if rock/pop artists were classical composers . . .

[realthog]

I have the feeling that this might be a parlour game that's been played to the point of tedium by everyone except me, into whose mind the notion has just popped -- or, well, sludged, sorta thing.

I've been listening this evening to Mylene Farmer's extraordinary live performance at Bercy linked to her equally extraordinary album Avant que l'Ombre -- I can assure you it is the most excellent music to listen to while you're sitting in a hot bath in the room next door to where you have the player belting out Mlle Farmer at the kind of volume you were never allowed to deploy when living in cities. It occurred to me, as I peered between my knees at the taps and the bobbing suds between me and them, that, if it is true that the spirit of Mozart be lodged within any one rock/pop writer today (which I somehow doubt . . . but I am, you know, a fantasy writer, dammit, so allow me my little indulgences), then that rock/pop writer must surely be Farmer.

I live with Farmer's greatest living detractor: Pam regards her as the epitome of the "breathy French dame". (All female French singers are "breathy French dames", you see. This includes people like Edith Piaf and Dalida, where the description becomes conceptually difficult to apply but is applied nevertheless.) I think Pam would include among her criticisms of Farmer many of the same that those who dislike Mozart's music apply to it: there's what you might call a lack of range -- Mozart's stuff never seems to get beyond chamber music; Farmer's rarely seems to have the ambition to become more than what one might call neo-pop.

At the same time, though, the two composers share the ability to make what might be a restricted medium into something astonishingly, exquisitely more than by all normal lights it should be.

Another point of common ground is the . . . precision of everything. As with someone like Loreena McKennitt, one has the impression that Farmer is a complete control freak, a complete obsessive, when it comes to renditions of her music: every last scintilla of a grace note must be in exactly the right place, perfectly executed -- which applies as much to her own singing as to anything else.

(This is one of the many things that make the Bercy recording so remarkable: Farmer famously broke down in tears during two of the songs in the middle of the concert that night, for reasons no one knows.)

There are other parallels, but those'll do for now.

I continued bathing, listening to the music . . . and in its slow fashion my mind moved on to a new thought. As I kneaded shampoo into my hair I wondered: If Farmer's Mozart, who's McKennitt?

After some thought I decided McKennitt, another favourite musician of mine, is probably Sibelius. There's that same symphonic sense of drama, yet coupled with it is the ability to produce extremes of subtlety; and there's that same willingness -- even eagerness -- to borrow from and play with folk tunes. On the other hand, these qualities could perhaps make her Nielsen or Dvorak or even Brahms instead . . .

No, not Brahms. And she's a bit too orthodoxly melodic to be Nielsen, I think. For the same reason, she can't be Bartok (besides, David Ackles was almost certainly Bartok). But, despite the precision, there's a definite romantic lushness to the proceedings that could bring Dvorak into contention. And then there's Grieg, perhaps an even better match . . .

I decided, as I reached for my towel and the bathwater started gurgling out, not to extend my mental exercise to other pairings of modern and historic composers -- at least, not for the moment. It could become like one of those awful bits of journalism you sometimes come across -- a Maureen Dowd column, for example -- where the hack has become so enraptured by some particular analogy or image that s/he extends it for what soon comes to feel like eternity, with each new variant showing a greater height of both artificiality and desperation.

However, it might be interesting to find out if similar matches have occurred to others. Do feel free to add.

Comments

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

McKennitt and Grieg? I could see it. She's definitely a composer with those Nordic sensibilities. More furiously passionate than Sibelius, in my book, but not so quirky as Grieg...

I think of Sting as fitting somewhere between Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky -- in that soundtracky, musically evocative, overly-emotional sort of way.

I could rhapsodize about Mozart for days. He and Bach are my two favorites. The thing I love most about Mozart is that certainty of angelic sweetness, and the feeling that each piece does exactly what it ought to, goes where it should, is never quite a surprise and yet it's not stale... He is cliche because he made the cliche. He shows up in a new musician in every generation, the one that takes the form and solidifies it. Maybe Freddie Mercury this latest trip through the ether, moving on to Mika. Flashy, touched by genius, gone before the fire burns out.

Bach is crystal, pure and simple, and I know of no one that can touch him, even in modern days. I think he's moved on to a different plane.

Mark Knopfler might be Aaron Copland, in the way he writes anthems that seem to embody in sound what they're about in topic (hope I am making sense). Extraordinary in their ordinariness.

[hutch0.livejournal.com]

Vaughan Williams and Billy Bragg. Two ends of a thread of English folk song.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Bach is crystal, pure and simple, and I know of no one that can touch him, even in modern days."

You might want to try listening to some Kuhnau -- not that a huge amount survives. Kuhnau was, if memory serves, one of Bach's teachers. Whatever, if you listen to Kuhnau's Biblical Sonatas and then, say, Bach's Goldberg Variations, you realize that, at the very least, good Kuhnau is better than bad Bach.

I enjoy music by quite a few of Bach's contemporaries or approximate-like-sort-of-do-I-have-to-go-look-up-their-dates-dammit contemporaries as much as I do Bach's, I confess.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Vaughan Williams and Billy Bragg"

I'm not sure I can go along with that, though I've not listened to Billy Bragg much for years. Come to that, I don't listen to Vaughan Williams often.

How'd you fancy Jim Steinman for Wagner, though? Everyone enjoys it and wants to turn the volume up, but they're kind of ashamed to admit it.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"I think of Sting as fitting somewhere between Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky"

Those two were far better at melody than, I think, Sting will ever be. I like some of his stuff, but throughout his career he's been able to produce only about half a dozen really strong tunes. With Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky you'd be likely to get that many in the first few minutes of any particular piece.

"Maybe Freddie Mercury this latest trip through the ether"

Queen as a whole, maybe. A lot of what we tend to think of as "Freddie Mercury" was Brian May.

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

See, we'd have to agree to disagree about Sting. Certainly up through the album "The Soul Cages" he was an auto-buy for me. After that I noticed a falling-off of quality as if the best tunes had already been written out of him, but until then, and even during his Police days, his hooks were some of the best going.

My favorites of Rachmaninoff were those themes he borrowed from others. Hee!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"See, we'd have to agree to disagree about Sting."

Yeah, I think we do. Pam really likes his stuff, both in The Police and solo, so I've tried and tried to penetrate it; but I still can't see what all the fuss is about.

Whether I like his work or not is, of course, irrelevant to my comment about his ability to create good tunes. Maybe there are good tunes there but I just don't recognize them as such.