POV: You’re an Orchestra Dropout
Listening to songs that have no business being next to each other in a playlist? More likely than not for the new age of classical fans.
Written by Raymond Lam
Photo courtesy of Rina Yang
Out of the crop of kids that join orchestra as a one-off club in fifth grade, a talented few manage to join the upper echelons of achievement, venturing off to music school or teaching music to students themselves. Most, however, just end up in mediocrity and forget their instruments the second high school ends, outside of playing for the occasional family function (it doesn’t usually go very well).
For many, though, there’s a bizarre attachment to orchestra even after it ends, not unlike other fine arts cliques like theatre and band kids. For better or worse, music taste seems to develop most strongly in adolescence than any other period, it just so happens that the sounds of out-of-tune rehearsals in dingy practice rooms have some staying power for the latest generation of classical fans. In the interest of adding some modernity to the “tragedy” of its slow decline, classical and pop songs can and should go together (even if a bit haphazardly). For many, and at least for the author of this article, pairing the two genres together is just a means to hold on to some classical memories of years past.
“Magdalena Lugens” by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and “Mary Magdalene” by FKA twigs
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Baroque era works are closest to what people envision when thinking of classical music: uppity, holy, operatic, and sometimes in a language we can’t understand anymore. The Latin text accompanying the piece is largely based on the legacy of St. Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s closest confidant-turned-scandalous woman as scholars twisted her Biblical legacy to one unfitting of sainthood.
The religious figure’s tarnished reputation seems to have aligned itself with the readings of FKA twigs, the artist behind the titular 2019 album MAGDALENE, who revealed in a 2016 Fader interview that she similarly sees her artistic narrative as deprived of the grace it deserves:
I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song “Preface” is like a hymn ... If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you'd be talking about the 'choral aspect.' But you're not talking about that because I'm a mixed-race girl from South London.
Despite it sounding nowhere near a typical Baroque hymn, twigs’ MAGDALENE heavily lays the classical influence throughout. The church hall reverb and discordant electronic choir on “Mary Magdalene'' in particular push a more religious narrative than anything twigs has put out before. Perhaps it’s her personal vision to revise her narrative to one beyond what her critics say, in a manner akin to the legacy Mary Magdalene herself could not fix.
“Piano Sonata No. 8” by Ludwig van Beethoven and “Snakeskin” by Rina Sawayama
The classical influence on the bombastic closer for Rina Sawayama’s eponymous album is quite clear: it opens and closes with a recording of her mom playing the introduction to Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 8.” Overlaid with a conversation on her mother’s 60th birthday, the interpolation doesn’t really hold deeper purpose than to accentuate a simple memory with her mother. As Sawayama said in an interview with Apple Music, “It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that.” The conversation itself reflects on her mother’s deeper views on life, but the classical-era sonata’s placement seems to accentuate classical’s simple role as a fixture of enduring day-to-day memories in our lives.
“Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky and “Time Alone With You” by Jacob Collier ft. Daniel Caesar
Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was nothing less than revolutionary at the time of the ballet’s 1913 Champs-Élysées premiere. Its jagged choreography and atonal structures of a prehistoric pagan Russia ritual was more than enough to upset the upper-class crowd and incite a riot in the audience. From a music theory standpoint, it’s a complex mess – so much so that today’s orchestras still struggle to play it correctly. But for the most part, its broad appeal lies in its purposefully-harsh sound, which was so diametrically opposite to everything else from the era.
With the serendipitous demand for the gaudiness of hyperpop or noise music, it’s nice to still see some of the innovative music theory and discordance of “Rite of Spring” still being pushed, especially in a modern, mainstream context. In particular, Jacob Collier’s “Time Alone With You” adds in a lot for music theory worshippers, setting it in D-½-sharp major and making all the choir harmonies into pitch-shifted ninth and 13th chord messes. And the best part: Compared to the increasing jaggedness of avant-garde contemporary classical, it’s actually listenable.
“Romanian Folk Dances” by Béla Bartók and “Townie” by Mitski
The most famed compositions of modernist composer Béla Bartók drew more from Hungarian folk tunes than the aristocracy and formalized structures of Baroque and Romantic tradition, hoping to capture a bit more of the public’s wider imagination. The entirety of “Romanian Folk Dances” is relatively terse, only spanning about five minutes total. In a similar vein, Afterglow’s favorite indie rock musician (and the subject of its first ever album review) keeps her songs short and sweet too, playing simple major chord progressions and preserving the desire for simple songs that shift away from the ever-increasing complexities in today’s musical soundscapes. She even cites Bartok’s folk dances as a direct influence in a video with Amoeba, noting his simplicity in using folk melodies as an inspiration.
Expounding her musical philosophy in a public forum, Mitski seems okay with rejecting her music conservatory training to keep up the tradition of simpler music:
Here's just a simple chord progression that's been used over and over and over ... I wanted that also to parallel the idea of, like, the teenager in a suburb or in a town where it's just like, ‘This is what they know and it's repetitive and it's been done before and they don't know what to do with it, but it's there.
Or, stated more simply: “F-ck atonality.”
It’s not often that mainstream and classical worlds intersect, so it’s fun to see the boundaries blend as younger generations get in tune with preserving the classical tradition. Classical music doesn’t have to stay in the elitist and high academia the genre has become known for, as it has slowly shifted towards a larger appreciation from the general public. Orchestral and pop fans alike aren’t quite ready to make Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets blow up again or to throw it “Bach” (I express deep regret for this) to the next Lizzo flute interlude, but it’s worth a shot.