the Life.
This brings me to Elizabeth Alker’s book, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. It is released on 28th August through Faber & Faber. (I might check out the Audible version). People might not realise how extensive the usage of Classical music is in the history of Pop music. Specifically, the previous century. Alker has been promoting the book at the moment. As a music fan who is keen to not only broaden my horizons and knowledge but also learn more about the Pop world in general, this is fascinating! I listen to BBC Radio 6 Music a lot but do not tune into BBC Radio 3 as much as I should. I do not listen to modern Classical music. I know how important this is. Considering the debt Pop music owes to Classical artists, I am compelled to investigate shows like Unclassified. Not only modern Classical artists too. I don’t think we can think about Pop music in the twentieth-century without recognising the influence of Classical music:
“A panoramic exploration of the ways in which pop and rock were transformed by the pioneering visionaries of classical music.
The worlds of pop and rock owe a much greater debt to the classical canon than we realise. A direct and fascinating lineage draws from the experimentalism of Pierre Henry to The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows', from Stockhausen to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' and from Bruckner to Sonic Youth via Glenn Branca.
In Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker shines a light on the fertile ground that exists between the borders of classical music and pop. She showcases the innovators of the former and their fans and collaborators in the latter, and explores how together these artists challenged the notion that such musical worlds are mutually exclusive.
** Featuring interviews with Sir Paul McCartney, Steve Reich, Nils Frahm, Soweto Kinch, Jonny Greenwood, the Blessed Madonna and more. **”.
I am going to move to an interview with The Times. Elizabeth Alker explains how this great divide that has always seemingly existed by the disparate worlds of Pop and Classical are starting to blur. There is a harmony, relationship and chemistry that has been present in twentieth-century Pop music and influenced and shaped it sound – and continue to this day:
“It started when I was a kid and my dad played Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield,” Alker says, who grew up in Rochdale, the child of classically trained pianists and music teachers, of her mission to bring classical and pop under the same umbrella. “He would get really excited and say, ‘Wait for this!’ as the various instruments came in. Hearing pop infused with the spirit of classical music was interesting to me.”
Alker’s argument is that many of today’s classical musicians grew up listening to pop and are informed by it. “Anna Meredith is a good example,” she says, citing the Mercury prize-nominated Scottish composer. “She likes going to karaoke bars and singing power ballads.”
Then there is the American composer Rhys Chatham and his involvement in no wave, the late-Seventies New York movement of which Sonic Youth and the singer Lydia Lunch were a part, where musical ability was rejected in favour of ideas and attitude. Chatham’s revelation came from seeing the punk pioneers the Ramones at the insalubrious Manhattan dive CBGB’s in 1976.
“Chatham told me that because he had trained in a classical way he was too stiff,” Alker says. “People can train for years in classical music and still come up with something really boring. He went to punk bars where people were throwing beer over each other. Playing one chord with real attitude will impact an audience far more than a symphony played with no attitude. It is the spirit of the thing that people latch on to.”
As Alker points out, behemoths of the western classical tradition such as Mozart and Vivaldi were, like all the best rock and pop stars, larger-than-life characters possessed of both manic intensity and great tunes. “And composers like Bartok and Dvorak looked at what was happening in folk music, which is what Bob Dylan did. The music of Vaughan Williams sounds like England. That isn’t so different from the pastoral psychedelia of the early Seventies.”
Hang on a minute, rock’n’roll is essentially the blues speeded up — how can classical music be as important to the story as Alker says it is? “Jean-Michel Jarre is very good on this,” she replies. “He went to gigs by British groups at the Paris Olympia in the Sixties, saw how their sound came from America, believed it could be infused with the European classical canon and realised it was possible through electronics.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Elizabeth Alker/PHOTO CREDIT: Jake Millers
The Second World War played a key part. Alker explains that advancements in technology accelerated due to the war, with new studios set up throughout Europe to make propaganda broadcasts. In the decades that followed pioneering European composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry used their classical training on this technology and the studio space available to them. “The development of electronica in Europe ran parallel to the explosion of blues-based rock’n’roll in America,” Alker says. “And combining it all were the Beatles.”
Alker spoke to Paul McCartney, who attended concerts by European electronic composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio just as the Beatles were changing pop with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album. “Paul was gloriously unpretentious about it,” she says. “He went to find pioneering classical music and brought it back into the Beatles’ sound, which George Martin allowed and facilitated. He said at one point, ‘We don’t work music, we play music.’ Paul was unburdened by academia. He didn’t care if people took him seriously or not and it was so refreshing.”
Over in Germany and Japan the shame of being on the losing side of the war, not to mention embracing fascism, required a total reinvention. “Stockhausen was creating a new electronic sonic palette from scratch, which has symmetry in Germany building a new culture from the ashes,” Alker says. “Kraftwerk then looked to Stockhausen as the touchstone for the new German tradition. And the parallels with Japan were obvious. Both countries were using machines to build themselves up again, which led to a classically trained musician like Ryuichi Sakamoto forming [the Japanese electro-pop pioneers] Yellow Magic Orchestra.”
