Crossing Over

The Guardian's Philip Hensher surveys the grim landscape left by half a century of pop-classical crossovers. In the process he provides a revealing and hilarious behind-the-scenes look at how the commercial product gets made. Here's a glimpse:

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. [. . . .]

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.

Hensher's article, 'C or C-sharp', makes a nice crescendo of its own, though, building to The Hall of Shame: a listing of crossover's most memorable disasters.

But don't get the idea that only pop stars provide the cringe factor. Crossovers work the other direction, too, and Henshaw is not alone in seeing Leonard Bernstein's Mass as the classical world's 'embarrassment a-go-go.' Personally, I think Dame Kiri Te Kanawa rates at least a niche for her 1986 rendering of 'Honey Bun' from Rogers & Hammerstein's South Pacific. But don't take my word for it.

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