A quantum leap
Stephen Pettitt says that rock musicians who compose classical music are out of their depth
Acouple of weeks ago a press release arrived in my electronic in-tray. It was from Naxos, the record company much admired for its bargain recordings of a repertoire ranging wide and free over the thousand years or so of what we on my side of the business like to call Western art music. Naxos makes them cheap and turns in a profit by taking a chance on artists who might not have reached glamour status. Thus the company feeds on a thirst for repertoire, not on the cult of celebrity.
Or at least that has been the case until now, The email I received angled for me to provide gushing coverage of a new, prestigious release, a recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, no less, of a newly composed orchestral suite. What could he wrong with that? The championing of contemporary music by such a
label and it has already done good work in this department, not least by commissioning a whole series of string quartets from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies — is surely something very noble and desirable. The problem was that the composer of this suite, which is called Seven on the basis that it consists of seven movements, is one Tony Banks. Not the affable Labour MP, but, the bumf tells me, 'keyboard player and composer for the progressive rock group Genesis'.
Alarm-bells rang, and I'm ashamed to say that I responded to the email with a thoroughly prejudiced and uncharacteristically rude 'Oh, God' even before I'd heard a note of the work. When the product arrived, however, all my prejudices proved justified. Seven is nothing more than musical doodling. While it has some sweet ideas, its language is severely restricted. It doesn't challenge, move, or inspire. It's rather like the work of someone who has taken early retirement from a boring office job and has taken instead to painting naff watercolours of idyllic lakeside scenes and pretty thatched cottages. Therapy for the creator, maybe, but dull for any reasonably intelligent beholder.
What's more, as is common in such enterprises, in order to realise the piece for orchestra. Banks was obliged to engage the services of an orchestrator, one Simon Hale. Hale has achieved what any orchestrator should achieve: a professional if unremarkable job. But these days orchestration is an integral part of the creative process, not something slapped on to the music afterwards. It's as if Banks had left the colouring-in of his naff watercolours to someone else.
Of course, anyone — even the odd critic — is perfectly entitled to compose music if he or she feels so moved. My objection is not that Banks has done so but that we are being sold the line that his reputation as a famous rock musician is enough to guarantee that he can be a classical composer of interest and ability. It's not true of Banks. It was not true, either, of McCartney with his Liverpool Oratorio (likewise orchestrated by another hand). It's not true even of the more sophisticated Elvis Costello, whose offerings with the Brodsky Quartet I have always found insipid and pretentious. I'm not sure what Banks's business arrangement with Naxos is, but he was able to use the LPO, even engaging them for a second set of sessions (who paid?) because, unused to the way orchestras work in the studio and on his own admission, he was inadequately prepared for the first.
Everything about this product suggests that Naxos is not as idealistic an enterprise as we first thought. It's not alone. Projects like EMI Classics's dreadful Queen Symphony, a tiresome sequence of cheap Hollywood-style epic climaxes, or more recently Sanctuary Classics's bland crossover effort, Patrick Hawes's Blue in Blue, betray a willingness to compromise standards for profit that goes far beyond the populist ethos of Your Hundred Best Tunes. At least they were all good tunes.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the rock-musician-turned-classical-composer phenomenon is that it underlines the tendency nowadays to ignore the vast skills gap that exists between classical and pop/rock musicians, whether composers or players. I am not suggesting that people like Eric Clapton or Elton John are unskilled. Clearly they are not. But where many a classical musician could ape their achievements, is the reverse also true? Can John play the Hammerklavier? Would Clapton get his fingers around a Bach lute suite? For the record companies, however, the rule seems to be that if you are famous enough then you are good enough.
For a would-be composer desiring to cross the great divide, the chasm between the two art forms is perhaps even wider. Consider what the genre of the pop song generally demands of its creator. At best it can approach the outwardly simple lyric subtlety of Schubert. But mostly as music it is pretty crude. No organic exploration (Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner), collisions of musical types (Monteverdi, Messiaen), or complex layerings (Bruckner, Stravinsky, Carter). No dynamic shading, since everything is loud. No subtle instrumentation. An insistent tribal drum thud. Limited harmonies. Normally, a rigid four beats to a bar, and an equally rigid tempo, defined in bprns (beats per minute). It's most often a music about pulse and power. Even in progressive rock, the spirit of musical adventure is severely restricted. Which is right, for its language suits its purpose.
Given a rooting in a craft so formulaic, is it any wonder that a rock musician wanting to compose something more substantial, more classical, should find himself at sea? A quantum leap is demanded of him. Yet the message we are being given is that we must laud him, that we must accept that his music can hold its own alongside the wonders of Monteverdi, Beethoven, Sibelius, Birtwistle. It's just snobbishness if we do not.
Well, if snobbishness it is, a snob I will have to remain, for I find presumptuous this stak ing a claim on the territory of art music. Few rock stars know much about the commitment and skills that it takes to be a real musician, about the tedious hours spent practising each day, about the requirement to stand back and ruthlessly self-criticise, about the demands of getting inside a piece of real music. Few would tolerate the insecurity of an orchestral musician's working environment, or know just how much courage it takes to mount the stage night after night and do the physically impossible. Few can contemplate the agonies that a composer puts himself or herself through in order to find the inner voice, the language, the form, the right sound for the moment. By all means allow the rock stars their indulgences, particularly if one consequence is that some of their wealth finds its way into real musicians' pockets. But please do not try to sell it as something that it is not. Not to me, anyway.
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