Crossing Over
If you’ve signed up to the Royal Opera House Student Standby, you may have noticed the super cool background music which is a remix of Nessun Dorma from Turandot. The track is taken from this album. Not all the tracks are amazing, but the Turandot remix is brilliant - a mix of rap (the words are along the lines of not being able to sleep because of love), lazy jazz with a passionate tenor belting out Nessum Dorma - it’s my ideal of evening drinks party music.
iTunes Store makes music shopping so much easier, especially if you are into rare quirky stuff like me. The album is available on there (no venturing out to HMV and the likes) and I also bought remixes of Schubert’s Mass No.6 in Eb: Kyrie (for purely nostalgic reasons; it was the last choral piece I’d done. I am suspecting that this album used the Bach Collegium Stuttgart’s recording to mix the track, as I own that recording) and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons: Barcarolle. (Listen @ http://www.groovegravy.com/catalog/gg1104.html)
I don’t expect this kind of remixes to be everyone’s cup of tea. At first I find them a bit odd to listen to, but I got to like them. I am not a purist. Why can’t we funk classical music up? I can’t agree a certain type of snobbery related to high brow music; classical music do not have some sort of divine status making it beyond the reach of electronic musicians.
Look at modern art - correct me if I’d remembered it wrong, but a few year back some dude recreated the Mona Lisa out of cow dung - it got lots of publicity: some condemned the work as bad taste or an insult to di Vinci (they sound like they are attaching moral values to manure without considering the intention of the artist); while some hailed it as a creative piece of work, which I am not sure about - I don’t see how much more creative it is compared to a Mona Lisa made out of pure gold.
While people are more ready to accept this kind of regeneration within art, the glass ceiling (as I see it as) is harder to break within the musical realm. Crossover music still lacks a solid mature following - it’s more of a young people’s thing. The Classical-Brit-Award-type has swallowed the crossover Vanessa Mae (as a traditional violinist she is nowhere near the top), Bond (their instruments are as small/invisible as possible, making you indulge your visual senses on their cleverages and long, tanned legs rather than using your audio senses). Of course there are also Sarah Brightman and the lesser known Maksim. They have all good musical qualifications/background, and good looks. To a certain extent that latter part has been used to opponents of crossover music to attack it as ‘repackaging classical music in terms of pop culture consumerism’. But as far as I can tell, these crossover artists has only fused classical music with pop music. What about classical music + hip hop/Nu Jazz, like the album I cited above? There’s still a long way to go…