There are plenty of other rabbit holes Alker heads down: the droning intensity of the Velvet Underground being a product of the viola player John Cale studying under the composer La Monte Young. Ambient house taking its cue from the sampling techniques of the New York composer Steve Reich. In Everything We Do Is Music Alker breaks down the idea that classical and rock and pop are distinct traditions with nothing to do with each other and argues that goes all the way to the lifestyle”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney with Brian Epstein at Abbey Road Studios/PHOTO CREDIT: David Magnus/Shutterstock
I am going to end with an extract of an interview between Elizabeth Alker and Paul McCartney that appears in Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. McCartney explaining and exploring how people like John Cage and great Avant Garde composers were hugely instrumental. How he owes a debt to them. It is a fascinating interview that appears in full in the book. Elizabeth Alker writing for The Guardian. If you are a Beatles/McCartney fan or not, what the icon says about the role and influence of Classical composers and innovators has not only infused his writing and music. It extends right through the world of Pop in the twentieth-century – and, as mentioned, Pop of today:
“In the mid-1960s, as well as topping the charts, turning a generation of teenage girls hysterical and finding themselves the focus of obsessive media attention, the Beatles were also engaged with, and
The Beatles, McCartney tells me, also took their cue from the 1956 piece Radio Music by John Cage for one of the band’s most famous songs: “Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he says, “and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”
Two men who certainly did that were French composer-engineers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, pioneered a style of composition called musique concrète. Working in Parisian studios set up for propaganda broadcasts during the second world war, the pair used turntables and tape machines to forge an entirely original method of composing which, in line with French movements in art and philosophy at the time, sought to deconstruct established ideas and build from scratch a new means of making music.
This was iconoclasm driven by an erosion of trust in a ruling class that had led millions to their deaths during two brutal international conflicts. Schaeffer and Henry recorded natural or found sounds on to magnetic tape – the bark of a dog, the whistle or chugging of a train, a cackling voice – and then, using tape machines to slow down, speed up or reverse the original sound, they created collages of altered or “manipulated” recordings that are completely bewildering and mesmeric. Our ear is lured by that which is familiar and then unsettled by its abstraction. The suggestion is that all is not what it seems – the very essence of psychedelia.
“Not everything we see is clear and figurative,” McCartney says to me, pointing to a Willem de Kooning painting next to us on the wall. “Sometimes when you’re asleep or you rub your eye, you see an abstract: your mind knows about it. We know about this stuff. It was the same with music. We were messing around, but our minds could still accept it because it was something that we already kind of knew anyway. Even though we were in another lane to more classical composers, we were kind of equal in that we also wanted freedom.”
After buying a pair of his own Brenell tape machines, McCartney set about looping and spooling these ideas into the work he had to do for “his day job”. He describes the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows, “which was shaping up to be kind of a far-out Beatles song”. McCartney remembers carrying a plastic bag full of tape loops – on which he’d recorded various sounds at home – to Abbey Road during sessions for Revolver. “I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all mixed together”.
The result is a myriad of strange musical textures and meditative drones, a sonic vacuum into which all our troubling thoughts and feelings are swallowed up and disappear. It’s a big part of what made the Beatles as colourful as the recreational substances that were so popular at the time. It’s also the alchemical element in their work that helped put them in a different league, in terms of their legacy and influence.
Eventually John Lennon also procured a pair of Brenell machines and entered new realms of experimentalism. This produced the hypnotic track Revolution 9: “John was fascinated and he loved the craziness of it,” McCartney says. He, meanwhile, preferred to use these new studio gadgets “in a controlled way”, working within the pop-song format, cherrypicking interesting stylistic elements and twisting them into the Beatles’ established song-writing template.
Together the pair fashioned a new, intelligent and avant garde-informed kind of pop music – a reminder, as if we need it, of the magic of the Lennon-McCartney partnership. The push and pull of two genius creatives working together to upend the status quo. “You think, ‘Oh well our audience wants a pop song,’”.
My quest into the roots of this trippy magic in the Beatles’ music is just one of many explorations I made into the way the 20th century’s most innovative pop musicians borrowed from the classical avant garde, for my book Everything We Do Is Music. In it, I draw a line from John Cale’s drone in the Velvet Underground to the extraordinary Indian classical-inspired sounds in music by La Monte Young; and connect the blistering microtonality of Polish sonorism to the angst-ridden rock of Radiohead. The feminist philosophies of Pauline Oliveros formed a blueprint for techno, meanwhile, and US composers such as Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass found ways to reflect the energy and freneticism of the urban metropolis in their work. In each case, I found that artists on both sides of the pop/classical divide reached across it, disregarding those things that usually separate us – education, class, nationality, gender – to do something epochal”.
Pop and Rock have been transformed by Classical music and its innovators. For the reviews that have arrived already (“Revelation after revelation . . . I love music more for reading it.' Guy Garvey; 'Alker joins the dots by following myriad musical ley lines. A fascinating journey into sound.' Mark Radcliffe; 'Reveals so much about the hidden connections between the sounds we love . . . A must read.' Sara Mohr-Pietsch”), it sounds like every music fans needs own this book! On Tuesday, 2nd September, Elizabeth Alker will be in conversation with Mary Anne Hobbs (BBC Radio 6 Music) at Foyle’s Bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road (107). You can get your ticket and hear what is likely to be a fascinating discussion between two friends an music lovers. How perhaps the worlds of BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 6 Music are linked. In a wider sense, a delve into the vital role Classical music and its composers played in shaping Pop music last century. Its legacy and effects being felt, evolved and continued now. There is no doubting that Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop is one of the most essential and must-read music books…
OF this year.